Is Central Falls The New PATCO?

Consumer Warning: This article draws a parallel between Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Obama fans, please read the caveats and qualifications included herein carefully before braining out.

The article on budget cutbacks to education in NJ and young teachers’ resistance in Newark posted here at FotM just days ago by Rahim on the Docks, and updated just yesterday, has brought to the surface a deep concern I have about a little-noticed statement President Obama made last month, a statement that reminded me of an action taken by Ronald Reagan at the beginning of his first term.

First, the Reagan analogy. In his first year in office, 1981, Ronald Reagan broke a strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)--one of only two national unions to support him in the previous year’s election. These federal employees hit the bricks for demands mainly concerning passenger safety--shorter hours, more modern equipment, etc.

First, Reagan fired all the strikers. Then he brought in scabs and military personnel to keep air traffic running. Finally he had PATCO decertified, breaking it entirely.

This one act was the main direct government intervention in labor relations during his whole administration. (Of course, the usual anti-union corporate types were appointed to run the National Labor Relations Board, OSHA, etc, but that is standard Republican practice.)

What breaking PATCO did was to send a signal to big corporations, flailing in the quicksand of the severe late ‘70s-early’80s economic crisis which was eroding their profits severely, that it was open season on unions. And they fired away--literally--laying off thousands upon thousands of workers, closing plants in the so-called Rust Belt of the Midwest, breaking union contracts, forcing givebacks, shifting production to low-wage, low-regulation areas in the Third World.

This is not a just a whiny complaint by labor unions and lefties. Reactionary economist and Federal Reserve Bank chairman Alan Greenspan declared proudly in 2003, that Reagan’s “action gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and discharge workers.”

One act, mere months after Reagan’s inauguration, and the working class in this country is still paying for it almost thirty years later.

So what step could Obama have taken that could conceivably parallel this crime against working people? True, he hasn’t done much to push through card-check legislation that would eliminate some of the many legal obstacles to union organizing, but he has, after all, already muscled through a health insurance reform law that may, arguably, wind up benefiting millions of working people. His appointees to the NRLB, OSHA and other government regulatory bodies certainly draw from the some of the best and brightest folks the labor movement has to offer. He stepped up to denounce Massey Energy after their murder of 29 coal miners.

Okay, let’s turn our attention to the small city of Central Falls in the state of Rhode Island. At the end of February, the superintendent of the school district fired every single person at Central Falls High School, 93 people-4 administrators, 74 union teachers, and a bunch of other staffers. The school board got to do this under federal law because the students were performing poorly on standardized tests and had a low graduation rate. The fact that the town is the poorest in the state, that a majority of the students don’t speak English as a first language, that population turnover in Central Falls itself is extremely high, that the school had improved its reading scores 21% over the last three years--none of this meant a thing.

And President Obama went out of his way to hail the action. He could even been content to let his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, make the shameful declaration that Central Falls officials were “showing courage and doing the right thing for kids." But no. On March 1, Obama himself praised the wholesale firings--to the US Chamber of Commerce, of all audiences! He justified the firings: “If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show any sign of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability,”

Now, I personally tend to hold a cranky and unsympathetic position on the social role played by teachers in capitalist society, which is to condition future generations of workers to live lives subordinate to the needs of capital. And I find that teacher unions too often uphold the immediate interests of their members over and against the needs of the children they are teaching. But Obama’s rap is bullshit, pure and simple, collective punishment based on artificial criteria without taking objective circumstances into account.

And this brings me to the kernal of my concern about what he did. The economic meltdown is increasingly concentrated these days, in the US at least, in state and local budget crises. These are very real, extraordinarily severe and seemingly intractable. There has already been plenty of noise about how brutal budget deficits are the fault of greedy, overpaid civil servants and retirees. Why wouldn’t local governments, desperate for any way out of this mess, use Obama’s words and his general stance to justify directing their fire at all civil service workers and their unions, teachers included, for “failure to perform adequately” and “lack of accountability” ?

In the depths of the Great Depression under Roosevelt, the CIO unionized millions, proclaiming “The President wants you to join the union.” Will state and local governments in the coming decade rally to save their hides under the banner “The President wants you to break the union”?