The Educators Rank-and-File Committee is an international network of educators, students, parents, and workers fighting for workers power in the schools, to stop the capitalist destruction of public education and eliminate COVID-19.
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New York City’s public education system is facing an impending crisis as federal, state, and local budget cuts converge with a deepening social crisis, threatening essential programs and the futures of hundreds of thousands of students.
The destruction of the Head Start program, part of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” would eliminate education and social services for nearly 800,000 children and result in the loss of a quarter of a million jobs.
Although the immediate cause of the students’ reaction is the exile of their teachers, there is mounting anger over the poor quality of education, lack of a future, growing social inequality and state repression.
Large sections of educators had no confidence that the Chicago Teachers Union would bring back a better deal, let alone lead a fight against Trump.
The Verdi leadership unreservedly supports the warmongering policy of both the outgoing and incoming federal governments.
The reports and discussions outlined the crisis in public education and emphasised the urgent need for educators to form independent organisations of struggle to counter the widening attacks on public education and democratic rights.
Postal workers, outraged at the betrayals of the trade unions, discussed what needed to be done now to protect jobs, which included unifying all sections of the working class in a common struggle against oligarchy and dictatorship.
USPS workers must link up with other sections of the federal workforce, with auto workers, logistics workers, and other sections of the working class, and with postal workers internationally facing the same threat of privatization.
“Rank-and-file” is originally a military term. It refers to the lower “ranks” of soldiers, who literally stand in lines or “files”. These soldiers have a different set of interests in preserving their lives than the officers or “brass” who prosecute the wars on behalf of the ruling elite.
Rank-and-file committees are of, by and for the rank-and-file workers, who have a different set of interests in preserving their lives than management, the bosses, the politicians, and the trade union apparatus, who send workers to die while defending the profits of the ruling elite.
Yes. The formation of rank-and-file committees is 100% completely legal under the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
The right to freedom of speech means you can say whatever you like about what you agree or disagree with. Freedom of association, also covered under the first amendment, means you have the right to associate with others who share your views, for political ends. You also have the right to petition the government for redress, to make demands on the government and tell them what you want them to do.
No. HIPAA has an exception for disclosures to prevent and control the spread of disease, but the state is deliberately not invoking this exception in order to conceal information from workers, so that they can pretend that what they are doing is safe when it’s not.
Rank-and-file educators have the right to know who’s gotten sick, where, when, and what happened. Rank-and-file committees have to demand this information, and have to share it with other workers as a matter of collective self defense.
