Strike in Terre Haute

[Santiago]

You know I really don't like your tone of voice.  It sounds as if you are the bitter one for being treated so mean by your unions.  I never expected to become a rich man from teaching.  I actually became a teacher because I love working with young people.  Still do.  I tuitor at risk 5th and 6th graders in math and reading skills.
We're about to begin a new school year come Sept. 1.  Oh, and for your information there is no pay involved; it's all voluntary.  Very rewarding. You should try it. 

Going out on strike doesn't seem very good for the children you had been hired to teach. What were they doing while you were walking the picket line.  Seems very unprofessional to moi!

[followsthewolf]

Sure sounds like I struck a nerve, when all you can reply is "I really don't like the tone of your voice."

I'm not one of your students. 

I never expected to become rich from teaching, either; I just wanted to be paid what I was and am worth. The children we were hired to teach, and their parents, actually supported our efforts. Many parents walked the picket lines with us and eventually voted out the school boards that were the primary cause of the problems.

All my life I have volunteered in several programs to help under-achieving children and young adults, the reason I got into teaching in the first place.
I still do.

And as for the swipe at me for being "unprofessional:"

Think about every other professional person besides teachers -- they can decide who their clients will be, what hours they will keep, and how much they will be paid. Did you?

Don't try to hide behind the "I love children, so I am some kind of underpaid, suffering martyr" routine. That's the attitude you are displaying. We who stood up for ourselves were and are no less dedicated to helping young adults learn than the "martyrs" who wear their hair shirts publicly. We didn't want people to give lip service to the "poor, poor underpaid and overworked teachers." We simply wanted to be adequately reimbursed for our skills.

I'm not at all bitter; just tired of hearing the same old rhetoric of complaint from those in the profession who wanted then and still want now to be martyr figures.

I am proud of what we were able to accomplish in the way of negotiating Master Contracts to improve widespread disparities in the way teachers were treated within my district. Those contracts are still in effect, and the salary and conditions that young teachers now enjoy are the products of our labors. Many of my ex-students are now teachers elsewhere and are in contact with me regularly, exchanging ideas and techniques.

I still teach regularly, although not in a public school setting. My labs are researching some critical ecological problems, and our classes are on an undergraduate and graduate level. We provide opportunities for inner-city youth to become research assistants at the entry level, and, at the other end of the spectrum, we have post-docs doing their internships there.

Unions, far from being mean to me, provided, in many ways, help for me, who came from a home with no running water, to go where my dreams have led me.

Oh, and, don't forget, you were the one who decided to take a swipe at unions in general. You brought up the topic, originally. I'm just responding to your broad paintbrush with some specific examples of how you might have been a bit too general with your comments.

Gotta go to work now. Have a good day

[Santiago]

Dear John,
Your enlarged ego is to be pitied.  I'm happy your life is so perfect.  It's got to be perfectly Eden in whatever mystical state you teach in where the teachers are so well paid due to your efforts they all eat pheasant-under-glass every evening and drink the very best French wines with their gourmet meals.
I'm sure when they meet you on the street they all bow down and kiss your ------ ring and thank you so much for all those miserable nights you willingly spent locked  up in jail and all just  so they can live the life of a rich teacher.

I'm obviously unfit to be in your company even when it's just on the written page, so you won't be hearing anymore from this lowdown freeloading non-union member retired teacher.  I'll pray for you in church this morning, and also ask a special blessing on my friend's boss who is so personally concerned about his well-being. (The point of my original post which you so conveniently ignored all for the purpose of getting in your rants.)

[followsthewolf]

No, the first reason you posted was a swipe at all unions in general. Unfortunately, since you never participated, your opinion lacks genuine insight.

Now you've dropped into the "poor, poor, pitiful me," "I gave so much that nobody cares about" routine, attempting to elicit sympathy, instead of standing up for what is right and improving your profession and financial well-being.

Typical of far too many teachers.

And, far from posting to feed my own ego, I made those remarks simply to back up my case -- that those who feel underpaid and under appreciated need to exhibit some pride and fortitude in effecting change. If you had been here for any length of time, you would know that this "rant" (as you call it) would  probably be properly called an enormous revelation of my past, compared to my many posts about other topics in general. That was a genuine rarity that I won't repeat.

Yes, I appreciate greatly your friend's boss, who effected a wholesale change in the business in order to treat the employees with compassion. Unfortunately, there are far too few examples of that kind of human understanding in the business world. I loudly applaud the effort.

And yet, we can choose one of two paths: first, to accept the world as it is, while hoping against hope that we physically and financially survive it, or, secondly, to work and take risks to cause change for the better -- for others as well as ourselves.

All of us make that choice.

Time to get back to work.

[Santiago]

How do you suppose the state of Texas has survived all these years without the help and support of all your precious unions.  I believe that's another Texas Brag...stay to hell up in Yankee land we don't need your "help". 
As a matter of fact I've been reading that Texas as a whole has survived  Obama's distructive reign better than nearly all other states, especially union states, i.e. Michigan.
  Since the auto union is so strong, helpful, and necessary for the good of the people according to you,  why didn't they come to the rescue of General Motors, et.al. instead of expecting even us non-union tax payers to pay for the unions' mistakes with those companies by demanding more and more for less and less work.  Toyota seems to be doing great without the damnation of unions.  The Toyota plant here in San Antonio is getting ready to expand according to newspaper accounts.

It's quite revealing when you say "Unions, far from being mean to me, provided, in many ways, help for me, who came from a home with no running water, to go where my dreams have led me."  Using past tense to discribe unions past  usefulness implies your labs today are not  union. Hmmmmm!  Why?

Going outback to the little two holer "shed" house in the middle of a sub freezing  night to take a crap isn't one of life's peasures, is it?

[followsthewolf]

Ya sure needed yankee help at the Alamo, didn't you?

You can argue until you're blue in the face about unions and their effect on the auto industry, or whatever industry you care to name. First, they aren't the issue here -- we are concerned about teachers' unions -- and second, I don't accept any of your premises about the unions being responsible in the ways you mentioned for the troubles at GM. Ford, for instance, seems to be doing ok with the same union in place.

You are really reaching very hard for the condemnation of my using nonunion help. First, you are assuming that I don't. Wrong. The pay is at least union scale, and, in most cases, much higher. Second, it seems to be your tactic to try to do the best you can to nitpick a tiny area and blow it into a huge assumption. You have been dead wrong every time. You ought to learn to stop using that maneuver. Even rats in a maze learn not to step on the electrified grid every single time.

And as for your last comment (for whatever incredible reason you made it), you are just blatantly WRONG again. My work takes me to places where there are no modern facilities, and I literally go to the "little two holer shed in the middle of a sub freezing night" to answer nature's call. Not all field stations are in the most accessible and comfortable of locations, in case you missed the point.

The things you seem to find "quite revealing" about what I say simply indicate to me that you really have been stuffed with jargon and tripe from shills that pump it out on a regular basis for the purpose of making the almighty dollar. I wish you success as you keep spinning your wheels trying to create a cogent argument.

[LOsborne]

FTW, for whatever reason you and Santi have decided to make the union--non-union discussion personal, it is seductive. Here is the strike story that still disturbs my sleep at times.

Roughly thirty years ago, in my hometown (and Santi's for that matter) the railcar company went out on strike. It was the last large union company in town, so a lot of people were out of work. The company brought in scabs, and things deteriorated from there. However, the violence and nastiness did not stay focused on the company. The small-town daily newspaper (where I worked) had the lobby shotgunned. The advertising director's house was shot at one night, the bullets hitting his young son's bedroom window. The editor's dog was wrapped in barb-wire. A state trooper came to my door, told me my license number had appeared on a list of newspaper employees targeted by the union, and asked me to try to get a license number or good description of any cars driving by firing at my home. (I told him it was unlikely I would get anything he could use from my haven under the bed.)

So what was the evil practiced by the newspaper to bring down such wrath on its employees? It wouldn't publish all the letters to the editor from the strikers. It published a representative sample, but there were dozens of them -- and they were repetitive. All the pages published had to be paid for by ads, and we couldn't sell enough ads for six pages of letters from strikers. A policy of printing everything would put the newspaper employees out of work, with no strike-defense fund to help ease the pain.

A week later the mayor's house was fire-bombed. I still don't know what the strikers thought he could do to convince the company to meet their demands.

So, to this day, I have looked with suspicion on striking unions. A sense of proportion seems to be one of the first casualties in the conflict. Walking off the job is the choice of the workers, and to them it may be worth it, and may bring about positive results. But those who don't belong to union or invest with the company shouldn't have to suffer strong-arm tactics, too.

[Santiago]

I suspect FTW is too young to remember such tactics that were so common with the unions.

  My childhood memories of unions goes back even further than the 30 years of Lolly's personal account.  Many, if not most  of our neighbors were coal miners and as a young impressionable child I was horrified of some of the atrocious actions I read in the newspapers that the UMW union was doing.  For some of those atrocities research the mid-20th century newspapers.  It's no doubt those childhood memories involving neighbors and friends left a lingering and  distinct distaste for unions in my young mind.

[followsthewolf]

Allow me to clarify.

As to the reference about being too young to remember the violence of other strikes....first, I am fairly sure that I am older than Santiago (thought I made that clear with my reference to the "been there, done that, got the t-shirt" remark in response to his delineation of his teaching experience). I left the public school sector after 31 years in the classroom, having taught every level and grade from 7th lowest level through ap seniors. Since then, my experience has been on a university level.

Second, the discussion was centered around teachers' unions. The relevance of tarring teachers' strikes with the same brush as the violence that occurred in other strikes is unclear, unless it was (and is) designed to unfairly characterize and demonize those teachers' unions. Uncalled for in this discussion.

Strangely enough, though, scabs were used by the school board during one of our strikes. The board hired substitutes at a rate that was twice the weekly salary of the most experienced teacher in the system. They hired one old person who fell asleep in his chair and urinated on himself. Several others physically manhandled students and were brought up on criminal and physical charges. Many were later found to have had no undergraduate or graduate qualifications  -- they had simply created their diplomas with one of the software programs available then and now.

The only violence I experienced was to have been physically attacked by a family member of one of the members of the board of education, who said, "Get back in the classroom where you belong, you Commie!" Still haven't figured out what the logic was in that statement.

Finally, if you are REALLY interested in trying to understand what those strikes in the "old days" were all about, I suggest you do some research in order to put all of that in context. You might start with some information about Matewan, West Virginia. Might give some insight into the problems.

Oh, and another thing, those newspaper accounts that you rely so much on for the "atrocities" to which you referred: remember that lots of those newspapers were pretty much the tools of some of the richest owners back then (remember, for example, William Randolph Hearst), so I wouldn't put a lot of stock in the accuracy of some of the reporting. They didn't always give both sides of the story, nor did they report the horrible, dangerous working conditions in factories and mines at the time. Try researching the other side of the story for yourself, if you consider yourself a scholar.

When you have done that, come back again. 

[followsthewolf]

For what it is worth --

". . . when there are values so firmly and so consistently held by genuinely conflicting interests that the conflict cannot be resolved by logical analysis and factual investigation, then the role of reason in that human affair seems at an end. We can clarify the meaning and the consequences of values, we can make them consistent with one another and ascertain their actual priorities, we can surround them with fact -- but in the end we may be reduced to mere assertion and counter-assertion; then we can only plead or persuade. And at the very end, if the end is reached, moral problems become problems of power, and in the last resort, if the last resort is reached, the final form of power is coercion.
     "We cannot deduce. . . how we ought to act from what we believe is. Neither can we deduce how anyone else ought to act from how we believe we ought to act. In the end, if the end comes, we just have to beat those who disagree with us over the head; let us hope the end comes seldom. In the meantime, beaing as reasonable as we are able to be, we all ought to argue."

----C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination 1959

On the value of arguing....

[Santiago]

  A union is a union as a union is a union. Be it Teacher's or AFL/CIO's.

[followsthewolf]

And THAT kind of inane reply is just why we have stereotyping.

"A muslim is a muslim is a muslim."

"An African-American is an African-American is an African-American."

"A Mexican is a Mexican is a Mexican."

"A Puerto-Rican is a Puerto-Rican is a Puerto-Rican."

Makes about as much sense as your statement, doesn't it?

Why on EARTH would you say such a thing?

And why are you so angry?

And why are you so angry?

Are you that prejudiced?

[Y]

A couple of questions for Santi and Lolly.

1. Who has the power in such relationships as 'employer/employee', i.e.: 'capitalist/worker'?

2. Not to sound egotistical, but are you willing to bow to sound argument?

[Santiago]

And THAT kind of inane reply is just why we have stereotyping.

"A muslim is a muslim is a muslim."

"An African-American is an African-American is an African-American."

"A Mexican is a Mexican is a Mexican."

"A Puerto-Rican is a Puerto-Rican is a Puerto-Rican."

Makes about as much sense as your statement, doesn't it?

Why on EARTH would you say such a thing?

And why are you so angry?

And why are you so angry?

Are you that prejudiced?

Hey lighten up...I was only having some fun paraphrasing  a well known poet.  Guess you don't know Gertrude....  If you don't know who I'm talking about say so, and I'll give you her last name; you can look her up on Goggle!  I refuse to use that word as a verb.  LOL   If you are older  than I, you must be retired and working on a second career.

[Santiago]

A couple of questions for Santi and Lolly.

1. Who has the power in such relationships as 'employer/employee', i.e.: 'capitalist/worker'?

2. Not to sound egotistical, but are you willing to bow to sound argument?

Hi ya Y,   How you been and where?  I remember you from the old open forum when Cookie Parker had a terrible crush on you.  Then, I guess when you ignored her, she did an about face and had nothing good to say to or about you.