Giving Compass' Take:

• Tithi Bhattacharya discusses the Los Angeles teachers' strike, attempting to put the labor dispute in the context of other strikes from the past year.

• The opinions in this piece are highly critical of "neoliberalism work conditions" in general. What are other perspectives to the current strike?

• Read interviews with 5 teachers on strike in Los Angeles. 

More than 30,000 teachers are going on strike in Los Angeles. In several schools, there will be solidarity strike action from teaching assistants, custodians, food service workers, bus drivers, and other unionized workers who provide essential support services in the school district. The Los Angeles strike comes in the wake of a series of teachers’ strikes in the United States, an extraordinary wave that began with the wildcat action of West Virginia teachers in February, 2018. The West Virginia strike was followed by Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, and North Carolina.

This essay is an effort not so much to understand (a) why the strike has come back again to the US political landscape, but rather about (b) exploring the strike form in a landscape which many had thought only held the ruins of working class power. The answer to the first question has been adequately provided by the brutal regimes of neoliberal work conditions. This is why it is more important to reflect on the second, in order to arrive at that specific kind of agentive understanding that will allow for the strike to spread, all the while nourishing itself with histories of its own past as it charts the course of new futures.

Oral testimony from teachers shows clearly why they are in revolt. First there are the multiple jobs: teachers are 30% more likely to have multiple jobs than other workers, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Read the full article about putting the Los Angeles teachers' strike in perspective by Tithi Bhattacharya at Rebel.