Julian Vasquez Heilig honors Cesar Chavez’s birthday here.
He uses the occasion to contrast the views towards unions of Chavez, as contrasted to those of Campbell Brown and Michelle Rhee.
Brown says her fight to diminish teachers’ unions is equivalent to the fight for marriage equality. Rhee says that collaboration with teachers and their unions is unnecessary.
But what did Cesar Chavez say?
I would say that my own personal fight to diminish Campbell Brown is equivalent to to fighting the British Monarch in the 1700s to protect my freedom of taxation without representation, among other egregious oppressions the British empire imposed.
Campbell, like the soup, is canned, laden with bad ingredients, and is as vapid and non-nutritional as adding water, stirring, and heating up.
It would be fun to puree Campbell and turn her into a soup . . . .
I know! I am still reeling over John Legend, who sang so movingly about Selma, making a robo-call in favor of Marshall Tuck for California School Superintendent! Tuck is an anti-union, pro-charter guy, supported by Michelle Rhee and other “reformistas”. Doesn’t he know ML King died while supporting union rights? Why? And how dare Campbell Brown, married to a guy who stands to make millions off of privatization, dare to wrap herself in the flag of civil rights for our children?
Campbell Brown and Michelle Rhee look like someone set their faces of fire and put them out with a sack of nickels.
Attack the policies please, not how people look.
As a kind of antidote to the anti-labor ed reform “movement”, here’s a really good piece on the labor-backed Fight for Fifteen campaign:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/business/movement-to-increase-mcdonalds-minimum-wage-broadens-its-tactics.html
They’ve really been quite successful in actually helping low income working people, in marked contrast to both our elected leaders and the self-appointed “leaders” like Rhee and Brown.
Public sector unions are a different beast. How would Cesar Chavez or MLK feel about defending the Buffalo Teacher’s Association Plastic surgery benefit that took >$5m away from classrooms last year?
John,
I understand that you don’t like teachers or unions, but having read quite a lot of Dr. King’s writings, I have no doubt that he would be on the side of unions, not billionaires and hedge fund managers. Unions are not always right and they sometimes commit errors, but their errors don’t hurt as much as the greed of the 1%.
I love teachers and I don’t dislike unions. I just think that public sector unions have a lot of abuses. The negotiation between an elected school board and a union is not the same as the negotiation between management and labor because of the influence that the union has on school boards.
I’d like to see more unions where unions can be effective at making companies competitive, such as the non-Detroit automakers. I’d like to see teacher’s unions and administrator’s unions that cooperate to provide the best possible service to the students they are charged with educating. I don’t think that happens now in this country.
I agree that the 1% has done a lot of damage to this country and that unions have done a lot of good.