March 15, 2011
SAN BRUNO, Calif. — School districts in California have issued nearly 19,000 layoff notices so far to teachers amid uncertainty over the state budget, the California Teachers Association estimated Tuesday.
The union announced its estimate of preliminary notices on the day school districts must let employees know they could lose their jobs.
Some districts had yet to fully report how many warnings had been distributed as they prepare for worst-case budget scenarios. The union said it expects to have a final count Friday.
Its early estimate includes almost 500 school employees in San Francisco, 540 in Oakland, nearly 900 in San Diego, and about 5,000 educators in Los Angeles.
The situation is not unique to California. School districts throughout the country are warning of cutbacks involving teacher and other employees, as state legislatures seek to close massive budget shortfalls by cutting education spending.
Not all of the estimated layoffs will be carried out in California.
Schools have until May 15 to issue final layoff notices. Two years ago, districts handed out layoff notices to a record 26,500 teachers, but only 60 percent of them ended up losing their jobs.
Meanwhile, teachers and parents rallied around the state Tuesday to drum up support for Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposal.
Brown’s plan for closing the state’s nearly $27 billion budget deficit seeks to maintain current K-12 spending levels by asking voters to extend temporary increases in the sales, personal income and vehicle taxes for five years.
But so far the governor has not secured enough Republican support to hold a special tax election.
Without the tax extensions, school districts would face another round of deep budget cuts that education officials warn would prompt widespread layoffs and campus closures.
In Union City, between San Jose and Oakland, kindergarten teacher Quyen Tran was one of about 60 school employees in her small school district to get a layoff notice. She started teaching in New Haven Unified School District in 2006.
Quyen, 30, said she was laid off last spring but hired in August right before the school year began. She is expecting her first child in June.
“It’s very stressful,” she said during a news conference, “just not knowing where I’m going to be next year or how secure my income will be.”
Quyen, however, said she’s more worried about the impact of state budget cuts on her students.
“With all these layoffs of teachers, they will have no choice but to stuff more kids into these classrooms,” she said. “They’re going to be cheated out of their education just because there are not going to be enough teachers around.”
The prison gates are open... 
In all these discussions it is imperative to emphasize what even an Ezra Pound, who was an aesthetic Fascist but also acquainted intimately with Wall Street and the banksters, recognized, to wit, that “[the] imbecility of striking for higher wages while leaving the control of the purchasing power of those wages in the hands of the extortioners is not monopolised by the labour Parties.”
So also Karl Marx, in approving labor’s struggle for higher wages as legitimate, noted that at best that goal is transitory and of little significance in overthrowing the Capitalist system:
“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system!’….”
Emphasizing this point in the hyper-Capitalist state that is the United States is even more signally important. Stalin, for example, emphasized that he expected very little in the way of revolutionary change from the American workers or unions because they had been so thoroughly “bourgeoisified”.
In fact, beginning with Reagan, American unions have been thoroughly decimated and only a small part of American labor remains union. More important, most of these unions have long ago become accessories of the Corporations for whom they work, with little concern for the status of American workers in general, or for anything but their own short-sighted goals, which is mainly higher wages for themselves and everyone else take the hindmost.
This is also true of the unions that are employed by various state entities, including the Teachers’ unions and others, many of whom have been anti-Marxist in the past and remain so now.
This short-sightedness, of course, has led to their present predicament, but for the most part they do not see it, and it has to be explained to them carefully and over and over.
Granting that the Republican Right and the Finance Capitalists that own both them and the Democrats are the legitimate enemy, one has to be careful approving uncritically the struggle of some state workers for higher wages without emphasizing that this is at best a limited goal, and does nothing to change the system, which system is the real problem.
Thus the irony of many naive Leftists supporting uncritically, as in Wisconsin, the demands of the prison guard union for collective bargaining and higher wages. But these guards are the same force employed by the Finance Capitalists’ “state”, which imprisons enormous number of Americans as part of what Angela Davis calls, rightly, “the prison industrial complex.”
Is the goal then better paid prison guards for an unjust system controlled by the Capitalists themselves?
Capitalism with higher wages and social welfare is still Capitalism–that is the crux of the matter.
In fact the genuine unemployment rate in the US according to the government’s own numbers is now about twenty percent, and still growing.
These unemployed are no longer “union”, and most of them, along with the rest of the work force and poor never were. Nor will their status ever change if in supporting state workers for higher wages stops there, and these workers do not see that they are a small part of a larger picture.
As a matter of fact all of this was clarified once and for all by Lenin in regard to “Socialists” like Kautsky and Bernstein. That type of “Socialism” goes nowhere and will not change a thing.
You can praise someone like Stephen King for supposedly wanting to pay more in income tax, but he remains essentially Liberal and part of the problem. So too most of the Democrat “Progressives”, including Kucinich, who thinks that the abuses of the system can be palliated by reform.
After Marcuse all these Liberals and Progressives and pseudo-Leftists are not only fatally naive but in essence an integral part of the cooptation that keeps the system going.
These are hard facts, and not appetizing to the superficial “Left” but they must be faced and repeated over and over again.