“Something was coming to a head, but it didn’t have to be a strike—and especially not a strike that won.”
—West Virginia teacher Nicole McCormick
According to most national media accounts, the red state revolt was a spontaneous upsurge. Conditions were bad and teachers rose up en masse—end of story.
It’s true that these strikes were marked by an extraordinarily high level of self-activity outside formal organizational structures. Much of the struggle developed independently of any conscious interventions by experienced activists. But these strike movements were not completely leaderless, nor purely spontaneous. In fact, it’s impossible to separate their course from the efforts of those rank-and-file organizers that helped spark and guide them, in alliance—and sometimes in conflict—with the top trade union leadership. The point is not simply that some individual or group always has to take the initiative in mass struggle. Rather, it was the specific political perspectives and tactical choices of a dedicated core of militant teachers that most decisively shaped these strikes’ dynamics and outcomes.
To be sure, these grassroots activists did not conjure a mass movement out of thin air. As shown in the preceding chapters, a whole series of economic and political processes underlay the upsurge. And unions, with all their contradictions, played a pivotal role in coordinating and strengthening these movements. Yet, had it not been for the efforts of such rank-and-file organizers, things could have turned out very differently. Without activist interventions, for instance, it’s unlikely that rank and filers would have been able to overcome the hesitations of their top union leadership. Mingo County teacher Katie Endicott put it as follows: “We love our unions; we couldn’t have accomplished what we did without them. But we did have to overstep them along the way at certain times.”
An indispensable ingredient in the victories of West Virginia and Arizona was the existence of a “militant minority” of workplace activists—that is, individuals with a class struggle orientation, significant organizing experience, and a willingness to act independently of (and, if necessary, against) the top union officialdom. Though few in number, young socialists inspired by the Bernie Sanders campaign played an outsized role. Given the illegality of strikes in these states and the unions’ long-standing reliance on lobbying the Democrats, it’s not surprising that radicals were the only political current willing and able to consistently fight for a sustained work stoppage.
Much of this behind-the-scenes story has gone unpublished until now, since strike leaders in the heat of battle were understandably reluctant to give Republican red-baiters further ammunition to denounce the movement. But analyzing the impact of workplace militants is essential if we want to extract political lessons from the strikes and make sense of why they developed differently in each state. The absence of a layer of militant teacher organizers in Oklahoma, for instance, goes a long way toward explaining the relative weakness of its walkout. Without experienced grassroots activists to point the way forward, the Sooner State’s explosive upsurge fell short of its potential.
Comparing West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma reveals the continued relevance of an old insight: the revitalization of working-class struggle, and democratization of the labor movement, depends to a significant extent on the active participation of radical unionists and socialists. Labor needs the Left—and the Left needs labor. This isn’t because leftists are any smarter than anybody else, but because class struggle perspectives correspond best to the actual structural challenges and political opportunities facing working people.
By leaning on the accumulated experience of labor’s past and an inspiring vision of a better future, socialists throughout US history have usually played a central role in rank-and-file insurgencies. Indeed, the modern trade union movement arose in large part from the tireless organizing of Socialists, Communists, and Trotskyists prior to and during the Great Depression.
But the deep links forged between socialists and the labor movement were subsequently severed by McCarthyism, trade union bureaucratization, and the Left’s turn away from workplace organizing. Fortunately, it appears that this imposed divorce—which has been equally damaging for both US trade unionism and socialism—may be coming to an end. In 2012, socialist activists, in alliance with other class struggle unionists, played a key leadership role in Chicago’s powerful education strike. On an even-grander scale, the red state rebellions have demonstrated that reuniting political radicalism and organized labor is both necessary and possible.
Sanders and Socialism in West Virginia
To understand how and when West Virginia’s strike erupted, it’s not enough to look only at worsening labor conditions. Since at least 2014, intense anger toward pay stagnation and premium increases for the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA) had been the norm, without leading to any mass resistance. In the words of one demoralized teacher on the West Virginia Public Employees United Facebook page, “We have had several ‘strike worthy’ endeavors over the last few years and we’ve done nothing but take it.”
Emily Comer, a native West Virginian and teacher in South Charleston who had been organizing around a variety of social justice causes beginning with Occupy in 2011, argues that it was the impact of a newly emerged layer of young leftist organizers that made this time different: “Of course, a lot of factors led to this strike. Our economic crisis is not new. But I think the biggest difference is that since 2016 we’ve been developing a network of radicals in West Virginia. You know, we’re still pretty disorganized—but we had just enough cohesion and strength to step into the political vacuum after the latest attacks on PEIA.”
The roots of West Virginia’s militant minority are easy to trace. Outside of southern counties where labor traditions run deepest, each of the core organizers I spoke with pointed to Bernie Sanders’s insurgent primary run as the critical turning point.
Sanders’s confrontational politics and radical vision captured the imaginations of well over 100,000 West Virginian voters. At a sold-out mass rally on April 26, 2016, in Huntington, he announced, “We are going to create an economy that works for all of us, not just the people on top,” exhorting West Virginia to “join the political revolution.”
Nicole McCormick explains what this looked like in Mercer County: “I’ve been politically aware and involved with the union for probably at least the past seven or eight years. But really it was when Bernie started campaigning that I became heavily entrenched in the ideology that ‘everyone deserves health care, everyone deserves a decent life.’ That’s when I really got hard-core about all this. Bernie put forward class politics in a way that was really approachable to a lot of people I work with. They didn’t look at him as something scary: he was just saying we deserved a better life. He also made the word socialism stop being so heavily stigmatized.”
On the night of his primary victory, after trouncing Clinton by winning every single county in the state, Sanders described West Virginia as “a working-class state” where “many of the people there are hurting.” They know, he said, “like most Americans, that it is too late for establishment politics and establishment economics. They want real change.” Aided by the machinations of the Democratic Party establishment, Clinton ended up getting the national nomination. But Sanders’s primary run demonstrated that class struggle electoral campaigns could be a tremendous lever for building up the confidence and self-organization of working people.
Matt McCormick described how this played out in his personal experience. A few years earlier, bad working conditions while working at Walmart had led him to become “defiant, class conscious, and outspoken against [his] managers.” Soon after quitting, he began exploring radical ideas. But until the Sanders campaign, McCormick felt politically isolated: “Before Bernie, you could only vote for Republicans or Democrats that act that like Republicans. When Bernie came along, now there was a glimmer of hope, because he was saying what we believed all along. Basically, my wife Nicole and I were democratic socialists before it was cool to call yourself that. We just didn’t have an outlet for our politics. Bernie provided that outlet and gave a sense of legitimacy to our viewpoints.”
In addition to spreading and legitimizing class politics, the Sanders campaign in West Virginia, as across the country, helped coalesce a new organized socialist movement in the form of a reborn Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
One of DSA’s most important young members in the state was Emily Comer. In her view: “The role of the Bernie campaign of 2016 on organizing in West Virginia really cannot be overstated. We didn’t have a DSA chapter until Bernie. After his run, a few DSA chapters started to pop up around the state because Bernie’s campaign had gotten folks really excited for class politics. And it got people, especially young people, plugged in who before had been feeling hopeless and who would not have made their way into organizing before.”
Of all the people Comer met inside DSA, by far the most important was fellow Charleston educator Jay O’Neal. Though he’s too modest to take credit, other West Virginian activists agree that O’Neal was largely responsible for coalescing the circle of radical teachers that first initiated the collective push toward a strike.
O’Neal’s personal trajectory illustrates that many of West Virginia’s key strike leaders were motivated more by political conviction than family tradition. Raised in a conservative evangelical household in Texas, he became disillusioned with Republicanism when President Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. After moving to San Francisco in 2011 to teach middle school, O’Neal joined the union, eventually becoming a building rep—“Honestly, I wasn’t very good,” he insists—and participating in a 2014 strike authorization vote.
The following year, he moved to West Virginia and promptly dove into the labor movement, soon becoming a building rep at his school and the union treasurer for Kanawha County. “I knew by that time that unions were important,” he recalls. “And when I saw how bad our pay was, I was like, ‘I really need to be involved.’” Initially confused by the existence of competing teachers’ unions, he ended up joining the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) over the American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia (AFT-WV), since the latter had already endorsed Clinton instead of Sanders.
“Bernie was huge for me—that label democratic socialist, it definitely stopped being scary,” O’Neal explains. “And it felt like there was a real popular shift in West Virginia, Bernie was super popular here. But the Democratic Party establishment iced him out, leading to Trump’s victory. After the election, like a bunch of other people, I said to myself, ‘Man, I’ve got to do something.’ So when I saw that there was now a DSA chapter here, I decided to check it out.”
In the hope of coming up with a strategy to turn things around for public employees in West Virginia, he began discussions with Nicole and Matt McCormick, whom he had met at the 2016 convention of the National Education Association (NEA). O’Neal also reached out to leaders of the 1990 West Virginia strike, and he began reading everything he could about the lessons of the 2012 Chicago educator walkout, notably Micah Uetricht’s Strike for America and Labor Notes’ How to Jump-Start Your Union. But it was not immediately clear to him how to translate those experiences to “right to work” West Virginia.
Looking to find some answers, O’Neal set up a small DSA committee on labor and education in the summer of 2017, which Comer and a few of his progressive teacher friends joined shortly thereafter. Its most consequential decision was to organize a study group on Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts, a manual and manifesto for working-class strategy. “We decided to read No Shortcuts because we saw the state of organized labor in West Virginia: we keep losing, our unions are dying, and PEIA keeps getting more expensive every year,” Comer recalls. “We were in agreement that if something didn’t change, we were done for, basically. We also agreed that new life could be breathed into our unions—and that as rank-and-file members, we were strategically placed to lead that push.”
The main political upshot of the book for Comer was its “clear analysis of the difference between real organizing and advocacy.” West Virginia’s unions, she realized, were stuck doing the latter, which “didn’t build real power.” Reading No Shortcuts, in her view, “was a starting point for giving us confidence to begin organizing and to say: ‘We are the union. We’re dues-paying members, we’re not going to wait around for anybody else to change things for us.’” O’Neal agreed with this assessment, adding that “No Shortcuts was also really powerful because reading it made us realize: ‘Hey, socialists are usually at the front of a lot of big labor battles and strikes!’”
Armed with these insights, Comer and O’Neal were well prepared to respond when the latest changes to PEIA were announced in October 2017. Before exploring these initial organizing efforts, it’s worth noting—contrary to red-baiting stereotypes about nefarious radical infiltrators—that they had no intention of secretly manipulating public employees to impose a “socialist agenda.” Rather, the ethos that guided the two was Marx’s affirmation in The Communist Manifesto that socialists “have no interests separate and apart from those of the working class as a whole.” Socialists in West Virginia and across the country were not aiming to divert the working-class struggle; they were just trying to help it win. In fact, Comer and O’Neal both bent over backward to make sure that the movement “stayed organic,” as they liked to say.
The truth is that even if DSAers had wanted to try to control the education movement, their nascent grouping was too weak to do so. As a recently formed “big tent” organization with little established infrastructure and few experienced activists, West Virginia’s DSA was hardly a well-oiled machine. If anything, this was a significant drawback: at no point did Comer, O’Neal, or the McCormicks have the benefit of a cohesive political structure to which they could turn for organizational resources, tactical advice, or collective initiatives. Insofar as they received any outside counsel, it was from individuals like former AFT-WV organizer Ryan Frankenberry and, after January, Ellen David Friedman of Labor Notes.
Comer sums up the situation as it stood in the fall of 2017: “We had a small group of active socialist teachers with a strategic analysis doing organizing on the ground across West Virginia—that was crucial. But it was so important that we always worked alongside other people who were not socialists. There’s no way we could have done this on our own.”
First Steps
The first few months of the fight for a PEIA fix were an uphill battle. It seemed like 2017–18 could very well end up like school years prior, during which employees vented their anger about rising costs without taking any substantive action. With Republicans in power locally and nationally, many educators and union leaders felt that nothing could be won before the November 2018 midterm elections.
Charleston’s cluster of DSA teachers took a different approach. Comer explains: “Last October, when the latest changes to our health care came down, we immediately knew that with this Republican legislature, it was going to take something really big to win. Our goal was to do whatever it took to beat back these attacks and fix PEIA. Realistically, we saw that this could very well could require a strike—or at least a credible strike threat. We didn’t know what would happen; we didn’t know that it would have to come to that. But we knew that it could. So we were definitely talking strike from October onwards. But our goal wasn’t a strike per se, our goal was to win. Either way, we knew that we needed to begin with a bunch of escalating steps to build up power.”
O’Neal decided in late September to create a Facebook group with him and Comer as co-moderators. As is the case with most serious organizers, O’Neal was just trying to replicate what he saw work well elsewhere: “Honestly, I got the idea to form the group from my experience participating in DSA’s New Members Facebook group. It’s funny, because that DSA page ended up getting pretty out of control, but at least it made me see that social media could actually be used to build an on-the-ground movement.”
For Comer and O’Neal, the main purpose of West Virginia Public Employees United was to create a forum through which workers from different unions could join together to begin collectively organizing. In Comer’s words: “It’s strange: union leaderships here in West Virginia often spend more time trying to compete with each other for members than they do fighting the boss. So we needed to get around the fragmentation—we weren’t going to get anywhere with three separate orgs with three separate strategies.”
Seeking to build the broadest possible working-class unity, Comer and O’Neal also chose to heed Ryan Frankenberry’s suggestion to make it a group of and for all public employees, rather than just teachers. Without this early decision, it’s hard to imagine the chain of events leading to the state’s eventual granting of a 5 percent raise to every public employee. The fact that Comer and O’Neal made it a statewide Facebook group was no less consequential. By eventually uniting educators in all fifty-five counties, the movement constituted a significant advance over the 1990 strike, as well as over the localized WVEA walkouts that had sprung up in 2007.
Nevertheless, in the first month of its existence, the group didn’t “catch.” To O’Neal and Comer’s dismay, few people were joining or commenting. It was only after they took clipboards and sign-up sheets to PEIA informational hearings in November, and began bird-dogging politicians in December, that membership began to steadily grow. By the end of the year, 1,260 had joined the group. In early January, O’Neal and Comer chose, adroitly, to make the United page “secret”—you could only join if another public employee first invited you—which gave the group a certain mystique and cohesiveness.
The United page’s lightly moderated, freewheeling discussion style led to more than a few unfounded rumors, a source of considerable consternation for its moderators. But generally the group page worked well, particularly since it could tap into West Virginian educators’ relatively rich reserve of trade union experience and knowledge. By late January, West Virginia Public Employees United had grown to over 20,000 members.
Without social media, there’s no chance that the red state revolt would have developed as it did. Facebook made it possible to communicate easily with large groups of people and to widely disseminate calls to action without, as in the past, having to undertake the arduous task of building up a well-resourced, formal organizational infrastructure. Rather than idealizing (or dismissing) the impact of this new technology on social movements, it’s better to view it as a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, social media gave rank-and-file activists the ability to widely—and rapidly—disseminate calls to action across the state. It also changed the relationship of forces between them and their union leaderships. Without relying on official union channels, individual teachers from far-flung counties were able to share with one another their concerns, information, and ideas.
But on the other hand, the ease of mobilization and communication provided by Facebook has real downsides. In the Internet age, mass protests can scale up very quickly—sometimes too quickly for powerful organizations to develop in the process. Without the political relationships and infrastructure forged through in-person organizing, protest movements that rely on social media can be structurally fragile and ill-equipped to confront either harsh ruling-class opposition or serious internal debates.
Social media mobilization also poses important challenges to internal democracy within movements. Unlike in the trade unions, leaders of the red state educator Facebook groups were completely self selecting. Though educators could be polled online about next steps, and though they could vote with their feet by ignoring or leaving the groups, the ranks had no ability to select—or remove—their moderators. In West Virginia this never became a big issue, since the United page did not try to serve as a decision-making body. Oklahoma’s and Arizona’s Facebook leaders, in contrast, did make important political decisions during the walkouts, which raises all sorts of difficult questions about democratic process and accountability.
This divergence points to a broader point: social media can be wielded by organizers in very different ways. Oklahoma’s grassroots leaders, for example, focused most of their energy on Facebook, underestimating the urgency of building up to a strike through escalating workplace actions and collective organization. In contrast, Comer and O’Neal were school-site organizers who intentionally focused on getting educators to participate in protests, workplace actions, and union meetings.
“A lot of people across the country seem to have the impression that we just created a Facebook page, then ‘Boom!’ everyone went out on strike,” O’Neal explains. “Actually, we used the Facebook group to share information about months of concrete buildup actions and meetings going on in real life. These activities generated momentum, which in turn fed more interest and participation in the Facebook group. The two built on each other.”
Even in West Virginia, however, events surged forward so quickly that those militants across the state who sparked the strike lacked sufficient time to cohere themselves as a distinct statewide tendency. Partly, this was because so much of their on-the-ground organizational activity took place directly within the unions; O’Neal and the McCormicks, in particular, were important local union leaders. But the relative organizational weakness of the rank and file (and those on the Left in particular) proved to be a consequential limitation, if not a fatal one. This, however, would only become evident later on.
As O’Neal explained above, the United page served as the main platform to promote a series of grassroots-initiated actions to raise awareness about the changes to PEIA and build up confidence that these could be defeated. Throughout November 2017, the moderators encouraged educators to attend PEIA hearings and make their voices heard. Next, O’Neal and Comer asked educators to write to their representatives. Nasty or dismissive Republican replies were soon plastered across the page.
In December, they stepped up their campaign by organizing, and frequently live-streaming, in-person confrontations with leading Republican politicians. Next, Comer and O’Neal crashed the governor’s January 10 State of the State address by holding up a banner inside the capitol entrance that read: “Public Employee Healthcare, NOT Corporate Welfare! Fund PEIA now!”
The United moderators—most of whom were union building reps—did not limit themselves to promoting actions at the capitol. Their energy was equally dedicated to building up awareness and power at school sites and within the unions across the state. For his part, O’Neal barraged his coworkers with updates and calls to action at the end of each faculty senate meeting.
One particularly effective means to build workplace solidarity and momentum was to wear the same color shirt on a given day. On January 26, West Virginia Public Employees United organized the first statewide “Red for Ed” day: educators at hundreds of schools wore red and posted group photos on the page. The unions continued this tactic in the coming weeks, and it would later spread to Arizona and across the nation. A week later, on February 2, O’Neal and Comer took the initiative to organize the state’s first walk-ins, an idea first floated by local union leaders. It was significant that these actions began in Kanawha County, the heart of political power in West Virginia and the state’s largest county. Kanawha had been a major weak link during 1990; the prospects of a truly statewide strike would be dim if it were to remain aloof again this time.
Together with such activities, the United moderators engaged in constant political discussion and agitation. Initially, their main goal was just to get out information about the latest attacks against public employees. Soon they combined this with specific calls to resist, as in the following November 28 post by O’Neal: “For the last few years, I’ve gone to the PEIA hearings. People get angry, and then we go home … I refuse to let that happen this year without more of a fight. Let’s work together to brainstorm some things we could be doing to hold our governor’s and legislators’ feet to the fire.”
One of O’Neal and Comer’s particular contributions was to bring the question of progressive taxation to the fore. In person and online, they hammered home the point that taxing the rich was the only viable way to fix PEIA. As O’Neal posted on December 17: “These tax cuts largely flow to out-of-state corporations. It’s time to ask: Who does our state’s leadership value more? Out-of-state corporations OR West Virginia’s public employees?” By the time of the work stoppage, the idea that PEIA should be fixed by increasing the gas severance tax prevailed among public employees. During the nine school days of the strike, chants of “Tax our gas!” periodically erupted inside the capitol.
Another major emphasis of the United moderators was the need for rank and filers to participate in, and transform, their unions. Even in West Virginia, with its history of labor activism and its relatively strong union membership density in public education (70 percent), many workers were initially dismissive. Threats to stop paying union dues were common, as were arguments that it was a waste of time trying to work within these bodies. In response, the McCormicks, O’Neal, and Comer insisted over and over that unions were only as strong as their activated memberships.
A January 6 debate on the United page is illustrative. After one teacher denounced the union and called upon teachers to drop their dues, O’Neal responded: “WE ARE THE UNION. I know for a fact that when they went on strike in 1990 it wasn’t because leadership wanted to—they were pushed that direction by their members. If we want to see real change in our unions, WE’VE got to make it happen.”
It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of the fact that West Virginia’s radicals were all active members (and frequently local leaders) of their unions. It meant that, for all the often sharp differences within the movement, there were always open lines of communication and coordination from the bottom to the top, and vice versa. Even well before they agreed to strike, unions were playing an important role by disseminating information about the proposed changes to PEIA and encouraging members to make their voices heard. And, particularly as the movement heated up, the structures of the unions served increasingly as a framework for grassroots organizers to collaborate with statewide leaders on shared activities like walk-ins, rallies, and eventually the strike vote.
Above all, the main political contribution by West Virginia’s militant minority was to drive forward the case for a work stoppage. The dominant image of West Virginia’s walkout—as a purely spontaneous explosion—seriously underestimates how much hard work it took to overcome the fears of educators and the hesitations of their union leaderships. “It’s true that we have a long tradition of unionism in West Virginia,” notes Charleston teacher Olivia Morris. “But this was basically dormant until right before the strike.”
The first mention of the “s word” came on October 6, when O’Neal posted news about the push toward a strike in Fresno, California. “We are settling for FAR TOO LITTLE here,” he concluded. A skeptic replied that “WV teachers aren’t allowed to strike,” to which O’Neal responded: “True, but they did anyway in 1990 and it made a big difference.” Over the coming months, this basic argument was repeated thousands of times in a myriad of iterations.
Advocates for the strike were unquestionably in the minority until February; new teachers and service personnel were particularly fearful. Matt McCormick recalls the dynamic at his school: “For weeks, there were these constant get-togethers in hallways and in mailrooms, where we’d discuss what the hell was going on. Lots of folks were initially scared, but I kept on repeating that it was worth the risk. People started asking each other: ‘Would you go out if I go out?’ There were some who initially said no, but they changed their minds—eventually.”
By starting threads about the lessons of the 1990 strike, O’Neal sought from early on to help public employees consider the feasibility of a work stoppage. As he put it on January 6, “I think if we could educate more teachers about what the [1990] strike actually did for teachers here, we might get a lot of people on board.” One of the key insights generated by these discussions was the centrality of involving support staff. “Striking again may not be such a bad idea,” remarked a service employee who had been obliged to cross the picket lines in 1990. “But everyone must stand together and [in my opinion], this includes nonprofessional personnel also.”
As things started to heat up in January, two members of the United group, in particular, drove forward the case for a strike: Matt McCormick and Mingo County’s Justin Endicott. In fact, they basically refused to talk about anything else.
After another moderator on January 10 asked members how they felt about the governor’s State of the State address, McCormick responded, “Public employees need to strike.” Three days later, he elaborated on the point: “This won’t stop unless we are willing to walk off the job together … We have to be willing to disrupt the state’s ability to function.” Endicott chimed in: “I agree 100 percent and if we don’t it will only get worse … What will it take is the question I have been asking.” When a fellow teacher responded that the real solution was to vote in favorable candidates in the coming elections, McCormick pushed back: “I don’t think we’ll solve this at the ballot box.” Endicott put it similarly: “Until we draw the line we will face this every session from now until forever.”
From January 16 onward, both Endicott and McCormick began calling upon the union leaderships to start taking concrete organizational steps toward a strike. Endicott put it like this: “Our unions aren’t doing what they are supposed to be. Sending me a summary of bills and telling me to email my legislators is not what I pay them for. They need to walk in that building and start telling these legislators that they will pull us if it doesn’t stop immediately.” McCormick made a similar case: “[Union] leadership needs to indicate they are willing to take that next step. We need them to talk to county presidents and organize a ballot to determine interest in a sick out or strike.”
By mid January, the United page and school sites across West Virginia were buzzing with talk about the feasibility of some form of job action. Until this time, the unions had done nothing to promote or facilitate this discussion—in fact, top WVEA officials had called O’Neal into their headquarters in October to request that he “work within the union” rather than the United page, which they feared was the embryo of a new union. Then, in early January, they called upon Matt McCormick to stop talking prematurely about a strike.
Under growing pressure from below, top union officials began to shift gears. On January 15, at a small WVEA rally to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, union president Dale Lee acknowledged, “I’ve heard a lot of people talk about ‘It’s time for a walkout or time for a strike.’” He argued for taking things slow: “If we were to get back to that, there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid beforehand.” Comer recalls her and O’Neal’s elation that the “s word” had been mentioned: “That night we were like, ‘We got Dale Lee to mention the word strike!’”
Aiming to provide information to their members about PEIA and the legality of a strike, union leaders and staffers fanned out across the state. As AFT-WV lobbyist Bob Brown stated on January 29, an additional purpose of these trips was “to figure out what’s going on” among the mobilized ranks.1
Allen Stump, WVEA’s full-time organizer for southern West Virginia, explains the union’s message: “When we started hearing rumors about a strike, our agenda didn’t change. I’d say, ‘In all reality, you may lose your job and there might not be anything we could do about it.’ But at the end of the day, what I also told everybody was that ‘whatever you all want to do, we will help you organize, and we’ll support you, we’ll have your back.’”
Many teachers were frustrated that their union leaderships did not take a more proactive stance. Nevertheless, the openness these leaders expressed toward supporting educators’ desire for militant action constituted a major departure from the usual negative approach of US labor leaders toward strikes—especially illegal ones. Even ardent rank-and-file organizers commended their top union leaders’ willingness to go along with, and provide considerable resources to, the upsurge. Since this was also the labor officialdom’s approach in Oklahoma and Arizona, it makes sense to pause and examine the roots of this important, and rather exceptional, development.
Some of the key factors were conjunctural. For one, the fact that Republicans were in power created considerably more room for maneuver, since unions could support a strike without having to break their ties to the Democratic Party. As the movements gained traction, union officials realized that these could be potentially important springboards to elect Democrats in the November 2018 elections.
No less important was the fact that these labor officials were operating in “right to work” states—conditions later imposed upon the entire US public sector by the Janus decision. The prerogative of workers to stop paying dues at any time—though weakening the trade union movement as a whole—creates a qualitatively different power relationship between union ranks and officials. If labor leaders hadn’t heeded the desires of their mobilized members in these three states, the latter could have decided to just walk away. Indeed, threats among rank and filers to drop dues were prevalent throughout the red state rebellions.
It is also significant that in “right to work” industries without collective bargaining, workers can easily switch from one union to another. In West Virginia, for instance, fears of being outflanked by rival unions frequently spurred officials to talk and act more militantly than they might have otherwise. Union competition, while paralyzing in periods of demobilization, proved to have some significant benefits.
Finally, these states’ prohibition of mandatory “agency fees” undermines labor bureaucratization by considerably lowering the number of full-time functionaries that unions can afford to hire. The fact that local union presidents were working classroom teachers, not staff materially dependent on union dues, made them much more responsive to their coworkers and more willing to take the risk of an illegal job action. In many ways, they functioned more like a powerful shop steward than a typical union president.
This doesn’t mean we should promote or support “right to work” laws. Smaller union memberships, lower financial resources, and weaker organizational infrastructures are serious impediments to generating, and particularly to sustaining, working-class power. But contrary to widespread fears that Janus marked the death-knell of organized labor, it’s worth keeping in mind that the “agency fee” is a relatively recent US institutional anomaly dating back only to World War II, when the state sought to prop up union officials who feared that their wartime no-strike pledge would lead to a mass outflow of dues payers.
In West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, the relative weakness of those institutional forces that normally channel or stifle labor discontent created more space for rank-and-file activists to promote workplace action. Ironically, it is precisely these sorts of political conditions that the Right is actively seeking to generalize across the United States through anti-union attacks like Janus.
Criticizing Republican Supreme Court justices for scoffing “at the issue of labor peace,” AFT President Randi Weingarten explained in the wake of the Janus ruling that “if you look at the places in this country that have robust collective bargaining, you’ve seen very few strikes and work stoppages in the public sector, because they solved those problems at the bargaining table. Now, those problems will be solved in different ways.”2
The Southern Counties Rise
By the end of January 2018, there was a lot of talk in West Virginia about walking out. But it was still just talk. Union leaders were noncommittal, and many educators remained fearful. As late as January 29, one could still find frequent posts like the following on the United page: “This group will accomplish nothing. All I read is whining and complaining. If people are upset, they have the right to be, but a call for a strike every three or four posts is going to accomplish nothing, especially since we don’t have the right, too.”
It’s fitting that the initiative to move from words to deeds came from southern West Virginia, where a century-long tradition of labor militancy still looms large. The deep continuity of labor traditions—projected onto West Virginia as a whole in the national media coverage of the strike—does still exist in counties like Mingo, Wyoming, and Logan. To quote Katie Endicott: “Mingo—we’re the home of Matewan, the Mine Wars, the Battle of Blair Mountain. This is our history, this is in our blood. Everybody here knows somebody who’s been on strike.”
Few people today are aware that the coal miner battles that culminated in the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain—the country’s largest insurrection since the Civil War—were largely led by socialists. After subsequent governmental repression wiped out West Virginia’s socialist movement, it was primarily through militant trade unionism that the radical spirit of the Mine Wars lived on over the next century. Thus, in Mingo, unlike Charleston, the firebrand teachers who spurred the recent education strike weren’t socialists. As is often the case in areas with a strong labor legacy, the militant minority encompassed not only ideological radicals, but also rank-and-file organizers committed to (and capable of) leading class struggle on the job—including, crucially, against the hesitations of the top union leadership when necessary. Though all genuine socialists support class struggle unionism, not all class struggle unionists support socialism.
Numerous educators stepped up to make the strike possible. But in the southern counties, as in the rest of the state, it’s not hard to pinpoint the inner core of dedicated organizers that played a vastly disproportionate leadership role. Three Mingo educators stood out in particular. One was Brandon Wolford, a sixth-year special education teacher in Williamson and president of the Mingo County WVEA.
The Wolford family’s long history of coal mining and labor militancy played a central role in Brandon’s upbringing: “This goes way back for me; it was instilled in me since birth. I was raised with an understanding that you stick with your coworkers no matter what—and that you never cross a picket line.” Wolford proudly recounts that his grandfather was involved in the 1920 Battle of Matewan and that he eventually became local president of the coal miners’ union in Columbus, Ohio, before getting killed in a 1947 slate fall.
Brandon’s father, also a coal miner, had participated in the fifteen-month strike of 1984–85, a bitter and violent struggle marked by physical clashes, gunfire, jack throwing, slit tires, and truck barricade picket lines. These experiences had a profound impact: “My mom had collected a ton of low-quality VHS tapes about the strike, and I used to watch them for hours as a kid. It made me so proud that my dad had participated in those battles. You could say that it sparked a special interest—ever since I was little, I knew that I wanted one day to be in a struggle like that.”
During the strike’s buildup and development, Wolford’s main organizer allies were Katie Endicott and her husband, Justin. Both were from proud union families—his in coal mining, hers in education. “My mom was on strike in 1990—I was just four years old, and I was out there on the picket line with her,” Katie explains.
The Endicotts were also leaders at school and in the community. Though they were union members and participated in periodic activities in defense of education and public employees, their organizing experience and activities before the strike came largely through the church: “It was nothing new for us to mobilize people during the strike, because we’ve already done that, just in a different field. So even though we weren’t very active in the union until recently, people here know us—and we already knew how to organize quickly and efficiently.”
Despite the region’s militant traditions, it took a long time before most workers in southern West Virginia were willing to fight back against the changes to PEIA. Active participation in the unions had been low for many years—and it remained so up through early 2018. Though some people mistakenly believe that the southern counties unilaterally sparked the strike, Katie Endicott is the first to note the importance of the preceding organizing efforts initiated by O’Neal and Comer: “We can’t really overstate the importance of the Facebook page. It was the catalyst—it allowed us to get networked and get the pulse of all fifty-five counties very quickly.” It was not until the third week of January that teachers in the southern counties began organizing in earnest.
A small group of Mingo educators, including the Endicotts and Wolford, had traveled up to Charleston to participate in WVEA’s disappointingly small MLK day assembly on January 15. Sensing an urgent need to ramp up the struggle, Justin and Katie informally met that night with a few of their coworkers to discuss possible ways forward. “I told my husband, ‘We need a union meeting—and it needs to be open to everyone,’ ” Katie recalls. “So he talked to Brandon Wolford, and within a couple of hours we had a meeting scheduled.”
On January 23, over 250 Mingo County educators squeezed into the Carewood Center in Delbarton. The room was crackling with tension. Union staffers—Allen Stump (WVEA) and Brandon Tinney (AFT-WV)—began the meeting by informing the audience that statewide union leaders, though neither advocating nor discouraging an eventual strike, were against any immediate job actions.
Challenging his union superiors, Wolford, the Mingo County WVEA president, spoke forcefully in favor of a walkout. Never one to stay quiet, Katie Endicott took the floor to insist that the meeting set a specific date for the action: “We cannot leave this room until we decide on a date. Whether we realize it or not, the eyes of the state are on Mingo County. We just need a spark.”
In the face of this outcry, Stump, like his AFT-WV counterpart, decided to cede to the assembled educators: “Who I am to argue with an entire county of workers? At least 90 percent wanted to walk out. One lady stood up and said to us, ‘Listen you all can either get behind us or get out of the way, because if you don’t, we’ll run you over.’”
Mingo’s assembly closed with a decision to set up school-site strike votes for a one-day walkout on February 2. Aiming to spread the job action, Wolford reached out to local presidents in neighboring counties, asking them to join in. Over the next three days, similar mass meetings were held across the south. Support for organizing a strike vote was virtually unanimous in Wyoming County, where the movement surged forward under the guidance of WVEA copresidents Tina Adams and Lisa Collins.
Four counties—Mingo, Wyoming, Logan, and McDowell —ended up walking out on February 2 and rallying at the capitol. Virtually overnight, West Virginia was set politically ablaze. “After that first walkout, everything immediately blew up,” recalls Ashlea Bassham. In the words of another teacher, Carrena Rouse, “The tipping point came from the south.” As Endicott had anticipated, their action sparked the flammable material gathered over the preceding months by O’Neal, Comer, and the other United moderators.
Endicott sums up this political dialectic: “We knew that unity was the keystone. So without the Facebook page I don’t think you’d have ended up with ‘55 Strong.’ However, without the Facebook page you’d still have ended up with February 2, because we organized that action on our own, outside that broader statewide dynamic. And February 2 was such a turning point—we fired them up.”
The Strike
After February 2, the die was cast. Walk-ins and other school-site buildup actions expanded exponentially in all counties. Organizers called for another round of one-day walkouts in mid February, with seven counties participating. By this time, the upsurge had grown so large that it superseded the organizational capacity of West Virginia’s militant minority.
In ever-increasing numbers, rank and filers beseeched their unions to call a statewide strike vote. After a few days of continued discussion, the leaders of the AFT-WV, WVEA, and West Virginia School Service Personnel Association (WVSSPA) responded positively. Leaning on their significant organizational infrastructure and a newly invigorated membership, the unions jointly coordinated strike authorization votes in every school during mid-February. Organized labor’s tremendous power was beginning to be tapped.
Despite the state’s attempts to head off a work stoppage by making significant concessions—among them freezing PEIA costs and repealing bills that introduced charters, undermined seniority, and eliminated automatic union dues deductions—the vote results showed overwhelming statewide support for a strike. Roughly 80 percent of educators statewide voted yes, and the yes votes were nearly unanimous in schools with a strong union presence. At the end of a massive and rainy February 17 union-led rally in front of the capitol, WVEA and AFT-WV presidents Dale Lee and Christine Campbell announced that all school employees would be walking out the following Thursday and Friday, February 22 and 23.
By taking responsibility for the authorization votes and the strike, West Virginia’s union officials had finally placed themselves at the head of the upsurge. The unions’ significant financial, organizational, and political resources were immediately deployed to make the action a success. Militant organizers in Mingo and around the United page saw this as a very positive development, since they had never aspired to substitute themselves for their unions. At the same time, the school-site votes had made it clear that the strike’s legitimacy and authority should rest ultimately on the workers’ democratic decisions. This set an important precedent—one that would later come into play when strikers defied the labor officialdom’s premature decision to call off the strike.
Regarding the strikes’ health care demands, however, West Virginia’s militant minority proved too weak to win. Everybody was in favor of a permanent “fix” to PEIA, but what exactly this entailed—and how it would be paid for—was left unspecified by union leaders. The United moderators, with the help of State Senator Richard Ojeda, had succeeded in widely disseminating the proposal to raise West Virginia’s natural gas severance tax. Yet this had not been formally adopted as a demand for the strike. Jay O’Neal explains: “From October onwards, we had been arguing that the only solution was progressive taxation. But the union stuck with its stance that ‘it’s not our job to figure out where to come up with money.’ We knew that this was a problematic line because if the solution was left up to our politicians, they’d try to screw us.”
In O’Neal’s view, these ongoing ambiguities concerning how to fix PEIA were directly related to the organizational limitations of West Virginia’s militant rank-and-filers: “Honestly, my main regret of the strike is that we didn’t have a strong statewide structure of like-minded educators, through which we could have formulated and won things like a clear set of demands, particularly around taxing the rich and corporations. We moderators were always on the phone with each other, and we talked about demands—but from January onwards we just got so busy and overwhelmed, we weren’t able to really push this through.”
The rank and file may not have been strong enough to push through a progressive PEIA fix, but they did save the day by ignoring their union leaders’ premature commands to return to work on the evening of Tuesday, February 27.
When I spoke with AFT-WV President Christine Campbell after the strike, she was open about acknowledging this: “We should have given ourselves processing time, to know where the members were at. And, honestly, when we went out to the crowd on the steps to make that announcement, we just didn’t know. So if I could take back one day in my last six years of being union president, it would be that Tuesday. But I’m grateful to the membership for deciding to stay out.”
Together with thousands of their coworkers, West Virginia’s militant minority immediately began agitating Tuesday night to keep the strike going. After the union announcement from the steps, Matt McCormick posted the following definition on the United page: “Just FYI: ‘A wildcat strike action, often referred to as a wildcat strike, is a strike action undertaken by unionized workers without union leadership’s authorization, support, or approval.’” Over the next twenty-four hours, the Facebook group was inundated with comments, questions, and updates. Tanya Asleson recalled that “everybody was on the United page—that’s how we could tell that most people weren’t ready to go back.”
In-person gatherings on Wednesday were also critical. The scene at the capitol that morning was absolute chaos—nobody knew what was going on and rumors were flying that the governor had resigned. Katie Endicott relates how Mingo County educators intervened: “Everybody was coming up to us asking, ‘What’s Mingo doing?’ We explained that we weren’t going back, we didn’t care what Dale or Christine had agreed to. We didn’t know if our superintendents would call off school, but it didn’t matter—we weren’t cooling off.”
At 1:00 p.m., Charleston educators and union representatives packed into a church down the block to deliberate. The room was far past capacity, with hundreds of people crammed into the pews and aisles. Kanawha County’s AFT-WV president, Fred Albert, opened the meeting with a prayer along the following lines: “Dear God in heaven, give all of us during this trying time the guidance, clearheadedness, and strength to trust in our union leadership in guiding us through this storm.”
If Albert believed that this prayer was going to shield the union leadership from criticism, he had badly miscalculated. County union presidents tried their best to make a case for the deal, but they received nothing but heckling from the crowd, prompting the beleaguered AFT-WV president to storm out in anger. From her perch next to the podium, Emily Comer soon after texted the following update to a fellow organizer: “This guy from WVEA who looks like a basketball coach is telling us we need to go back in to protect us from an injunction. People are SHOUTING.”
In an interview the following day, Jay O’Neal told me that the meeting “got really heated, quick. I think teachers let out their frustration. Honestly, I was worried that the meeting might spiral out of control. But then a teacher from the floor spoke up and said: ‘We want to vote, we want to decide when to go back in.’ This really expressed where people are at.” To their credit, Kanawha’s local union leaders eventually apologized and ceded to their ranks’ desire to democratically decide on whether to stay out.
In Kanawha, as in counties across West Virginia, educators that afternoon and evening voted overwhelmingly to continue the strike. Unconvinced that superintendents would respect their decision, many educators also began planning hard picket lines, beginning at four the next morning, to physically prevent any attempts to open the schools with scabs. Emily Comer, who by this time was functioning as de facto building rep, recalls that “frantically organizing those pickets was definitely the most terrifying moment of the strike—I think it was actually the most scared shitless I’ve ever been in my life.” In counties across the state, other organizers undertook similar preparations.
Because West Virginia’s radical organizers were swimming with the political tide during this critical juncture, it’s difficult to measure their immediate impact on the wildcat. Most educators were so fired up, mobilized, and organized by this point that defiance of the union leadership would probably have occurred even without concerted efforts by the militants.
Developments in the debate over the PEIA health care program point to the challenges West Virginia’s radicals faced in helping guide the tempest. On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the main reason given by rank and filers for rejecting the deal was that the governor had promised only a task force, rather than a lasting fix, for PEIA. Yet by Thursday, most educators had changed their tune: the strike, they now argued, had to continue until the agreement between the union leaders and Governor Jim Justice was signed into law.
There were various reasons for this evolution. Most importantly, after Republican Senate leader Mitch Carmichael rejected the deal on Wednesday, many educators concluded that it was necessary to win the deal first and a PEIA fix later. But there were also other factors at play, including the United moderators’ continued abstention from a struggle around demands. Comer explained that “staying out on strike for a PEIA fix would have meant a simultaneous fight versus the union leadership and the state, and honestly we didn’t feel we were strong enough for that.”
O’Neal makes a similar point: “Because the strike didn’t have clearer demands from the beginning—particularly on progressive taxation to fix PEIA—it made it hard not to accept what we were given in the deal. In hindsight, maybe we could have tried to push for an independent task force (instead of one handpicked by the legislature), but particularly given how chaotic things were on Wednesday, I’m not sure we were sufficiently organized to pull that off.”
That this deferral on a PEIA fix was the strike’s major limitation shows how high expectations had been raised in the course of struggle. By this time, educators had already forced politicians to back down from the proposed health insurance changes that had initially fueled the movement, as well as the bills introducing charters, attacking seniority, and instituting anti-union “payroll protection.” When the Republican Senate caved on Tuesday, March 6, by giving an across-the-board 5 percent raise to all public employees, the educators’ ecstatic response was well warranted.
Taking a step back, it’s evident that the influence of West Virginia’s militant minority evolved over time. Their role was greatest in the first four months of the struggle, during which they took the lead on promoting mass actions, building statewide public employee unity, and overcoming the hesitations of top union officials. Once the movement exploded after February 2, and the union officialdom stepped into leadership, the relative importance of organized radicals receded somewhat, in part because the movement as a whole became so militant.
Like most successful labor struggles, West Virginia’s strike arose from the self-activity of countless workers combined with the conscious interventions of experienced organizers. One individual who understood this better than most was WVEA President Dale Lee. During the spontaneous victory celebration on the morning of Tuesday, March 6—as throngs of educators inside the capitol embraced and cried from joy—Lee unexpectedly walked up to Emily Comer, shook her hand, and said in a low voice: “You did this.” Whether this was meant as praise or a reprimand was left unclear. Either way, Lee was right that the rank and file—with the help of its most tireless and fiery activists—had made history.
Oklahoma’s Missing Militants
Few things are more dangerous to the ruling class than the inspiring precedent of a successful labor action. After West Virginia, political expectations were raised virtually overnight; educators all across the country began to realize that it was possible not only to fight, but to win. Mickey Miller notes how the mood among Oklahoman educators was transformed: “Oklahoma teachers have felt hopeless and powerless for years. So when I first heard about West Virginia, I didn’t think it would spill over for us. But teachers here started closely watching the strike. They began saying, ‘Wait a second, they did it there, they were able to get all counties to go out. Why can’t we do that here?’”
At most times, the conscious intervention of radicals or experienced organizers is required to transmit lessons from organized labor’s past into today’s movements. But because West Virginia’s successful strike had taken place so recently and was so widely publicized over social media, some of its key political takeaways diffused widely in Oklahoma, even in the absence of a militant minority.
West Virginia was a powerful inspiration, but it had also made winning look a little too easy to outsiders. Many educators seemed to get the impression that all you needed for a successful strike was a lot of anger and a Facebook group. Lost in the breezy national media reports were the months of organizing—and the political strategies that informed these activities—that made West Virginia’s success possible. As we will see, the strategies and tactics through which West Virginia educators and their unions came out on top remained hazy for the rank-and-file activists that initiated Oklahoma’s work stoppage.
The main limitation of Oklahoma’s strike—and its main point of divergence from West Virginia and Arizona—did not concern the amount of pay won from the state. Hoping to avert an imminent work stoppage that had been called for April 2, the legislature on March 29 passed a revenue bill that promised to give teachers a raise of roughly $6,000, or about 15 percent. This was a major achievement, particularly in a state that had not increased taxes a single time since 1990. The adopted revenue bill, however, included only minimal funding increases for schools, and a modest raise for support staff and state employees. Unlike in West Virginia and Arizona, the work stoppage itself was unable to wrest any added concessions from the government.
Moreover, Oklahoma’s walkout made few gains in terms of building up the collective organization or self-confidence of working people. These organizational weaknesses—culminating in the implosion of the work stoppage in mid April—can to a great extent be traced back to the limitations of Oklahoma educators’ contending leaderships, both on the union and grassroots levels. By the time the walkout ended, teachers were hardly more organized than they had been at the beginning of the movement; moreover, a feeling of demoralization was pervasive.
If West Virginia provides a positive example of the importance of a militant minority, Oklahoma’s experience shows what can happen in the absence of such a layer of experienced radical organizers. Though a new socialist movement arose in Oklahoma following the Sanders campaign, none of its members were educators—in marked contrast with those in West Virginia and Arizona. As we’ll see below, the ensuing political vacuum among Oklahoma’s rank and file was subsequently filled by individuals with no organizing experience and no connections to the unions.
The First Steps
All regions of this country have their own rich traditions of radicalism, though much of this history has been buried. It’s a little-known fact that a century ago, Oklahoma had the strongest Socialist Party in the country. It was not until the state’s deployment of vicious repression during World War I that it was finally able to destroy Oklahoma’s mass socialist movement. In 1925, seeking a complete eradication of the leftist legacy, political leaders replaced Oklahoma’s red state flag because it was too associated with working-class radicalism. Only the state motto, “Labor conquers all,” remained as an artifact of Oklahoma’s radical roots.
The present-day rebirth of a socialist movement in Oklahoma can be traced to February 28, 2016. On that Sunday afternoon, Bernie Sanders electrified a rally of over 6,000 in Oklahoma City. “We have a message that speaks to working-class people,” Sanders declared. “Whether you’re conservative, whether you are progressive, you understand we’re in a rigged economy, where ordinary Americans work longer hours for low wages and almost all new income and wealth is going to the top 1 percent.”3
As in West Virginia, Sanders dominated the 2016 primary. Xavier Doolittle, a member of DSA in Tulsa, recalls the campaign’s catalyzing effect on the state: “Bernie showed how radical Oklahoma was under the surface. Those rallies when he came really inspired and electrified people. He won the Democratic primary by a huge margin—and he gave an outlet to the deep dissatisfaction that existed with the status quo. People who had been isolated now felt confident and mobilized.”
Since 2016, Oklahoma’s socialist organizations have grown steadily. Indeed, by early 2018 the number of organized socialists in the Sooner State was similar to that in West Virginia. But there was one big difference: none of these Oklahoman DSAers had jobs in the schools. For this reason, they were unable to transmit class politics or organizing know-how into Oklahoma’s education movement, either during the lead-up to the walkout or once it had begun, and they were limited to providing outside support.
After West Virginia’s strike erupted, two separate rank-and-file initiatives sought to give expression to Oklahoma educators’ growing desire for action. The first was Oklahoma Teachers United (OTU), a Facebook page driven by Tulsa teacher Larry Cagle. Founded in 2017, OTU had attempted to build support for some localized sickouts by Tulsa teachers in early 2018. But the group had only a few visitors until West Virginia’s strike caught the country’s attention by going wildcat on February 28.
The second, and much more influential, Facebook page was Oklahoma Teacher Walkout—The Time Is Now! (TTN), created on February 28 by Stillwater teacher Alberto Morejon. Within hours, the membership of TTN had shot up to 18,000—and in a matter of weeks, it had become Oklahoma’s most influential rank-and-file hub, with over 70,000 members.
Focused on the same public education demands and the same action proposals, TTN and OTU were differentiated more by style than by politics. Politically, both of their founders were somewhat eclectic: neither had any previous organizing experience, neither were members of the union, and neither raised demands around progressive taxation. Though he radicalized over the course of the movement, initially Cagle proudly announced to all that he was a “fiscal conservative.” For his part, Morejon was a registered Republican for whom party labels mattered less than a demonstrated commitment to supporting teachers and improving Oklahoma’s public schools.
Both pages also consciously sought to spread and implement what they saw as the key lessons of West Virginia. As Morejon explained to me, “We learned a lot from West Virginia; it set a precedent.” Above all, each page stressed that a walkout was necessary and that it would only come about through the independent initiative of Oklahoma teachers.
However, the two Facebook pages differed substantially in tone. OTU, like Cagle himself, was brash. For example, he declared to the press on March 2: “If we strike, I double dare you to fire us. We’ll just go to Texas; they’re looking for new teachers.”4 This bravado endeared OTU to some of the most fired-up teachers, but it also ruffled a lot of feathers in a state known for its politeness, and in a workforce that prides itself on professionalism. Smaller questions also played a role in the eventual relegation of OTU to second fiddle—educators, for example, periodically complained of the moderators’ use of profanity and spelling errors. As one teacher exclaimed on March 7, “Profanity is not necessary to make a point!”
In contrast, TTN’s widespread popularity reflected Morejon’s more positive, professional, and matter-of-fact style. Oklahoma teachers came to trust Morejon as an honest individual and as a leader. In contrast to West Virginia’s United page, only Morejon could make posts to his group—others could only respond to polls or make comments under his posts. A tightly moderated Facebook page had the major benefit of being much easier to follow than West Virginia’s page, which was often overwhelmed by a flurry of posts on various topics. Nevertheless, the fact that TTN was unabashedly Morejon’s project was not conducive to collective strate-gizing or organizing.
On the whole, Cagle and Morejon’s political similarities outweighed their differences. Both seized the moment and pushed for bold action. Yet their lack of organizing experience had important consequences for the movement. So too did their disconnect from the Oklahoma Education Association (OEA)—the state’s the main union, representing roughly 40 percent of school employees.5
The union’s controversial decision to end April’s walkout after nine days has cast a long shadow. But it’s necessary to underline that OEA shared the same political and tactical approach of its counterparts in West Virginia and Arizona. For many years now, it has been focused on fighting for better pay and more school funding, primarily through lobbying and electoral campaigns. Though these efforts have been generally unsuccessful, they did succeed in fending off some of the worst attacks and in keeping the crisis of education firmly in the public eye.
If anything, the depth of the state’s education woes made OEA somewhat more proactive about supporting a walkout than were its labor counterparts in West Virginia and Arizona. By early 2018, Oklahoma’s union leaders had already been discussing the possibility of organizing a walkout for close to a year. That such plans for a potential job action were not made public, however, reflected both the prevailing hesitation of the OEA leadership to pivot toward mass action, as well as its ongoing difficulties in communication with its members and the public. The Republican dominance of state governance—a big difference from 1990, the year of the last teachers’ strike in Oklahoma—considerably lowered the officialdom’s expectations in what a job action might realistically be able to achieve. For these reasons, OEA did not initiate the type of systematic organizing drive usually necessary to prepare for a successful strike.
The first real initiative for a job action came from the grass roots. In the summer of 2017, a group of teachers in the small town of Bartlesville started pushing for a statewide walkout around pay and funding. After the February 12, 2018, legislative failure of the most recent bipartisan education funding plan, these teachers’ idea for action was floated by Bartlesville’s supportive young superintendent, Chuck McCauley. He sent out a poll asking how many of his fellow superintendents and school boards across the state would support a teacher walkout.
With talk of a work stoppage beginning to percolate, OEA President Alicia Priest jumped in. On February 19, she announced to the press: “When we walk out, it is for our kids. And, we’ve got to do better. And, so, it may be time again soon.” Four days later, OEA posted the following poll to its Facebook page: “The Oklahoma Legislature has repeatedly failed to adequately fund education or fund pay raises for teachers and education support professionals. Is it time for a work action?”
This post gives a good sense of OEA’s stance on the eve of the red state revolt. Yet it wasn’t widely publicized, nor was it a significant spur to the eventual walkout. Nevertheless, with a willing union, two viral Facebook groups, and the inspiring example of West Virginia, it seemed in the first week of March as if the stars were aligning for a powerful strike in Oklahoma.
The Date Debate
Events moved extremely quickly from this point, and talk of a walkout dominated the press and school sites from March 1 onward. Indeed, West Virginia’s strike had not even ended before Oklahoma’s movement was plunged into a fractious internal debate that would have a decisive impact on the course of its movement. In the span of a few chaotic days, pivotal decisions were taken that set into motion the walkout’s key organizational failures.
Conflict centered around the question of what date the work stoppage should begin. Morejon and Cagle wanted April 2; OEA initially wanted the first week of May. Though many Oklahoma educators, as well as numerous leftists across the country, celebrated the eventual victory of the rank and file’s date, it turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory.
The proposal for April 2 had been generated in private discussions between Morejon and Bartlesville superintendent McCauley. Since McCauley didn’t have the reach or inclination to organize a mass mobilization, agitating for the date had depended entirely on the grassroots Facebook leaders. On March 3, Morejon had blasted the April 2 date out to his group and received an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response. While it had initially floated even earlier dates for a strike starting in March, ultimately Cagle’s OTU also fought for April 2.
Significantly, neither Morejon nor Cagle raised the perspective that the decision to stop work should be voted on at school by all employees—each moderator, instead, relied on Facebook comments and periodic online polls of their groups to gauge interest in a strike. Nor did OTU or TTN argue during these crucial first days that the walkout should be organized through, or in close collaboration with, OEA—of which neither Morejon nor Cagle were members.
Instead, their early focus was on having teachers reach out to superintendents and work with them directly. As Morejon announced on March 2: “The goal is to allow superintendents and school board members to discuss the possibility of a school shutdown/suspension until something is done … I will be organizing a day next week where everyone in this group will email their districts superintendent and school board members to ask them where they stand on this issue.” On March 4, Cagle’s OTU similarly posted that it was “in discussions with superintendents from across the state in hopes of unifying our efforts so there is [a] single voice representing teachers.”
In the early-March rush of excitement, the problematic implications of this approach were appreciated by few teachers. But without school-site votes to decide on a work stoppage, it remained unclear who had the ultimate authority to start or stop the action. As the course of the walkout would later demonstrate, the absence of such votes resulted in a very different relationship of forces between employees and superintendents—and between rank-and-filers and top union officials.
Looking back at this issue months later, educator Stephanie Price made the following self-critique: “I honestly feel like we gave too much power to the districts to determine our plan for us—we were basically waiting for our superintendents to give us permission to walk out. We allowed ourselves to sit back and wait to until we were told, ‘Yes, you’re allowed to walk out.’ We should have just said, ‘We’re doing this.’”
To be sure, organizing independently of—and if necessary, against—superintendents would have subjected educators to more legal risks than a district-sanctioned walkout. But one of the key lessons of West Virginia was precisely that if you have the numbers, it’s possible to break anti-democratic labor laws and win.
Convincing Oklahoma educators—and pressuring the union—to take such a risk, however, would have required a concerted effort on the part of grassroots leaders. It would have also taken a considerable amount of time for organizers to test school employees’ strike readiness—particularly support staff, for whom a walkout necessarily entailed greater financial and job-security risks. There were certainly many thousands of teachers on the two Facebook pages who were already eager to strike at the soonest possible date. But that was still only a fraction of the total workforce. Neither TTN or OTU seem to have perceived any urgent need to deepen the movement’s organization at school sites or in more conservative towns before setting a date for a walkout. Unfortunately, experience would soon demonstrate that the types of personal-organizational relationships and difficult political conversations necessary for establishing real workplace power can’t be forged solely through Facebook.
OEA shared some of these same strategic limitations—including a hesitancy to move beyond organizing a legal, superintendent-sanctioned walkout. But union leaders also perceived that building for a successful work stoppage required more on-the-ground efforts and more time than the four weeks projected by Morejon and Cagle. “That was just too soon for a successful job action,” recalls Amanda Ewing, associate executive director of the OEA. “Alberto was new to politics and he had absolutely no conception of the amount of work, and amount of time, it takes to make something like this happen. Basically, we thought that it’d be impossible to get to the point of a real strike by April 2. Having a date in the first week of May would have given us the ability to have really laid the groundwork for support, and to have bolstered our members’ courage to walk.”
There were additional tactical reasons why the OEA considered a later date to be preferable. First, because federal funding is contingent upon completion of standardized tests, walking out after mid-April state testing would avoid a situation in which teachers could be pressured to call off the strike. Second, the legislative session ended in late May. Ewing explains: “We wanted to choose a date so that we could stay out until the end of the legislative session or the end of the school year if necessary. With our initial proposed date of early May, we knew might have to stay out for at least four weeks. The plan was to stay out, if necessary, until the end—but to do that, starting in April was just too long of an ask to make of educators. You’d have to potentially stay out for eight weeks to hold the politicians’ feet to the fire.”
On March 5, OEA President Alicia Priest and Executive Director David DuVall reached out to Cagle and Morejon to see if they would consider the possibility of working together around a later date. As a compromise, OEA changed its proposal to April 23.
Ewing notes the uneven success of the union’s conciliatory efforts: “In the hopes of collaboration we reached out to both groups—at various points. Our president and director called Larry early on, when things started moving very quickly and we were trying to figure out the best date for the walkout and how to get people working together. But that conversation quickly devolved into Larry screaming, ‘You work for me!’ to us, even though he’s not even a member of OEA. We came away with the impression that he wasn’t someone we could work with—plus it was becoming clearer to us that though he was loud, he didn’t really have the capacity to mobilize people.”
For his part, Cagle saw OTU’s intransigence as analogous to the militancy of West Virginia rank and filers. But whereas radicals in the Mountain State had openly identified with the union and called positively on its leadership to listen to the ranks, Cagle took a more strident approach. Looking back at the course of the movement, Cagle later acknowledged, “I now know that I must be a leader within the union to help create the change I desire.”
OEA’s conversation with Morejon was more cordial. As he recalls, “My whole thing was, I didn’t want to cause any divisions. I spoke with the union and, to be honest, for a while there I was willing to do whatever the union wanted to about the date.” On March 6, he posted a note vaguely indicating an openness to the April 23 compromise. But he didn’t make a case to his followers in favor of moving to a later date—and, given the excitement already generated for April 2, at this point it would have taken a concerted push by Morejon to have convinced riled-up educators of the benefits of a slower approach. Instead, Morejon posted soon after: “This Group showed OEA that April 23rd was too late. They listened to us!”
Eventually, OEA realized that it had no choice but to cede to the pressure for April 2. “We knew we’d look ridiculous changing the date,” explains Ewing. “But we decided: ‘It’s going to happen with or without us, so we need to help.’” In a widely publicized March 7 video message, Alicia Priest announced that the union was calling for statewide school closures “beginning April 2—we will be at the capitol until a solution is passed and signed by the governor … Our members are ready to act now, so we are accelerating our strategy.”
The Strike
The wind was at the backs of Oklahoma educators, but three weeks was not a lot of time to build for a work stoppage. It didn’t help that the forces pushing for the walkout were doing so largely in isolation from each other. Neither Cagle nor Morejon sought to merge their groups or coordinate their activities, and relations between OTU and OEA only continued to worsen over the course of March.
In comparison with OTU, there was somewhat more unity between Morejon and the union, at least at first. In a good faith OEA effort to build collaboration, Morejon had received an invitation, which he accepted, to speak at the joint press conference to announce the April 2 walkout. But beyond that, they did little to unify their efforts and messaging. When I later asked Morejon and OEA leaders about the reasons for this ongoing disunity, each pinned the blame on the other side, charging their rivals with an unwillingness to cede control and leadership over the movement. Perhaps both were partially right. The date debate had crystallized a mutual suspicion, rooted at least partially in an underlying divide between nonunionized workers and the OEA.
Above all, their lack of coordination reflected the slanted organizational relationship of forces. Despite its concession in the April 2 debates, the OEA did not feel compelled to coordinate walkout organizing, because neither OTU nor TTN was attempting to work proactively within the union (as in West Virginia), or to build an independent organizational base (like in Arizona). When I asked why they hadn’t coordinated more, one union staffer (who asked to remain anonymous) argued, “Basically, the union saw that though the Facebook groups were popular, they weren’t doing real organizational groundwork for the walkout.”
In the lead-up to April 2, Oklahoma’s two competing Facebook pages did their best to generate enthusiasm for the work stoppage. Largely through digital agitation, they helped spark a flurry of local actions to get the word out to parents and community members, and to coordinate with superintendents. Morejon’s Facebook group continued its upward ascent in traffic. But little systematic in-person organizing was attempted at school sites or beyond.
To many rank-and-file teachers, it seemed like the growing tide of social media–induced mobilization would be sufficient to make the Republicans concede all along the line. Stephanie Price later reflected on this question: “At the time, it felt like we were moving forward, but looking back I feel like we were far less organized than the other states that struck, Arizona in particular. When I eventually found out that they had liaisons at every school, it made me wonder how effective we could have been had we built that kind of organization from the start in our strike process.”
The first test of strength for the movement came on Wednesday, March 26, when the state legislature passed the funding bill HB 1010xx in a last-ditch effort to head off the imminent walkout. This was a significant win for teachers; had it not been for the credible strike threat, there’s no way that the Republican legislature would have raised taxes or conceded such a large raise. But, like in West Virginia and Arizona, concessions by politicians on the eve of the walkout proved to be insufficient to head off the grassroots upsurge. Overwhelmingly, Oklahoma educators were adamant about sticking with their planned work stoppage in order to win better school funding.
After HB 1010xx, however, both the superintendents and OEA began to waver. Across the state, superintendents showered praise on the bill, and for the first time, they began framing April 2 as a one-day rally only. OEA’s response to HB 1010xx was also somewhat equivocal. On Wednesday evening, the union thanked the legislature and declared that the “historic” bill was “major progress.” But it added that there is “still work to do to get this legislature to invest more in our classrooms. That work will continue Monday when educators descend on the Capitol.” With this politically adroit move, the union pivoted away from a focus on pay demands by foregrounding the fight for funding.
Initially, OEA’s leadership, like many superintendents, appeared to be trying to avoid an ongoing strike by transforming April 2 into a one-off action, after which teachers would return to work. The unattained demands could then be fought for through less disruptive means. But it was also clear that union leaders didn’t trust the legislature, and that they were worried about getting overtaken again by the rank and file. Indeed, Morejon’s response to HB 1010xx was uncompromising. On Thursday, he insisted that the bill was “not enough to prevent the walkout” and posted the following call to arms: “We teachers control our destiny! We have come too far to accept this offer that does nothing but put a bandaid on a severe wound.”
The union leadership quickly stiffened its spine. In a new video update on the eve of the walkout, Priest declared, “We will stand with our members as long as our members want.” By Monday, April 2, OEA appeared to have decided to stay out for at least several days to pressure the legislature to make further concessions.
Whatever OEA’s limitations, it is hard to imagine the movement reaching the point it did without their active support. It put serious organizational and financial resources toward the walkout. And it frequently pushed hard for big turnouts at the capitol, as did Morejon.
Perhaps the most incredible aspect of the walkout was its massive size, given Oklahoma’s weak labor organizations and traditions—a limitation compounded by the absence of any systematic workplace organizational buildup during March. One certainly cannot attribute the divergence of Oklahoma’s movement from West Virginia and Arizona to lower levels of educator militancy or mobilization.
Tens of thousands of teachers, plus a sizable number of public employees, demonstrated in the cold on Monday, April 2—a far larger crowd than at any of West Virginia’s rallies. That Monday evening, some teachers privately worried that turnout in the coming days might decline. Amazingly, the opposite occurred: Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s numbers were each greater than the day before. And Monday, April 9, was the largest action yet, with an estimated 50,000 at the capitol. At the walkout’s height, about half a million students—roughly 70 percent of the state total—were out of school.
These massive turnouts took place despite OEA’s rather-unclear stance on funding demands and next steps. Though OEA leaders were personally in favor of progressive taxation, the union’s actual policy proposals remained scattershot. Morejon recalls that “it seemed like every day OEA was changing its demands—it was really confusing and teachers were getting upset.”
Amanda Ewing provided her take on OEA’s approach: “A lot of what we were doing was focused on logistics: how to set up parking, how to get people inside the capitol, setting up Porta Potties, all that. But my main regret is that we could have communicated better. This was true in general, but particularly for nonmembers: we basically didn’t have an infrastructure to communicate with non–OEA members.”
Underlying these difficulties, however, was OEA’s reluctance to fight for a clear platform on progressive taxation—or to encourage educators to stay out until their funding demands were met. Morejon’s post on Thursday, April 5, went viral: “Does OEA want us to give up so they can say … ‘Well we at OEA tried’? Are the Legislators waiting us out, or is OEA waiting us out? When is the last time OEA clearly announced what would end this walkout without being extremely vague?”
Throughout the entirety of the work stoppage, Morejon remained by far the most influential force encouraging teachers to stay out until their demands were met. In contrast, in a video message on Tuesday, April 10, Alicia Priest began setting the stage for a pivot to the November elections: “If we’ve learned anything during this walkout, it’s that we can’t afford to continue to elect candidates that are dismissive of the needs of our students.”
Like their counterparts in West Virginia and Arizona, OEA leaders tended to hold, and publicly project, low expectations about what could be won from a Republican legislature. It often felt as if union officials were treating these work stoppages as massive ongoing lobby days, rather than as strikes meant to force the other side to concede by creating and deepening a social crisis.
Nick Singer, who was asked by OEA to work as the capitol action’s DJ, notes his frustration: “I kept on telling the OEA folks I knew, ‘It’s necessary to change the game, we’ve got to think outside the box.’ Some were sympathetic, but they weren’t used to bold, or deep, organizing—and they were getting a lot of bad advice and pressure from the staffers the NEA had flown in, who kept on insisting that it wasn’t possible to win anything more and that it was necessary to wrap things up. So instead of redefining what was possible, instead of changing the relationship of forces through a compelling message of taxing the rich and corporations and an escalation of tactics (for example, calling on public sector workers to join in), OEA leaders just seemed to let the strike die with a whimper.”
The political strategies of OEA and NEA officials were not the only factor weakening the walkout. Morejon was a celebrity among educators at the capitol, yet neither he nor OTU had any significant ground game or organizational presence. Once people were physically assembled together en masse, the limitations of an infrastructure based purely on Facebook became more glaring.
The lack of participation by service personnel was another significant weakness. Price noted that “this really hurt the walkout, because think about how many paras and support staff there are in Oklahoma—that’s a huge loss of numbers. And in terms of solidarity, not having everyone participate in the action set up a sort of an invisible barrier between us.”
Above all, the movement’s ongoing reliance on a strategic bloc with district administrators did not prepare teachers for what would happen after April 2, when their erstwhile allies began pulling back. Though initially most superintendents and school boards remained publicly supportive of the walkout, behind the scenes they were, to quote Singer, “really seriously undermining the action—honestly, they were the biggest cowards.” By the end of week one, with state testing looming, district leaders—including presumed allies like Bartlesville’s Chuck McCauley—began pressuring employees to return to work. Ewing notes, “By having chosen to start on April 2, we created a timing risk that people hadn’t fully contemplated.”
Resistance to these pressures was possible—indeed, teachers in districts like Moore fought hard to stay out. But without strong workplace organizations, or the political precedent and authority generated by a rank-and-file strike vote, this task proved to be exceedingly difficult.
By Thursday, April 12, most urban districts remained out, and the public remained more supportive than ever, with approval ratings of over 70 percent. But in the absence of clear leadership from OEA or an organized effort from below, crowd numbers at the capitol were beginning to decline. So was momentum. The work stoppage had gone on nine days, the same length as in West Virginia, and Republican lawmakers still showed no signs of budging.
It was in this context that OEA officials, at a Thursday-evening press conference, abruptly called off the walkout. Nominally, they made the decision on the basis of a poll OEA sent to its members the preceding Monday. But that vaguely worded survey hadn’t specifically asked educators whether they wanted to end the walkout—and moreover, many union members, not to mention the majority of educators, had not received it.
Teachers across Oklahoma were outraged at OEA leaders. Hundreds dropped their dues, and incensed teachers immediately inundated social media with denunciations of OEA for “betraying” and “selling [them] out.” One of the more measured responses on April 12 came from teacher Gabrielle Price, who posted: “I’m upset, I’m tired, I’m frustrated. I was used, I was thrown under the bus, and I was misrepresented.” She expressed the sentiments of many in a tear-filled video post that went viral:
I appreciate OEA. They have provided shuttles, bathrooms, they have provided awesome things for us, which is great. However … I didn’t get a poll [to go back]. I was never asked on whether or not I thought the walkout should continue. There aren’t a ton of union members, but I am a member and I was never asked about ending the walkout … This was a teacher-led walkout. This was not any organization’s walkout. This was not OEA’s decision for us to go fight. This was our decision.
It’s hard to know for certain whether it would still have been possible, as of April 12, to turn around the walkout’s momentum. Organizationally, the movement was already relatively weak. Yet the large school districts remained shut, and thousands of teachers, including the ever-vocal Morejon, remained convinced that it was still possible for the walkout to win.
Others, like Nick Singer, felt that the union should have stuck it out past April 12, even if there was no guarantee more concessions would be won. In his opinion, deepening and consolidating the movement’s gains regarding mass organization and political consciousness didn’t hinge on winning more state funding: “OEA leaders misplayed their hand. Who knows whether we could have forced the Republicans to back down, but the union definitely could have stayed out at least another week by highlighting a clear progressive funding proposal—like raising the capitol gains tax—and mobilizing hard for teachers to fight for it. We could have made the Republican leadership die on the hill publicly defending an inequitable tax structure to the death. And then, even if we didn’t win, at least teachers would have been mad at the Republicans instead of the union. If we had gone out fighting, OEA and the movement would have come out a lot stronger.”
On Friday, April 13, thousands of teachers scrambled to keep the walkout going. As Morejon put it, “The grassroots effort that started the walkout had to continue it.” In an important move toward in-person organizing—one that would have been more effective weeks earlier—he called a mass meeting of teachers that Friday to determine how to move forward. Thousands crowded into the capitol to collectively discuss next steps. For a brief moment, it seemed like Oklahoma teachers might go wildcat, like those in West Virginia. But the hastily assembled ranks didn’t have the organizational capacity to overcome the decision of OEA’s leaders. By the following Monday, the walkout had petered out, though many individual teachers called in sick, and hundreds of schools began sending small delegations to the capitol.
Angered by the failure of the walkout to fulfill its potential, many educators concluded, defensibly, that the struggle could have advanced further had it been led differently. As Gabrielle Price put it: “In a movement this large, leadership is necessary. Unfortunately, the management that rose up was not the leadership we had hoped for.”
The main problem, as I’ve tried to show, wasn’t the approach of OEA officials, per se. West Virginia, and later Arizona, showed that the internal dynamics of the strikes hinged, above all, on the role of the rank and file. Oklahoma’s insurgent teachers, however, found themselves insufficiently organized to overcome the hesitancy of their union leaders. Had the ranks been stronger, OEA would likely have been pushed to continue to support the upsurge.
Nor would it be fair to pin the blame on Morejon and Cagle. As individuals lacking the benefit of any previous organizing experience, they did the best they could to push things forward, and they stuck their necks out, often at great personal cost. Morejon’s efforts, in particular, played a critical role in raising educators’ desire to fight and in forcing Republican lawmakers to grant teachers a historic pay raise.
What was missing in Oklahoma was a team of like-minded grassroots militants, armed with activist know-how, class struggle politics, and an orientation toward working within the unions to push them forward. Indeed, this was one of the main lessons learned by DSA members in Tulsa and Oklahoma City. “The experience of our walkout really put into urgent focus for me that socialists can’t effectively raise class consciousness from the outside,” explains DSA organizer Xavier Doolittle. In the hopes of being better placed to help guide the Sooner State’s next round of labor militancy, he decided in the wake of the walkout to become a teacher: “I saw that if you’re not on the shop floor, if you’re not an educator in public education, it’s hard to be a credible messenger to workers in struggle. During the walkout, we tried our best to help provide solidarity from the outside, but it’s just not the same as organizing alongside your coworkers.”
Doolittle’s confidence in the potential power of radical workplace organizers was not misplaced. Arizona’s strike, the most remarkable work stoppage of the entire wave, would soon make this clear.
Arizona’s Militant Minority
Few states in the United States have been more inhospitable to labor and the Left than Arizona. As Arizona Educators United leader Rebecca Garelli notes, “Arizona is ground zero for Koch brothers money, ground zero for charters, ground zero for vouchers, ground zero for privatization. We’re in the thick of it, and we’re up against a massive wall. I knew it existed, but it’s greater than I ever imagined.”
Precisely for this reason, the unexpected success of Arizona’s 2018 mass strike serves as a perfect test case for demonstrating the importance of a radical militant minority. Arizona educators faced an even harsher political context, with even weaker unions, than did those in Oklahoma. Thus, for the purposes of a comparative analysis, Arizona’s best counterpoint is Oklahoma rather than West Virginia, since the latter’s relatively strong labor movement and traditions are a confounding factor that buoyed its work stoppage.
Like the action in Oklahoma, Arizona’s strike arose directly in the wake of West Virginia. But the paths of the two movements quickly began to diverge. Since Arizona was an even tougher objective political context for mass labor militancy than Oklahoma, the greater success of its movement can best be explained by the subjective factor of political leadership. And given that union officials in both states shared a basically identical political approach, the most important differentiating factor was the orientation and experience of grassroots leaders. Through their efforts, Arizona’s rank-and-file organization not only grew stronger than its equivalents in other states, but also superseded the influence of Arizona’s official education union. “Arizona’s walkout wasn’t just random teachers stumbling in the dark,” explains Noah Karvelis. “Teachers with experience and politics were helping guide this.”
The Buildup
By virtually all possible metrics, the challenges to successful strike action were greatest in Arizona. Its right wing was considerably stronger, and its labor movement significantly weaker, than in Oklahoma—not to mention most other US states. Home of pioneering reactionary Barry Goldwater, Arizona has for many decades been at the vanguard of the conservative Right’s offensive against working people. A whole host of regressive policies—ranging from tax cuts for the wealthy to school privatization to racist anti-immigrant crackdowns—have been tested and refined on the backs of working-class Arizonans.
The state’s leading politicians are deeply embedded in, and indebted to, the Charles Koch Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council, a hyper-conservative Koch-funded corporate legislation mill. Governor Doug Ducey has been part of the Koch network since 2011 and received $1.4 million from it in 2014 for his gubernatorial run. In 2017, more than a third of Republican legislators were wined and dined at ALEC’s annual summit to promote “free market” model legislation.
Decades of one-sided class war have left their mark on Arizona’s labor movement, which has long been one of the weakest in the country. Unlike Oklahoma and West Virginia, Arizona had never experienced a statewide teachers’ strike. A “right to work” state since 1946, its union membership density is 5.2 percent, even lower than Oklahoma’s 7.1 percent. The Arizona Education Association (AEA) represented only 25 percent of the workforce at the beginning of the 2017–18 school year, whereas in Oklahoma the rate was 40 percent, and in West Virginia it was 70 percent.
The particularities of Arizona’s decimated public education system make it especially hard to organize. About 17 percent of Arizona students attended a charter school in 2018—more than three times the national average. In Arizona and elsewhere, charter employees remained disproportionately absent from the spring 2018 walkouts due to their lack of either job security or collective organization. The same was true for Arizona’s large number of noncitizens working on J-1 visas to fill the state’s teacher shortage.
Divisions over race and immigration status were also heaviest in Arizona. With a working class stratified by language and ethnicity, and a xenophobic Republican Party with significant roots among white workers, one could hardly choose a less hospitable area of the United States to build working-class unity. Until Red for Ed erupted, Arizona was more marked by individualism and xenophobia than collective action and solidarity.
In the face of these obstacles, it’s highly unlikely that Arizona’s movement would have scored so many victories without the tireless work, tactical savvy, and strategic clarity of Arizona Educators United. From March through May, each of the teachers who came to comprise the AEU leadership team threw aside much of their normal life in order to organize the movement. As Vanessa Arredondo-Aguirre notes, “It was crazy—those were some very long hours, it was nonstop. Every day, I’d get out of work and I’d be up ’til at least midnight organizing.”
AEU was a collective effort, in which all of its core leaders—not to mention its thousands of rank-and-file local school-site activists—played an indispensable part. For the purposes of understanding the group’s particular trajectory and impact, three activists played an especially outsized leadership role: Noah Karvelis, Dylan Wegela, and Rebecca Garelli. Even more effectively than Jay O’Neal and Emily Comer in West Virginia, this militant minority of young workplace organizers was able to lead mass struggle forward by leaning on their organizing experience and class struggle perspectives.
Like many living in Arizona, Karvelis, Wegela, and Garelli were raised in other states. Arizona, with its relatively buoyant economy, has for many years been a leading recipient of US working-class in-migration, particularly from the Midwest’s stagnant Rust Belt. Indeed, in 2017 Maricopa County, Arizona, was the fastest growing county in the United States.
Notwithstanding this steady growth in blue state transplants, Arizona has remained a bastion of conservatism. In such a context, it’s pretty extraordinary that someone like Karvelis could become the public face of a mass movement supported by millions. Faced with vicious red-baiting from the corporate media and Republican leaders, Karvelis was reluctant to publicly ascribe to ideological labels during the strike. But when I asked him how he wanted to be identified in this book, he replied, “Call me a democratic socialist, please.”
Karvelis was raised in rural, working-class Illinois. His first inkling that something was wrong with the system came in the eighth grade. “Growing up where I did,” he explains, “everyone was working class, most worked in factories. My family was single income and, after the 2008 recession, my dad all of a sudden lost his job, forcing him to look for work for many months. It was eye-opening: I realized we’re all living at the will of these CEOs and investors.”
During high school, Karvelis dug deep into political theory and history: “After my dad got fired, I got into really into reading about politics, to make sense of what happened—it was a pivotal moment for me to develop class consciousness.” As for so many millennials, Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run was the catalyst that convinced Karvelis to get engaged: “That was a huge thing for me. Bernie’s campaign showed me a new set of politics, that there was something beyond just being a Democrat—you could really fight for working class people and marginalized people. It was one of the first times that I’d seen anything happening in US politics that resonated with me, that reflected the things I believed in. It felt personal, it felt fresh, and it spoke to the problems of my family and my friends. So it was a really big moment for me—it was the first time I really volunteered on a campaign or got involved in politics.”
Upon arriving in Phoenix to start teaching music, Karvelis immediately threw himself into in a wide range of local activist efforts and began writing publicly about education and politics. This political immersion, he notes, was indispensable for his later contribution to Red for Ed: “I’ve been reading and writing about all these issues for a while now, so that background definitely helped me get the movement off the ground.”
Eager to seize the opening created by West Virginia, on the morning of March 1, 2018, Karvelis issued a soon-to-be viral call over social media for educators to wear red that coming Wednesday: “West Virginia is showing the entire nation what can happen when teachers stand in solidarity. Arizona’s teachers are taking note and realizing that now is the time for us to start organizing our campuses and districts. Join us next Wednesday by wearing RED for ED and stand in solidarity with our demands for fair pay! AZ’s teachers and schools deserve proper funding!”
Dylan Wegela received far less notoriety than Karvelis in the spring of 2018. But as the site liaison coordinator and the main strike proponent within AEU, his contribution to the movement was certainly no less important. Like Karvelis’s, Wegela’s politicization began early on. “Part of getting into politics was that I grew up in a very white part of Michigan and people sometimes treated me a bit different because my skin was tan,” he notes. In high school, Wegela read some Marx and, though he was still skeptical, “the idea that there could be something different to capitalism resonated with me.”
But it wasn’t until college, with the Sanders campaign, that he actually got involved in organizing. Soon after diving deep into canvassing, he organized his first action—a keg party to raise funds for Sanders. Wegela recalls that the campaign was a game changer for him personally: “Bernie definitely made me call myself a democratic socialist; I had socialist ideals already, but honestly I hadn’t even heard the label until the campaign. And it showed me that a large number of people actually wanted to fight to improve things. Those massive rallies convinced me that something had to change. So when I started teaching [in 2016 in Arizona], I got immediately involved here.”
In the fall of 2016, Wegela decided to speak out at his school and in his district against the 1 percent raise received by teachers. Soon after, he was asked by veteran teachers to run for the executive board of his district union. By the spring of 2017, he was secretary of the Cartwright Education Association. “I learned a lot through this union work,” Wegela emphasizes. “It made everything during Red for Ed way easier because I already had organizing experience—though not on that scale of course.”
Rebecca Garelli took a different path toward becoming a militant leader. Like that of Mingo County’s rank and filers, Garelli’s radicalism has been focused squarely on union and workplace struggles. Though she had attended a few protests during college against the war in Iraq, her politicization took place primarily through participation in the radical-led Chicago Teachers Union (CTU): “That union militancy—for me it all comes from Chicago. I have a strong personality to begin with and even as a nontenured teacher I spoke my mind a lot. From my personal experience with issues at school, filing grievances and all that, it became clear to me real quick how powerful and necessary a union was. So I got involved: I’d go to all the union meetings, I’d wear my red shirt every Friday, I’d engage in all the activities they asked us to do.”
Above all, it was Garelli’s participation in the 2012 Chicago education strike that set the stage for the central leadership role she’d go on to play after moving to Arizona five years later. For her, the strike was a watershed moment: “That was an incredibly powerful experience for me. I didn’t realize the full strength of our union until the organizing began for the strike. It was real democratic unionism. People who weren’t political—it made them political. And it sparked such camaraderie and solidarity in our building. Then when we were actually on strike, marching in downtown Chicago—it was epic. We were under the high-rises and we’d see workers everywhere—all the buildings, on all the floors—supporting us, waving, holding signs. And the union every day told us, ‘You have a job to do today.’ We always had a task, it created this sense of unity—and it politicized a lot of people in the process.”
Encouraged by the inspiration of West Virginia, on Friday, March 2, 2018, Garelli decided to start a Facebook page to mobilize and unite Arizona’s educators. Within hours it had thousands of members: “The minute I created that page, it blew up. It was just supposed to be a discussion page, I consciously hadn’t put any talk about striking in the description. But, immediately, people on it were like, ‘YES, we’re going on strike!’”
Until this point, events in Arizona paralleled those in Oklahoma very closely. And in both places, decisions made at this early juncture, and in the heat of the moment, determined much of the movement’s subsequent trajectory. But, unlike her counterparts in the Sooner State, Garelli had enough union experience to realize the dangers of going too far, too fast: “The page was out of control. Lots of people on it wanted to strike—now. But I said, ‘No way, there’s no way we’re ready yet for that!’ I knew from Chicago that we had a lot of work to do before we were ready for something like a strike, particularly a statewide action. I tried to sell people on this perspective, but I saw what was happening. So that Sunday I posted that I was going to take the page down—we needed more time to prepare, to do this right. People were begging me and reaching out to me, ‘Please don’t shut it down, don’t let the momentum die!’ But I pulled the trigger.”
After Garelli announced her intention to close down the page, Derek Harris—a young Tucson District band teacher and progressive union activist—set up Arizona Educators United to serve as its replacement. By Monday, March 5, nine teachers had come through a process of voluntary self-selection to serve as the AEU leadership team.
Spread out across the state, all were strangers up until this point. Most were young, with at most a few years of activism under their belts. Contrary to conspiracy theories hatched by Arizona’s leading Republicans, AEU was hardly a socialist plot. Far from being ideologically monolithic, most were progressive Democrats, and there was even one Republican. Moreover, none of the teacher radicals were members of any socialist organization, unlike in West Virginia.
That Monday evening’s conference call—the first of many over the next two months—divvied up coordinating tasks. For some in the team, including Vanessa Arredondo-Aguirre, Catherine Barrett, and Brittani Karbginsky, this was their first foray into activism. In contrast, Kelley Wendland Fisher was a longtime teacher and an experienced progressive union leader. Fisher notes that “as an ‘elder statesmen’ so to speak, in the first few days and weeks I did a lot of listening and not a lot of speaking in AEU—I let these new young leaders find their places first.” Though her approach was mostly hands off, her role as a “conduit” between the two organizations was significant: “During the first weeks, tensions were high on both sides at times, and being able to talk openly to people in both groups really helped create a bond.”
While Fisher and others focused on tasks like community outreach and building a digital platform, Garelli was mandated to strategize actions, Karvelis was made media spokesperson, and Wegela was charged with heading the (soon-to-be critical) site liaison network.
In contrast with Oklahoma’s precipitous calls for a walkout, AEU leaders decided to begin by systematically building a base at schools and in the community. To this end, the meeting decided to promote Karvelis’s call to wear red across the state that coming Wednesday. Even more importantly, it adopted Garelli’s proposal to build a structure of workplace representatives. She noted that the idea came directly from her CTU experience: “You have to set up a real organization on the ground so that when you hit the ‘go’ button, you hit with power.”
By that evening, Wegela had blasted out a call for site liaison volunteers. Over the coming weeks, it would take countless hours to input contact information, respond to volunteers, and provide them with ongoing guidance on how to organize their sites. Garelli helped get the system off the ground in early March, as did Arredondo-Aguirre. But the site liaison network—which by late April was comprised of roughly 2,000 educators—was above all Wegela’s responsibility.
As he explains, “When Rebecca made that proposal for a site liaison network, I immediately knew that coordinating it was an important role and that I wanted to be that line of communication. Because of my experience as union secretary, I had picked up how to coordinate with members and help them get things done. And it turned out that the liaisons were the most important part of the movement. They organized their schools, got a sense of where people were at, and served as the channel of communication between the rank-and-file and our AEU leadership team. We couldn’t have done any of this without them.”
Anybody interested in how a militant minority of workplace radicals can build workplace power and political momentum should closely study AEU’s two-month organizing blitz, most of which was done in conjunction with the union. With the help of AEU’s new liaisons, thousands of teachers participated in the first Red for Ed day on March 7.
Karvelis recalls the profound transformation that this action had at his workplace: “When we organized that first Red for Ed day at my school, it was a real hush-hush whisper campaign to get it off the ground. People were still pretty scared to speak out and our district is notorious for being pretty complacent. But we ended up having 99 percent of educators decked out in red. That set the tone for the rest of the year—we’ve done it every Wednesday since, as did most other schools.”
Based on her Chicago experience, Garelli envisioned and coordinated a series of escalating actions aimed at empowering educators and building support among community members. She also added some important tactics to the play-book. One of her personal innovations was to call on educators and allies to use erasable window markers to draw supportive messages on their cars, small businesses, and homes. By the time I arrived in Arizona, the state was awash in Red for Ed signs and decorated cars. “These might seem like modest asks,” Garelli explains, “but they helped overcome the fear factor, and they helped people feel less isolated. You can’t just do this overnight. If you don’t have the confidence to do small actions, how are you ever going to be able to do a large job action?”
In late March, AEU called upon its members—which now numbered in the tens of thousands—to collectively formulate their demands through a democratic, deliberative process. Following extensive discussions online and in the school sites, these were then presented publicly at a mass rally of over 6,000 on March 28 at the state capitol. Next came a string of walk-ins that culminated on April 11, when over 110,000 educators, parents, and students participated across Arizona. By this time, the organizational strength and legitimacy of AEU had transformed it into a body more akin to a bona fide trade union than a loose rank-and-file network.
Though Arizona Educators United relied primarily on its site liaison network to coordinate and promote actions, it also utilized social media adeptly. Indeed, AEU leaders found a way to overcome the basic problem that had plagued both West Virginia and Oklahoma’s pages: that if you open content up to anybody to post, a big group gets overwhelmed and the most important information tends to get lost; but if you restrict a page to moderator posts, then you lose the collective ownership and effervescence that made West Virginia’s United page so attractive.
Initially, AEU had tried the Mountain State model, but, as Arredondo-Aguirre notes, “It was so big, there were way too many posts, and our information was getting missed.” Their solution was to create a separate AEU “discussion hub” page where anybody could post, while making the main AEU page a vehicle for the leadership team’s updates and asks—and for educators to post photos and ideas in the comments sections. Many AEU liaisons also created their own district-wide Facebook pages to facilitate local coordination.
AEU was also lucky to have a gifted public spokesperson. In interview after interview, Karvelis hammered on the same key points regarding Arizona’s education crisis and the power of a collective fightback to solve it. Thanks to an uncanny ability to popularize a class struggle vision for defending educators and students, he immediately became a statewide celebrity. By late April, he could hardly walk two minutes without being besieged by strangers requesting he take a selfie with them.
Through two months of deep organizing, the movement had won over school employees from all political persuasions and in all corners of the state. Arizona educator Warren Faulkner’s April 22 tweet illustrates the breadth of the popular radicalization:
I’m a registered Republican and a conservative. I’ve taught high school math for 27 years and the last thing I ever thought I’d do is a walkout, but I will walk out this Thursday. Enough is enough … I love my job and I love the students I teach. I don’t want to walk out, but I will for my students.
Red-Baiting and Socialism
Red for Ed’s booming popularity and momentum would not go unchallenged by Arizona’s Koch-funded right wing. For its efforts on behalf of educators and students, Arizona’s militant minority was subjected to a relentless smear campaign. While there had also been ruling-class pushback in West Virginia and Oklahoma, it was nothing like this.
First, it was Governor Ducey who set the stage by refusing to meet with Red for Ed representatives, claiming on April 10 that they were “political operatives.” Then, in the coming weeks, the powers that be threw every possible slander in their direction. Talk show hosts and politicians spuriously questioned AEU leaders’ teaching credentials, their motivations for moving to Arizona, and their adherence to democratic norms when conducting the strike vote. Fox 10 News anchor Kari Lake even announced that Red for Ed was “nothing more than a push to legalize pot.”
But above all, the tactic to which defenders of Arizona’s status quo turned most was red-baiting. Pointing to Karvelis’s involvement in the Sanders campaign and his authorship of online articles such as “From Marx to Trump: Labor’s Role in Revolution,” the twenty-three-year-old music teacher was their favorite target. On April 24, Arizona House Representative Maria Syms sounded the alarm in an op-ed accusing the entire education movement of being a socialist plot:
If [Karvelis] gets [his goal], we will see contemporary radical politics at its treacherous worst, where harm to our children and their academic achievement are necessary collateral damage in the cause of leftist revolution. Arizonans should take a stand against such threats to our children and our democracy. We all deserve better. #TooRedForEd6
That same day, Breitbart published an in-depth account of Karvelis’s purported attempts to brainwash his students with anti-capitalism and anti-racism.7 The radical politics of some individual AEU leaders was now front-page news.
This demagogy fired up Arizona’s crystallized reactionaries, confused the waverers, and took a toll on AEU leaders. “It’s the hardest thing to stand up and know that you’ll be smeared,” recalls Karvelis. “But if you don’t do it, who will?” Since he, like all of AEU’s core, was sincerely committed to upholding Red for Ed’s nonpartisan nature, Karvelis always tried to pivot the media’s attention back to public education. In fact, if it hadn’t been for these constant right-wing attacks, socialism would have been a complete nonissue in Arizona’s movement.
Red-baiting has long been effective as a right-wing tactic for discrediting and dividing labor struggles. As Karvelis noted in a 2017 article about working-class agency, the first “Red Scare,” for instance, successfully extinguished “the fire at the heart of the labor movement … in its earliest stages.”8 Though Arizona’s recent smear campaign did some real damage, it proved to be far less successful in undermining the struggle.
Unlike much of the rest of the United States since 2016, Arizona has yet to see democratic socialism become a mainstream idea. Nevertheless, most educators across the state pushed back in defense of Red for Ed and its rank-and-file representatives. It was not difficult to see that red-baiting was being weaponized against their demands for better pay and funding. Of course, a few teachers took the bait. Yet the vast majority insisted that their movement was a united effort of all supporters of public education, rather than a socialist plot.
Educators instantly took to social media with a wide range of rebuttals to the Republican smears. Many educators took offense at the implication that they were ignorant sheep manipulated by a wily conspirator. Others, likewise, stressed that this was a collective movement: “I love Noah Karvelis, but in kid language ‘Noah’s not the boss of me’ … Noah didn’t organize the standouts in Tucson or the other protests down here. We have tens of thousands of parents and community members and educators all organizing each other.”
Some posters noted that red-baiting was fundamentally a tool of the powers that be. In the words of one teacher, “Anything that benefits people that aren’t rich is always marked as ‘socialism.’” Others rejected the ideas of socialists but invoked their First Amendment rights. A few rank-and-file teachers even made cases for the positive importance of a radical presence in the struggle: “We are fighting a corrupt political environment and to purge ourselves of leftists seems authoritarian and stupid at the same time. You really think conservative Republicans are capable of leading the fight for change?”
One of the ironies of Arizona’s smear campaign was that it prompted many educators to begin exploring radical ideas for the first time. As elsewhere in the United States, the content of the term socialism was contested widely in Arizona. Many equated it with public services like public education or the postal service. Others invoked Wikipedia’s useful definition: “Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production, as well as the political theories and movements associated with them.” A few argued that Jesus was a true socialist; Republican leaders like State House Representative Kelly Townsend, in their view, were Christians “in name only.” A Phoenix teacher posted: “Kelly Townsend wagged her finger in my face and called me a communist at the Capitol and I took it as a badge of honor. Being the exact opposite of whatever she is is nothing to be ashamed of.”
Arizona’s red scare was not inconsequential. It peeled off some potential supporters, periodically put AEU leaders on the defensive, and created a climate conducive to the Republicans’ efforts to ignore educators’ demands. Yet on the whole, the Koch-backed Right failed to achieve its goal of turning educators and the public against AEU or its representatives. Teachers “voted with their feet” by sticking with Red for Ed.
Ultimately, the smear campaign’s main long-term consequence will likely be that it helped generate a new audience for socialism in Arizona. A sign of just how far things had come in the span of two months was a May 4 Phoenix New Times piece titled “No, #RedForEd Isn’t a Socialist Plot, but It Would Be Awesome If It Were.” After discussing with Arizona’s DSAers—who, like those in Oklahoma, were limited to building outside support for the strike—the author reached a conclusion common to a growing number of Americans: “If the leftist revolution that we’ve been warned about results in an energized labor movement and better funding for education, health care, roads, and other public institutions, that actually would be pretty great.”
Relations with the Union
Though Arizona Educators United was both the spark and the primary leadership of Red for Ed, much of its success arose from close collaboration with the Arizona Education Association. As one rank-and-file teacher posted on April 21, “There is no way we could have come this far this fast without the AEA.” Union officials committed significant resources to building the movement. And their collaboration with militant grassroots leaders was consistently closer in Arizona than any in Oklahoma or West Virginia.
Arizona’s strike took a distinct trajectory despite the fact that AEA’s political strategy was identical to its sister organizations in Oklahoma and West Virginia. Like most union officials I met during the red state revolt, AEA’s top leaders were honest and progressive-minded individuals who were committed to defending public education, largely through lobbying and electing Democrats. Similarly, though they were willing to support the upsurge, their structural position made them hesitant to embark on an illegal work stoppage.
To understand the reasons for the exceptional alliance between AEU and AEA, we must turn our attention back to March 5, when the founders of AEU decided to build up their own independent mass organization at the school sites. From day one, their project, centered around the site liaison network, was far more organizationally ambitious than the grassroots groupings in West Virginia and Oklahoma. Though AEU leaders were not thinking in these terms at the time, they were in fact building something more like a proto-union than a rank-and-file caucus.
AEU’s independent approach did not emerge from anti-union sentiment. To the contrary, almost all of the core nine were union members, and three (Harris, Wegela, and Fisher) were in fact elected AEA leaders at various levels. This organic connection to the union was a major differentiating factor from dynamics in Oklahoma. Fisher argues that “had there not been this membership kinship, there may have been more of a struggle with moving forward together because it could have been perceived as two competing organizations.”
At the same time, AEU’s core was well aware that only 25 percent of Arizona educators were union members. Wegela explains: “We all thought it was important to coordinate with the union, especially after first month. But we didn’t go through the union, because it wouldn’t have worked that way: AEA just didn’t have the structure or the trust of our membership.”
As Karvelis notes, Red for Ed’s founders envisioned something bigger and politically broader: “One of the biggest reasons we established AEU was that it was clear to us that this all began on a grassroots level and was spreading on a grassroots level. So the thought of funneling people into the union didn’t even cross our minds. Keep in mind that there’s strong anti-union sentiment in Arizona. Before this movement, our coworkers generally said things like, ‘AEA hasn’t done anything, where has it been?’ Others said that AEA was too political, too partisan. So it was really important for AEU not to have any partisan affiliation. We found a way to bring everyone on board the movement in a way the union couldn’t.”
Just as OEA leadership had done in Oklahoma, Arizona’s top union leaders quickly took the initiative to reach out to rank-and-file organizers. Their first joint discussion took place on the evening of March 7, right after the massively successful Red for Ed day of action called by AEU. As was the case in the Sooner State, a tactical-political clash had led to considerable apprehension early on from both sides.
The main source of tension was AEA’s announcement, during the Red for Ed mobilization earlier that day, of its endorsement of David Garcia, a Democratic candidate for governor. The Arizona Republic reported on the unexpected nature of the union’s press conference: “In the middle of arguably the largest teacher demonstration in recent Arizona history Wednesday, the state’s teachers’ union essentially called a TV time out—to endorse a political candidate. And it didn’t go over well for some.”9
Wegela was one of these early critics. “I didn’t trust the union leadership at first, especially because it endorsed David Garcia during our event,” he notes. “It seemed like they were trying to steal our thunder, and it made it seem like Red for Ed had been established solely for the purpose of electing Garcia. The media really came after us—and the union—for that.”
Things easily could have blown up on March 7. Indeed, the right wing’s apparatus immediately sought to sow as much division as possible. Matthew Benson, a Republican political consultant, declared to the press that Garcia and AEA “effectively co-opted the (#RedForEd) movement today by choosing this day to announce their endorsement of Garcia for governor.”10
It would have been simple for AEU leaders to have broken with the union at this moment. But instead, they responded to the Garcia incident by issuing a press release affirming that Arizona Educators United was a nonpartisan organization that did not endorse any political candidate.
From March 7 onward, AEU and AEA leaders communicated through a joint Facebook chat and frequent conference calls. As the movement progressed, these relationships deepened, and most of the subsequent buildup actions and activities were jointly organized. Many local AEU organizers were simultaneous members of AEA—and sometimes even low-ranking officials of the latter.
AEU was strong in “people power” but low in resources. Fortunately, the union provided its office infrastructure, institutional legitimacy, research team, financial help (to print signs, rent speaker systems, etc.), and tactical advice without attempting to usurp the movement’s leadership. “Teachers are the drivers of this bus; we’re steering the struggle,” noted Garelli when I first met her in April. “But the union is our parallel, and it has really supported us.”
The US labor movement would be in a much better place if union leaders across the country adopted a similar stance. AEA President Joe Thomas, Vice President Marisol Garcia, and staff organizer Doug Kilgore deserve a lot of personal credit for solidifying a working alliance with Arizona’s grassroots teacher leaders. Yet it would be a mistake to ignore the particular relationship of forces that made possible such a novel alliance. Put simply, the union leadership’s consistent collaboration with its organized rank and file arose in response to AEU’s exceptional strength and legitimacy. Unlike the teachers’ unions in Oklahoma and West Virginia, AEA couldn’t plausibly “go it alone” in the face of such an organizationally strong counterpart. Had a similarly influential grassroots structure existed in these other states, union officials there would likely have responded in the same way. As Karvelis explains, “AEA leaders saw the energy, they saw what we had created on the ground, and they said: ‘You’ve done something that we haven’t been able to do in twenty or thirty years.’ And they saw that if they were to try to take the wheel, it would squash the movement.”
Although AEA officials did not try to “take the wheel,” they did use their considerable influence to encourage the movement to drive in a less risky direction. Indeed, much of the behind-the-scenes story of Red for Ed revolves around a long fight by AEU leaders—Dylan Wegela in particular—to overcome the union’s hesitancy to support a work stoppage. Joe Thomas, in a poststrike panel for Los Angeles teacher unionists, was candid about the dynamic: “Unions—we’re cautious because we have to be here on the next day … But [Arizona Educators United] wouldn’t let us be cautious, which was good.”
In contrast with Oklahoma, Arizona’s call for a strike vote—let alone a strike—didn’t come until very late in the game, mid April to be exact. Part of the reason for this, as we have seen, was that AEU militants like Garelli understood that it takes time to methodically build up to a work stoppage. “Maricopa was ready to go from day one,” she recalls. “But this had to be a statewide shutdown.”
This question of strike timing, however, was intertwined with an ongoing conflict over whether or not a strike was even feasible in Arizona. During the first six weeks of the movement, there were basically only two poles in this internal debate: Wegela and the AEA leadership. “From our first joint meeting on March 7 onwards,” notes Wegela, “I was the only one bringing up the need for a strike—and I kept on getting shot down.” His orientation on this question stemmed from his political conviction about the power of mass strikes: “I thought that a strike was the only way forward, because nothing else had worked. Electing Democrats didn’t work—all across the country they’ve also cut school funds. But strikes work. My argument was basically: ‘We can win. We’re the gears of the machine, if we stop showing up, everything shuts down.’ And even if we didn’t end up winning everything, people needed to know they could do this, they needed to feel powerful. I wanted my coworkers and me to know what it felt like to say ‘Hey boss, I’m not coming back until you fix this.’”
Apart from Wegela, most AEU leaders were initially skeptical about the prospects for a work stoppage in conservative Arizona, and/or hesitant to reject the tactical advice from their AEA allies. Garelli and Fisher told Wegela in private discussions that they agreed with his case for a strike. “We knew he had a real pulse on the feelings of our members, and we pushed for him to stand his ground,” says Fisher. But when it came to speaking up at joint meetings with the union, they remained silent on this question.
AEU’s hesitancy was buoyed by steady pressure from union leaders. In meeting after meeting, AEA officials argued against orienting to a strike. They raised three main objections. First, educators and community members in Arizona weren’t yet ready for that type of action. Though this was often positively framed as an argument for more buildup activities, AEA’s thrust was distinct from Garelli’s specific concerns about timing. “We all definitely got the impression that the union, at least at first, was afraid of a walkout,” notes Wegela. “They didn’t seem to think people in Arizona would ever get on board. I’d ask them in meetings, ‘How many liaisons do you think we need before we can go on strike?’ Then we’d eventually hit that number and they still didn’t want to do it.”
Second, according to AEA leaders, educators wouldn’t be able to get much out of the Republican-dominated legislature. It would be very dangerous to stage a walkout without a plan for “what would bring teachers back in” when they didn’t win their demands. Wegela recalls that union leaders “kept saying that they had no faith that the Republicans would budge. My stance was that we had to force them to budge by shutting down the schools and staying out.”
Finally, and relatedly, an unsuccessful walkout would jeopardize pro-education efforts in the upcoming November elections. In addition to their campaign to elect Garcia, AEA, in conjunction with some community allies, responded to the eruption of Red for Ed with the decision to put an initiative on the November ballot to fund education by raising income taxes for the rich.
At an April 19 press conference, union president Joe Thomas put forward an admirably sharp case for fixing public education by making the rich pay:
Here’s the game that’s played every year. Tax cut, tax cut, tax cut—and then a year later, there’s no money for schools. We’re tired of that game. Legislators need to reinvest dollars, the billion dollars that they stole from our students and schools over the past ten years. Let’s roll back those corporate tax cuts—the people who can afford to pay should pay.
Without doubt, the “Invest in Ed” ballot campaign—officially announced to the public midway through the late-April walkout—was a major advance from the labor movement’s traditional hesitancy to fight openly for progressive taxation. Yet the initiative’s looming presence simultaneously served as one of AEA’s main arguments against moving toward a potentially risky strike.
For all these reasons, Arizona’s top union officials, despite their progressive political leanings, were on the whole less open to a walkout than those in Oklahoma. It’s worth recalling that the Oklahoma Education Association had begun moving in the direction of a work stoppage even before West Virginia’s strike began or Oklahoma’s Facebook groups formed. In Arizona, it took a month and a half of pressure and sharp internal discussions to get union leaders on board.
An important turning point in the debate came when Wegela, Garelli, Arredondo-Aguirre, and Karbginsky attended the 2018 Labor Notes Conference, from April 6 to 8 in Chicago. Until this time, no one aside from Wegela had pushed for AEU and AEA to set a strike into motion. The conference, however, had a powerful impact upon AEU’s participants. As Arredondo-Aguirre recalls: “For me, being completely new to this type of thing, it was hard to take sides in the debates about whether or not to strike. But Labor Notes really opened up my eyes because we all had a chance to talk to strike leaders from other states like West Virginia and Kentucky. They all kept telling us how impressed they were: ‘You’re way more organized than we ever were. If we could do a strike, you definitely can too.’”
Encouraged by these discussions, AEU’s four participants in Chicago called the rest of the leadership team, hoping to get them on board with setting a date for a walkout. The majority of AEU leaders agreed with the plan—until a conference call with the union later that day. Garelli explains: “Basically, AEA leaders tried to squash the idea. They made it seem like we were only saying all this because we were being influenced by Labor Notes people. It was pretty condescending, and I told them so on that call. I said: ‘I’m the only one here who has actual experience striking—I was in Chicago.’” But, to Wegela’s chagrin, other AEU leaders eventually backed down in the face of the union’s arguments.
Upon their return to Arizona, pressure from the ranks mounted, and internal debates continued to grow. Time was running out, since the legislative session was set to finish within a few weeks. Seeing the mounting anger and frustration from below, Wegela became increasingly worried that Red for Ed would fail to take action in time. “Dylan really had his finger on the pulse of things,” notes Garelli. “He was site liaison coordinator, and he understood before the others that teachers weren’t going to settle for less than a walkout.”
Karvelis recalls that “the union brought in staff from [the National Education Association] to join us. Dylan was insistent: ‘Our members want to walk—we have to honor what they want.’ The NEA folks were trying to talk him back, to walk him back away from the cliff. But he was nailing it, sticking up for what he believed in, and he was beginning to turn the tide.” Still, Wegela’s efforts and the mounting rank-and-file calls for action were insufficient to swing the joint AEU-AEA calls.
The final breaking point in the debate came after 110,000 Arizonans participated in walk-ins on April 11. “We met as AEU right after that,” recalls Wegela. “I argued hard. My main point was: ‘What now? We need to escalate, and we can’t just keep walking in. The only thing we can do now is walk out, or we’ll miss the moment.’” This time, the AEU leadership not only agreed to the proposal to set a date for a walkout but also unanimously presented its decision to its AEA allies.
At certain junctures, the actions of movement leaders can be decisive for the course of mass struggle. It’s impossible to say whether there would have been a unified statewide walkout without Dylan Wegela’s stubborn internal push in this direction. Multiple AEU leaders were convinced it wouldn’t have happened without him. In Karvelis’s words: “Dylan was essential—I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
Had Wegela not won over AEU’s core to the call for a walkout, Arizona’s movement very well could have imploded as a result of demoralizing internal recriminations, or uncoordinated local walkouts by frustrated teachers unwilling to wait any longer.11 But instead of holding yet another discussion over the feasibility of a walkout, the first AEU-AEA meeting after the April 11 walk-ins focused on the actual mechanics of calling one. Again, Garelli’s experience of Chicago militancy proved to be invaluable. She recalls: “[President Joe Thomas]’s response to the walkout was now, ‘Okay, but I can’t do this kind of action without first asking my members.’ So I proposed a strike authorization vote and I said: ‘This is how we did it in Chicago.’ When the union asked what this would actually look like, I explained to them that it was all laid out on Page 127 of the Labor Notes book How to Jump-Start Your Union.”
On April 15, AEU leaders issued a call for a statewide strike vote. After multiple days of voting through secret paper ballots at each school site, AEU and union leaders made the results public at a joint press conference: of the more than 57,000 teachers and school staff who participated in the vote, 78 percent supported a work stoppage. On the basis of this bottom-up process of workplace democracy, and armed with a clear mandate for action, Red for Ed leaders announced that the walkout would begin on Thursday, April 26, and Friday, April 27.
The Strike
As the strike day approached, Arizona’s establishment ratcheted up its attacks on Red for Ed. In addition to intense redbaiting, numerous superintendents pressured their school employees to forgo participation in the strike.
In the days leading up to the strike, statewide superintendent Diane Douglas hit the media trail to threaten educators with the loss of their teaching certificates if they walked out: “A walkout is a nice term for it. It is a strike, plain and simple. And in Arizona, it is not legal for teachers to strike.” She also denounced those school districts that were supporting Red for Ed, questioning “how a governing board can support an unlawful action legitimately.”12
Another important expression of the Arizona political establishment’s particular intransigence was that, unlike in both West Virginia and Oklahoma, it had still refused to pass a single legislative concession to avoid a strike. Indeed, had Arizona’s educators not walked out in late April, it’s possible that they would have won nothing.
On April 12, in response to the 110,000-strong walk-ins and AEU’s announcement of an impending walkout, Ducey announced that he was increasing his proposal for a 1 percent teacher raise to 20 percent. There were numerous problems with this plan, including that it ignored support staff, would result in cuts to essential social services, and provided no additional school funding. But, for all the flaws in Ducey’s proposal, Republican lawmakers looked at a 20 percent pay raise as an exorbitant expense—and an unnecessary concession to rabble-rousers. On this basis, Republican lawmakers would continue to refuse to support the pay raise until midway through the strike.
The chronology of conservative politicians’ public positions on the raise warrants careful attention, because after the walkout Governor Ducey and other Republicans attempted to paint themselves as friends of education who had granted the pay increase out of the goodness of their hearts. Indeed, AEU organizers foresaw that without a strong walkout, it was likely the Republican legislature would ultimately reject, or significantly reduce, Ducey’s pay proposal—thereby allowing the governor to save face for his upcoming November reelection campaign, while simultaneously defeating and demoralizing the teachers.
It was in this context that a new debate emerged among AEU-AEA leaders. Once again a minority of one, Wegela argued hard for an indefinite strike aimed at winning both the pay and funding demands of AEU: “I felt we had the power and momentum to do a real strike like West Virginia, where they said: ‘These are our demands, we’re not going back to work until you meet them.’ It would have been hard, definitely. But schools couldn’t stay closed forever, so parents would have at some point turned on us, or on the politicians. And my sense was that folks would have turned on the politicians.”
Most other AEU and AEA leaders felt that launching an indefinite strike was not worth the risk. Instead, they viewed the impending walkout primarily as a means to make sure Ducey’s raise went through, ideally without the cuts to social services. Rather than attempt to stay out until all their main demands were met, it would make more sense to take a win and use the momentum to pivot to winning school funding through the Invest in Ed progressive taxation ballot initiative.
But whereas union leaders had floated the idea of a one-day walkout and were insistent about the dangers of an extended work stoppage, AEU’s core envisioned staying out until a bill was signed. To quote Arredondo-Aguirre, “My view of the walkout was that we needed to keep it going until something was signed. But I knew we weren’t going to get everything we wanted, not at first.” Karvelis had a similar conception: “I didn’t think we’d get all our demands through the walkout. But I thought we had to make sure the bill got through, and got through clean—we had to make sure it didn’t get swept through on the backs of cuts to Medicaid recipients and kids with disabilities.” These discussions, however, remained internal. For better or worse, most educators entered into the strike with no clear sense of how long it could last or what the baseline might be for a return to work.
Despite ongoing superintendent threats and a witch hunt against AEU leaders, the work stoppage begun on Thursday, April 26, was larger than anybody had anticipated. School was shut for over 850,000 students across the state—an extraordinarily high number given that almost a fifth of Arizona pupils are in charter schools. In the ninety-degree heat, roughly 75,000 educators and allies marched through the streets of Phoenix. Without the union’s significant logistical and financial resources, it’s unlikely that an event of this scale—the largest protest in Arizona history—could have been pulled off so smoothly.
During that afternoon’s mass rally, AEU leaders came out swinging. Impervious to the red-baiting offensive, Wegela concluded his opening speech by yelling, “This is an education revolution!”
Karvelis was in top form, bringing the house down with a rousing call for collective struggle: “If we don’t stand up for our kids, who will? [Crowd: ‘Nobody!’] If we don’t bring a change to this state, who will? If we don’t stand up and bring a change, the people sitting in those chairs right now [inside the State House] will not do it. We have to be the ones to stand up and fight back in this moment, we have the power … And this movement—with the power of each and every one of us working together—will be the movement that goes down in history as the thing that changed education and the state of Arizona forever.”
That same day, House Majority Whip Kelly Townsend issued a public statement threatening a class action lawsuit against strikers. And on Friday morning, the arch-reactionary Goldwater Institute sent letters to every district superintendent, declaring that they would be subject to lawsuits unless they immediately opened their schools.
Pressure from Republicans—and from conservative community members—was intensifying. On Friday, April 27, one teacher posted the following: “A woman in the grocery store today told me to go back to work—the children are being traumatized. We’re being called hateful names, demeaned, and bullied. We’re standing strong together, though.” Some superintendents began to buckle, but the intimidation offensive generally failed to scare educators back to work. Despite the growing number of right-wing threats, educator turnout at Friday’s rally was huge, and spirits remained high.
In response to the strikers’ unforeseen resilience, at six o’clock Friday evening Ducey issued a press release stating that he had reached a deal with Republican lawmakers. Although the governor tried, cynically, to frame this as a personal triumph, he was ultimately forced to publicly acknowledge that the real tipping point was the strike: “The folks coming down to the state Capitol, making their voices heard, it helped me with other people I needed to get a budget passed, and that’s why we’re going to be able to introduce it on Monday and pass it soon after.”13
In another significant concession, the proposed bill did not include Ducey’s original plan to fund the raise by cutting social services.
In internal discussions, some union representatives raised the idea of calling partial victory, pivoting to Invest in Ed, and returning to work. But the AEU leadership team instead decided to poll liaisons over the weekend. The overwhelming response was that they, and their coworkers, wanted to come back to the capitol on Monday.
The walkout continued. Overall, momentum remained strong on Monday, which witnessed a turnout of roughly 50,000 at the capitol. At the same time, many district leaders began pushing hard to end the work stoppage; the precedent of a strike vote, however, made this task more difficult than it had been in Oklahoma. As Joe Thomas later explained, in most districts “superintendents were calling our local presidents asking if school was going to be shut the next day.”
Tuesday afternoon brought the next big development. To the surprise of educators and the press, a joint AEU-AEA press conference announced that strikers would return to work on Thursday if the legislature passed Ducey’s bill. Wegela had sharply opposed this move, arguing that it was necessary to let educators vote on whether or not to return. After the fact, AEU representatives agreed that it had been a mistake not to put the question up for a vote.14
At the same time, it was understandable that AEU’s leadership felt it made sense to take ownership of the partial victory and pivot to the Invest in Ed campaign. Garelli explained, “There’s been lots of pressure to return to work. And Ducey has been blasting the press all week, saying that he gave us a 20 percent raise. Lots of parents may not have responded well if we continued the walkout after the governor signed what they’re being told is a big win for teachers.”
Karvelis elaborates on this: “We all knew they were going to leave town after they passed the budget. So we would have been left yelling at an empty building, trying to force a special session—to call that, you need a two-thirds vote from the legislature or a decision from the governor himself … The reality was that we didn’t think we could get anything more from these legislators. Our thought was that if they would have conceded more to us, it would have already happened by now. Though they haven’t done everything they’re able to do, they’ve done all they’re willing to do. So we thought it was time for a shift in tactics.”
Though a minority of teachers wanted to stay out until all their demands were met, educators, in person and over social media, generally agreed that it made sense to return to school if Ducey’s bill was signed. Nevertheless, most of these individuals were vocally angry that they were not consulted by the AEU leadership team. AEU’s Facebook pages were riven by confusion and sharp debate. Wegela notes that “a majority of teachers were upset that we didn’t give them a choice. I felt horrible about it; the whole thing started giving me anxiety attacks.”
Momentum began to decline rapidly. Briefly, it seemed as if Arizona’s walkout denouement might end up looking more like the implosion in Oklahoma. Wegela, however, was not prepared to give up. At this critical juncture, it was once again his efforts that proved to be the crucial link in the chain that pulled AEU’s leadership, and then the movement, in a different direction. Wegela recounts the inauspicious origins of Wednesday’s roller coaster of events: “Tuesday evening, right after our press conference, I was really upset about what we had done. So I went out for drinks with a friend of mine to vent—and to brainstorm ideas for what we could do. Over beers that night at the bar, we came up with the proposal that eventually turned things around: instead of going out without a fight, we could extend the strike and fire people back up by pushing to make amendments to the budget bill.”
Wegela set the plan into motion early Wednesday morning on an AEU conference call with union leaders and Democratic legislators. The Democrats had set up the call to ask Red for Ed representatives how they should vote on Ducey’s bill. “It was on that call,” notes Wegela, “that we told them they needed to propose pro-education amendments, that would be paid for by taxing the rich.” Specifically, the four amendments would (1) broaden the bill’s definition of “teacher” to include all certified professionals; (2) cap student to teacher ratios at twenty-five to one; (3) cap student to counselor ratios at fifty to one; and (4) give a 10 percent raise to all support staff.
The Democrats accepted this proposal—at least in part. Wegela notes that “those Democratic lawmakers said they agreed, but they ended up watering down our original proposal by completely cutting all talk about funding mechanisms—I guess they didn’t want to talk about taxing the rich. But it worked out okay because folks still ended up being super excited about the amendments.”
Morale at the capitol was low on the morning of Wednesday, May 2. But it quickly began to turn back around after Arredondo-Aguirre posted a Facebook Live video update of Wegela and Garelli explaining the urgency of mobilizing for the four amendments and staying out until the bill was signed—even if this meant canceling school on Thursday or beyond: “If you can get down to the capitol tonight, get here … People [need to] put some pressure on the legislators … We need everybody here at the capitol until the budget is passed.”
Educators responded enthusiastically. By the thousands, they streamed to the capitol, setting into motion one of the most sublime actions of the entire strike wave.
Garelli recalls the impact of the all-night capitol encampment: “That fight for the amendments, camping out all night, staying out another day on strike—that’s what revived the energy. Honestly, it’s what saved us. Without our amendment fight, the final budget process would have been a noose around our necks. That Wednesday night everybody—not only the teachers inside the chambers, but the entire state of Arizona watching online or on TV—witnessed Republican lawmakers vote down important amendment after amendment to improve our schools. People are still talking about this today. People saw with their own eyes who was responsible for the education crisis.”
Wegela likewise stresses the importance of that final evening: “It was something special—it made it clear to educators that it was their actions, their power, that made the whole thing possible. And, honestly, I don’t even know if the legislators would have ended up passing the raise if we hadn’t kept the strike going until the end.”
Apart from boosting morale, the amendment campout and strike extension were also key factors in making possible two major additional legislative victories. Faced with unprecedented public scrutiny, on Thursday, May 3, Republican lawmakers scrapped their proposed tax cuts and tax credits and dropped their attempt to prevent a referendum on vouchers from getting on the November 2018 ballot. Arizona educators did not win all their funding demands, but they could hold their heads high. Despite the long-standing weakness of Arizona’s labor movement, they had built up an impressive level of collective power and wrested significant victories from one of the most reactionary state governments in the country.
Though Arizona’s top union leaders were more hesitant than their grassroots counterparts, AEA played a crucial role in providing resources and legitimacy to the struggle. Seeing the Arizona Education Association’s considerable impact in major wins for educators, approximately 2,500 new members joined the union during spring 2018—a number higher than anywhere else in the red state revolt. At the same time, it’s unquestionable that Arizona Educators United was the organization most responsible for making this historic strike possible. It was the tireless work of each liaison and every member of the AEU core that collectively drove the struggle forward. And at the center of this rank-and-file upsurge were Garelli, Karvelis, and Wegela.
None of these young teachers sought recognition for their contributions. But they deserve it. Karvelis was speaking of past social movements when he remarked that “radicals and anti-capitalists have a big role to play—if you look at history, you see that those folks are often at the forefront of labor struggles.” Arizona showed that this insight remains no less true today than it was fifty or a hundred years ago.
Conclusion
Before they occur, successful strikes appear impossible to most people. Afterward, they seem almost inevitable. And underlying both of these mistaken assumptions is a failure to account for the agency of organizers.
Socialists, of course, didn’t create the 2018 education movements single-handedly. Without the active support of the trade unions and the activation of tens of thousands of educators, none of these victories would have been possible. Nor were radicals responsible for the material grievances that propelled these struggles forward. Contrary to the ravings of Republican leaders, class struggle is not produced by “outside agitators”; instead, it’s the result of an inherent structural antagonism between those who have to sell their labor to survive and the few who profit off this labor.
But as we have seen, the successes of the spring 2018 work stoppages often hinged on interventions by experienced workplace militants. Without accounting for their behind-the-scenes decisions and debates, it’s impossible to make sense of the divergent outcomes in West Virginia and Arizona, on one hand, and Oklahoma, on the other. Though red state educators operated in conditions not of their own choosing, they really did make their own history.
Instead of treating the recent educators’ strikes and the massive growth of the socialist movement since 2016 as two separate and distinct processes, this chapter has shown that labor militancy and political radicalism advanced hand in hand. Had it not been for the resurgence of socialist politics set into motion by Bernie Sanders’s primary run, the course of struggle in these states would have looked very different.
And all signs point to the deepening of this symbiotic relationship in the coming years. To quote Oklahoma DSA activist Jorge Roman-Romero: “I may be very optimistic, but I think we’ve entered a new historic period after the Bernie Sanders campaign and now these strikes. There is a new working-class political pole—and people, even those who are not on the Left, are becoming very receptive to it. To improve people’s living and working conditions urgently requires major challenges to the system. And that can’t be brought by the mainstream. We have the momentum, it’s just a matter of getting organized. Of course, effectively organizing isn’t easy for a young group like us. But we can see the opportunities. Ordinary people aren’t dumb; they just need to see an alternative.”
To be sure, it is not inevitable that the growth of socialist organizations will result in the rebirth of a militant labor movement. Apart from the fact that most young activists today are still not convinced of the centrality of workplace organizing and labor unions, it’s also the case that the presence of experienced radicals in an industry doesn’t automatically enable collective militancy.
Conditions need to be ripe—mass strikes can’t just be willed into being. Timing is key, as exemplified in the development of the spring 2018 upsurge: rank-and-file teachers in Oklahoma and Arizona were able to ride, and give expression to, the outpouring of excitement and enthusiasm generated by West Virginia’s recent victory.
Different contexts also create distinct tactical obstacles and opportunities. The relationship of forces between the rank and file, union officials, and management varies greatly across industry and region in the United States. There were important contextual reasons why West Virginia and Arizona’s radicals, despite their very small numbers, were able to play such an exceptionally outsized role at a moment of crisis and upsurge. In part because of the legal prohibition on public sector strikes and the absence of strong collective-bargaining mechanisms, there existed a leadership vacuum that a small militant minority was able to fill. At the same time, the fact that these red states’ labor officialdoms were relatively weak, and that the Democrats were out of power, helps explain why radicals were effective at pressuring the unions into supporting illegal work stoppages.
By way of contrast, much larger groups of leftist educators in cities like Chicago or Los Angeles have had to spend years patiently working within their unions to develop strong caucuses capable of overcoming the entrenched officialdom. Only through such protracted efforts could they transform these organizations into democratic fighting bodies capable of building workers’ power within the existing collective bargaining parameters. Effective struggle against the private sector’s corporate giants will likely require even-deeper organizing and greater strategic clarity.
Though the West Virginia and Arizona strikes do not provide a timeless political model that is replicable for the entire country, one lesson is clear: if we want to win, leftists need to start organizing at our workplaces and in our unions, when we’re lucky enough to have them. As the experience of the red state revolt illustrates, the revival of organized labor is inseparable from the project of rebuilding a militant minority.
No one has any illusions that it will be easy to reestablish an influential Left rooted in a fighting working class. This will require patient organizing over many years. Our enemies are powerful—and we’ll certainly experience many defeats along the way. But never underestimate the ability of working people to turn the world upside down.