The Educators Rank-and-File Committee is an international network of educators, students, parents, and workers fighting for workers power in the schools, to stop the capitalist destruction of public education and eliminate COVID-19.
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The workers—paraeducators, bus drivers, custodians, mechanics and food service staff—among the lowest-paid in the school workforce—voted by 92 percent to strike after five months of negotiations produced no agreement.
Even by the standards of the American trade union bureaucracy, the maneuvers to ram through this contract are noteworthy for their brazenness and crudeness
Trump’s Department of Education has targeted Northern Virginia schools over pro-LGBTQ policies, threatening funding cuts.
1,400 University of Minnesota custodians, cooks, maintenance, and dorm workers prepared for the school’s first system-wide strike in nearly fifty years, only to be blocked by Teamsters Local 320 leadership.
The Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee calls for teachers and all city workers to build independent rank-and-file power to defeat austerity, union betrayal, and attacks on living standards.
The contract rejection must become the launching pad for a renewed fight based on an entirely new strategy—one that breaks the stranglehold of the CUPW bureaucracy and mobilizes the immense social power of the entire working class.
The Philadelphia municipal strike was not the end but the opening act in a rapid series of confrontations in Philadelphia and beyond.
The agreement is aimed at blocking a growing rank-and-file rebellion and preventing the resurgence of a powerful citywide strike movement.
“Rank-and-file” is originally a military term. It refers to the lower “ranks” of soldiers, who literally stand in lines or “files”. These soldiers have a different set of interests in preserving their lives than the officers or “brass” who prosecute the wars on behalf of the ruling elite.
Rank-and-file committees are of, by and for the rank-and-file workers, who have a different set of interests in preserving their lives than management, the bosses, the politicians, and the trade union apparatus, who send workers to die while defending the profits of the ruling elite.
Yes. The formation of rank-and-file committees is 100% completely legal under the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
The right to freedom of speech means you can say whatever you like about what you agree or disagree with. Freedom of association, also covered under the first amendment, means you have the right to associate with others who share your views, for political ends. You also have the right to petition the government for redress, to make demands on the government and tell them what you want them to do.
No. HIPAA has an exception for disclosures to prevent and control the spread of disease, but the state is deliberately not invoking this exception in order to conceal information from workers, so that they can pretend that what they are doing is safe when it’s not.
Rank-and-file educators have the right to know who’s gotten sick, where, when, and what happened. Rank-and-file committees have to demand this information, and have to share it with other workers as a matter of collective self defense.
