Since many of the members of our organization Decarcerate the Garden State are also engaged in the struggle of the Newark communiy for local control of Newark schools and in opposition to the destruction of Newark schools through a profit driven privatization scheme, we are presenting this guest article (that will also soon appear at the Counterpunch site)> Please be encouraged to forward and offer your feedback. - Bob W.
By
Michelle Renee Matisons and Seth Sandronsky
In the shadow of Ferguson, Missouri's
phenomenal and ongoing resistance against police and economic
brutality, September 4, 2014 will be another important day to
remember as we document this dynamic and unforgettable era's
"post-Occupy" social/ labor movement struggles. While
fast food workers all over the U.S. took the day off from
selling crappy food at crappy wages, demanding pay of $15.00 per
hour and a labor union instead of at-will employment, families
in Newark, New Jersey, rejected the crappy segregationist
McEducation plan forced on them by truly fearless public and
private sector leaders. Newark families launched a school
boycott, with an alternative Freedom School option for
participating households. Such emancipatory actions, like the
fast food strike and the boycott, are important gestures of
refusal. Over four hundred fast food and home care workers were
arrested, risking job loss and jail time/ fines, but they deemed
it necessary to oppose their ongoing exploitation. Families are
opposing Governor Chris Christie’s/ Senator Cory Booker’s/
Newark School Superintendent Cami Anderson’s/ Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg’s/vulture philanthropist Eli Broad’s/ and
Pearson-Microsoft's great social experiment—also known as
"One Newark."
U.S. civil society and labor
sectors are rejecting impoverished and humiliating living,
working, and learning conditions, despite the message being sent
by the foreign war-mongering Democrat-GOP system (one party with
two right wings, according to the late author Gore Vidal) with
its militarized domestic police. U.S. protest is criminalized
and punished accordingly, but that doesn't seem to be stopping people.
Such
punishment has a history. Look no further than the last period of
popular dissent in the U.S.—the Civil Rights/Black Power/ 1960's
era. Black Americans’ emancipatory efforts to shake off the
shackles of Jim Crow segregation, with its whites-only facilities,
massive voting disenfranchisement, KKK terrorism, and a general
climate of intimidation and violence, paved the way for
intensified policing and imprisoning of black people. The Drug War
became Uncle Sam's bipartisan policy mechanism to help states and
municipalities neutralize some of the most militant actors of the
era—black Americans. Their subsequent mass incarceration,
propelling a seven-fold increase in the imprisoned population from
the 1970s to now, indicates that incarceration is the “new normal”
for blacks Americans. Under that model, black Americans are the
planet’s most imprisoned human beings, per capita, while their
jobless rates are double that of white workers, in and out of
economic expansions and contractions.
Many
of us are familiar with fast food work conditions. We or someone
we know have done this work or are currently employed in this
capacity, or we see fast food work conditions inside the
restaurants and drive-thru windows as customers. Less visible to
the public is home care labor. Michelle's recent home care
position was non-union, and had her working one week on, one week
off for approximately $100 per day. That's $5.00 per hour since
live-in home care workers are either actively working
with—actually living with—care "consumers" (as they are
called in home care industry lingo) or on call. Last year Obama
signed legislation that institutes minimum wage pay in the home
care industry, but we already know minimum wage isn't enough to
support families on anyway. So it should be no surprise that home
care workers joined fast food workers in U.S. streets—sharing the
same demands. The people who feed us quickly, and provide the
developmentally/ disabled and elderly with essential medical,
social, and emotional attention, are refusing invisibility in
favor of a highly visible campaign for their individual dignity
and families' futures.
Speaking
of home care workers’ mistreatment, in California recent
legislation, Assembly Bill 1522, authored by Assemblywoman Lorena
Gonzalez (D-San Diego), requires employers to provide their
employees with paid sick days off, but it does not include home
care workers. Governor Jerry Brown swayed lawmakers to exclude
home care workers from paid sick leave (http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/aug/29/paid-sick-leave-lorena-gonzalez-AB-1522-governor/).
According to the Economic Policy Institute, nationally 93 percent
of such workers are female, with 27 percent of them Hispanic and
18 percent black (far outstripping the groups’ representation in
the U.S. population (
http://www.epi.org/publication/in-home-workers/).
California’s
paid sick leave echoes the exclusion of domestic and farm workers
from the Social Security Act of 1935. In Working Toward
Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange
Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (Massachusetts:
Basic Books, 2005), David R. Roediger unravels how this particular
legislation fragmented Americans along gender and racial lines.
The striking workers on September 4, 2014 are resisting this
continued fragmentation in favor of class-based unity.
Meanwhile,
the white supremacist takeover of Newark public schools has many
Newark parents, worried for their children's futures, continuing
the battle for local community control of public schools.
The
Newark Public Schools' Boycott 4 Freedom (http://npsboycott4freedom.com), organized by
Parents United for Local School Education or PULSE (http://www.pulsenj.org) and supported by the
Newark Parents' Union (https://www.facebook.com/NewarkParentsUnion),
with broad support from many other community groups, has been
brewing as a concept for some time. Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson, a
most polarizing political figure, ignores widespread criticism
of her pro-charter overhaul of Newark’s public education system.
She locks people out of meetings, walks out of the same
meetings, and simply carries on with her school restructuring
plan despite warnings. On September 4th, she
nonchalantly suggested in a press conference that it was
boycotting parents, not the corporate education policy her
ill-ustrious career has come to symbolize, hurting the children.
As
school registration time approached, families grew outraged that
their children had been assigned schools far away from their
homes—or multiple student households were inconveniently and
unabashedly assigned to multiple schools, or students, including
special education students, did not receive new school assignments
or appropriate transportation at all—and the school boycott idea
grew in its appeal and relevance.
School
boycott, the refusal to send children to schools designed to
undermine community involvement and any civil rights gains made in
the past few decades, is an incredibly important tactic that more
communities may consider in the fight against the chartering/
vouchering of U.S. public schools. It doesn't matter how many
families participate or how long the boycott goes on. What matters
is that new oppositional tactics are at hand, and people are still
not scared to take the streets, or even keep their children home
from school, despite our intimidating, intentionally terrifying,
militarized police climate, highly punitive education climate, and
the corporate state lackeys upholding it all. The public school
movement and the growing momentum supporting mass prisoner
release, New Jersey’s “Decarcerate the Garden State” organization
is spearheading decarceration legislation, are sowing the seeds
for powerful coalition based work to cease school to prison
pipeline profiteering altogether (http://plainfieldview.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/decarcerate-nj-takes-aim-at-massive-penal-state/).
Democracy
is no spectator sport. Words matter. "Democratization"
is the term African Marxist political economist, Samir Amin, uses.
For him, democratization more precisely describes a process of
becoming, people in motion engaged with human institutions. When
all is said and done, September 4, 2014, is a stark reminder that
people are democratizing human institutions—like school and
work—and resisting a multi-pronged class war that is bludgeoning
America's families.
Young
people are being stalked, harassed, and murdered by police,
ignored or used by school administrators, corporate executives,
and politicians, and supported by stretched to the breaking point
parents who need not just living--but thriving--wages in order to
keep their families going. Children's living/ learning conditions
are parents' working conditions in the most basic
sense. Corporate/ state collusion is the 99%'s common enemy
—whether it be defense industry equipment from Afghanistan and
Iraq flowing to U.S. police departments, computer and education
executives endorsing federal learning standards to enhance bottom
line profits, or government subsidizing fast food and home care
workers' households instead of taxing amassed corporate wealth
offshore and stateside. And if September 4, 2014, is any
indication, less people are buying the equation between hard work,
good intentions and the American dream. The same targeted
families are defending new/old dreams of freedom, fighting with
new/old weapons, tactics, and strategies, and inspiring new waves
of continued activism in the many arenas under upper-class attack.
The
minority, that increasingly relies upon government intervention to
maintain and expand wealth and the political power its buys and
rents, needs people’s compliance to legitimate its status quo. No
thanks! People in Ferguson, Newark and across the U.S. are sick
and tired of this, in the words of the late and great Fannie Lou
Hamer. Oppressed people refusing to buy what their oppressors are
selling in a society growing more polarized with each passing day
marks a step forward. There will be counterpoised steps in the
days to come, no doubt. However, the concept of progress,
opportunity for humans to develop to their full potential without
making concessions to power and wealth, is a key moment in a long
road to emancipation from oppression. Happy September
4th, everyone!
(Since
students' lives are the bridge between oppressive learning and
working conditions, please follow and support the Newark Students
Union as they prepare for a demonstration against One Newark on
September 9, 2014: https://www.facebook.com/NewarkStudentsUnion )
Michelle
Renee Matisons, Ph.D., can be reached at
michrenee@gmail.com
Seth
Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the
freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com
