The United Teachers of Richmond, UTR, are members of the California Alliance for Community Schools. CACS for short. We have been working with a dozen or so other locals including all the biggest ones in California to build a coordinated struggle for the funding our schools need. Our organizing team attended a training where Jane McAlevey was one of the trainers. She struck a militant tone pointing out that unions really have a powerful weapon in a strike action and we ought not to be shy about using it in the struggle. Of course, we must prepare well and test our strength before committing to a strike. 

This training had made me hopeful that locals working together and building strike capacity could create a movement statewide capable of shaking the money out of Sacramento and the wealthy class of our state. As this planning has been progressing a pandemic hit. Unfortunately, I feel like all the organizing effort necessary to build to this point has been put on the back burner in order to prioritize protecting our members and our students from the COVID virus and the unsafe practices and demands of our district administration.

As we agreed to come back this fall, we were told that the administration agreed with the union that we would follow county guidelines. This has not been the case. I can speak from personal experience that students returning from being home sick have not been tested or quarantined. Students with symptoms have been kept at school. Isolation is minimal. COVID cases in classrooms have not led to multiple testing over the possible incubation period of 10 days. Teachers are in a difficult position when their principal states that he or she has their orders and that is that. UTR is attempting to negotiate a MOU, Memorandum of Understanding, in order to come to an agreement about district wide procedures. The district has not been cooperative and the negotiations are not moving forward. 

The union is going forward with an OSHA complaint and publicizing these unsafe procedures. Site representatives and staff are pushing back and there is improvement here and there. However, I am personally a little frustrated in that there always seems to be a fire, a crisis, that gets in the way or distracts us from doing the long term organizing that we so desperately need to do.

Eric Swabeck