Day 10+ Rage and Fatigue
Strike Update on November 15, 2023 included a link to the strike fund. Individual schools were mostly taking funds through private cash apps, so I didn’t share them, but bear in mind that people are still feeling the pinch from this month
Tomorrow is going to be day ten of the Portland teachers strike, which is just over two full calendar weeks. People are really tired. The teachers are feeling the financial pinch. They get some support from the union but for some of the ones on the higher end of the teacher pay scale, it is a big gap. Not that being on the higher end of the teacher pay scale is living high, particularly in Portland. And the high end of the teacher scale only comes in play for those with years of experience, a Masters degree and multiple hours of professional education credit. Whatever salary the teachers have, at any end of the scale, each month it has to cover rent/mortgage, car insurance, child care, groceries, utilities. Sure, some people have working spouses, but how many people can afford to just lose half a months pay? Not many, particularly in a town known for its high housing costs. No one strikes if they have a better option.
Everyone else is tired too. The parents of 45,000 children are worn out. The kids are bored and restless. People with small children need child care. Child care is expensive and hard to find. The parents are getting angry at the teachers, blaming them for not just caving and taking the deal, any deal, just to get back to normal.
This is an extra shitty situation because it pits parents and teachers against each other because our society willfully refuses to acknowledge that children (or really any vulnerable people) need care. There is no care infrastructure in this country. This forces parents to treat schools and educators as child care. Child care is essential to a functioning workforce, so children being out of school is catastrophic to parents who have to work outside the home. And the pandemic did not turn everyone into remote workers. Transportation, food service, healthcare care, skilled trades, sanitation, judiciary, and postal workers all go to work and many of them have school age children.
You can bet the PPS negotiating team knows all of this. The legislature knows it and the governor knows it. Everyone knows this is all going to add up to tremendous pressure on the educators to take a deal because they are the ones not working and facing eroding community support. The legislature that has deliberately chosen not to fund legislation at the state level for decades is hanging in the weeds because they know that if they rescue PPS, next month they’ll have to rescue Salem, then after that Bend and Medford. (“Rescue” meaning fund vital services state wide like they should have been doing all along). PPS is presumably getting pressure on all sides because the money is fixed, and even if they get their heads out of their bums and take down the most asinine of their current job posts, they can wring out only a few million where the differentials between proposals are in the tens of millions.
That being said, PPS is stunningly tone deaf, even as they send out a crocodile tears announcement every day that there’s no school tomorrow. In the last five days PPS posted a position for “director of charter schools” that STARTS at $118,000. Talk about classy… and that’s without even getting into the details of ways in which charter schools suck money out of regular schools, before paying someone six figures to just pick their nose while thinking about charter schools. If you’re a single parent who is looking at losing your job because your kindergartner has no childcare and you’ve been depending on free school lunch to keep your kid fed, I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that PPS is holding up a deal to pay educators a cost of living increase while simultaneously looking for someone to pay 118k, minimum plus benefits to “direct” charter school programming.
Also posted right now is a “Business operations analyst”. This is a non student facing position whose function is apparently to meditate on curriculum, and which starts at 70k (20k more than a starting teacher) and tops at 120k (30k more than the top of the scale for a teacher). If PPS can’t find someone to “analyze” curriculum for the same amount they pay someone to teach it, maybe they don’t need someone doing it.
Just as a little thought experiment I’m gonna throw some numbers even though I’m in a profession for whom numbers come with a “don’t try this at home” warning.
Inflation in the United States was 7% in 2021 and 6% in 2022. That means the value of salaries is actually declining. And PAT didn’t bargain during COVID, so they’ve essentially delayed getting a raise. PAT is asking for something like 8% cost of living increase. PPS is offering 3% (I’m not calculating increases across multiple years for the moment).
For an educator making 60,000, 8% is $4800. A single 120,000 director or analyst position equals an 8% raise for 25 educators making 60k. Put another way, if you took 120K off of Guadelupe Guerrero’s salary, he’d still be making over 200K and you’d get 25 more 8% increases!
There’s also a “cabinet level” position posted. Calling the superintendent’s top managers a “cabinet” is weirdly pretentious and makes them seem way more important than they could possibly be. And those people seem to be paid about $180,000 a year. That’s the equivalent of an 8% raise for 25 educators making 90,000 a year.
I know it’s not that simple, because there’s benefits, pensions, etc plus the whole new positions that would be needed in order to keep class sizes at a level that is humane for both the kids and the teachers. Still, I’m trying to envision bargaining for PAT and someone sitting across from me saying “we’ll give you 3%, which doesn’t even keep the value of your salary level, and *you’re* taking money out of the mouths of educational aides and janitors” while that person is simultaneously waving 180,000 around saying “come let us give you this money to be in GG’s ‘cabinet’”. I swear I have been in some very acrimonious, high stakes negotiations in my career and I have never leapt up from the table screaming and brandishing both my hands with middle fingers raised. But I would be tempted.
This sucks. PAT is carrying the weight of living wages for thousands of its members on their backs, but also every educator in this state who has taught through the pandemic, is seeing the paycheck stretched farther and thinner, and waiting to see how PAT’s contract shakes out when they go to the table with their districts. PPS is just hoping that PAT breaks first and that the community turns on its teachers. I’d just like my senior, who started highschool on zoom meetings, to graduate on time.
Today I donated to the teachers relief fund for one of my kids schools and to the PAT strike solidarity fund. Because I’m very lucky in many ways. Partly because I had a good public education and I support the investment in our society’s health and future that good schools and decently paid educators represent.