Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics

Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strikes and Working-Class Politics, by Eric Blanc (London, England: Verso Books, 2019)

Reviewed by Steve Golin, Professor Emeritus of History at Bloomfield College, NJ, author of The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Temple U. Press, 1988) and The Newark Teacher Strikes: Hopes on the Line (Rutgers U. Press, 2002).

Eric Blanc focuses on the 2018 teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona. All three strikes were in Republican-dominated states, where teachers’ unions were weak and funding for education had suffered grievous cuts. His focus on the three red states gives depth to the book, and consistently challenges what we think we know about red states.

 

In West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, rank-and-file teachers drove the movement to walk out. Classroom teachers transformed themselves, overcoming their fear of striking. The unions were cautious throughout, seeking to put a brake on militancy. One of Blanc’s accomplishments is to show that weak unions do not necessarily mean a weak labor movement. But he doesn’t stop there. He shows that organizing outside and below the teachers’ unions got the movement started, and he shows that to be successful, the movement needed the organizational support and resources of the teachers’ unions. Where the movement was strongest and the strikes most successful, the unions too were transformed, at least for a while.

 

The 2018 teachers’ strikes began in West Virginia. Blanc’s great strength is that he visited West Virginia during and just after the strike and talked to the radicals who started it. He talked, for instance, to Emily Comer. She was active in Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and became radicalized. In 2016, when the Bernie Sanders’ campaign came to West Virginia ––Bernie swept the primary in West Virginia, winning every county— Comer recognized that the possibilities for radical action by teachers were beginning to open up. “I think the biggest difference is that since 2016 we’ve been developing a network of radicals in West Virginia.” The radical network of teachers connected with other teachers who were not radical, and with fearful teachers’ unions, to prepare teachers for an illegal strike. Ultimately, the teachers walked out in all 55 West Virginia counties, and stayed out, until they won.

 

The strike in Oklahoma was not as successful as in West Virginia. Blanc explains why. As in West Virginia and Arizona, Oklahoma teachers used a Facebook page to connect with each other and build  momentum toward a walk out. But in Oklahoma, the teachers organizing on Facebook were not connected to the teachers active in the union; instead, their orientation was toward building support from the superintendents. Crucially, the teachers organizing on Facebook in Oklahoma did not push for rank-and file teachers to vote on a walkout. The walkout was called via Facebook, and ended via Facebook, before it achieved its goals.

 

In Arizona, the three young teachers who started the agitation on Facebook were radicals. In Blanc’s book, and only in his book, you will learn that two of the three had been transformed by Sanders’s 2016 campaign. and the third key radical activist had been transformed in 2012, when she participated in the breakthrough Chicago teachers strike. These three young leftists were committed to grass-roots democracy. They took the time to organize the teachers, to prepare for a strike, to win strike votes, district by district. They created irresistible momentum, which drew critical support from the teachers’ unions. Though their state was arguably the most conservative of the three, the Arizona teachers stayed out until they won most of their demands from the legislature.

 

Blanc teaches us about political possibility in red states. The teachers won support from the public in all three states. Imbued with an equalitarian outlook, grassroots teachers’ organizers included non-teaching school employees in their demands. At the other end of the hierarchy, they won support from superintendents, who also hated the way the Republican legislatures were starving the schools. And Blanc shows how the relative weakness of Democratic parties in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona created space for organizing; the Democratic parties in these red states lacked the clout to cool off the strike movements. (The political opportunities for teachers’ strikes were very different in Democratic strongholds like Chicago and Los Angeles, which are beyond the scope of Blanc’s book.)

 

More generally, one of Blanc’s accomplishments is to take teachers seriously, as workers. When I published The Newark Teacher Strikes: Hopes on the Line, in 2002, few labor history journals reviewed it. The assumption seemed to be that labor and working-class history was about private-sector, blue-color workers. Blanc effectively challenges that assumption. He studies the labor struggles of the teachers from the bottom up, as labor historians have long studied the struggles of blue-collar workers. Teachers in red states created powerful strikes that no one had foreseen. Blanc shows how they did it.