PA Teachers Endanger All Workers By Working for Free

This is dead wrong and extremely dangerous:

The Chester Upland School District in Delaware County, Pennsylvania suffered a serious setback when Gov. Tom Corbett (R) slashed $900 million in education funds from the state budget. The cuts landed hardest on poorer districts, and Chester Upland, which predominantly serves African-American children and relies on state aid for nearly 70 percent of its funding, expects to fall short this school year by $19 million.

Faced with such a shortage of funds, the school district informed its staff that it will not be able to pay their salaries come Wednesday. So the teachers decided to work for free. As one teacher put it, students “need to be educated, so we intend to be on the job”:

At a union meeting at Chester High School on Tuesday night, the employees passed a resolution saying they would stay on “as long as we are individually able.”

Columbus Elementary School math and literacy teacher Sara Ferguson, who has taught in Chester Upland for 21 years, said after the meeting, “It’s alarming. It’s disturbing. But we are adults; we will make a way. The students don’t have any contingency plan. They need to be educated, so we intend to be on the job.”

The school board and the unions separately begged Corbett to provide financial aid for the district, but Corbett turned each request down. Pennsylvania’s Education Secretary Ron Tomalis told the board that it “had failed to properly manage its finances and would not get any additional funds.” Chester Upland was forced to lay off “40 percent of its professional staff and about half of its unionized support staff before school began last fall.” That leaves 200 professionals and 65 support staff to manage a school with class sizes of over 40 students.

Chester Upland is not the only district desperately trying to stay afloat. Corbett’s cuts forced one school district to enforce wage freezes and cut extracurricular activities and another turned to actually using sheep instead of lawnmowers to cut grass at two of its schools. As ThinkProgress’s Travis Waldron pointed out, Corbett could relieve school districts if he let special interest groups like tobacco and the oil and gas industry go without their tax breaks. But he seems to prefer allowing teachers to go without pay.

Do I really have to explain that this is exactly what the repugs and one-percenters want?

This is what scabs do: give bosses an opening to slash wages and benefits down to nothing, because there are always desperate - or desperately naive - people willing to accept serfdom.

Nationwide, austerity hysterics are eliminating public-sector jobs by the tens of thousands every month.

David Dayen @Firedoglake:

While looking for something else, I found this chart from Calculated Risk:



It irks me to hear Democratic officials hail “private sector jobs numbers” or the “rebound in the private sector,” as if there are somehow two economies out there, and the amount of jobs up or down in the one where governments happen to sign the paychecks somehow has no bearing on the other. When cops and firefighters and teachers and nurses lose their jobs, they lose purchasing power. They lose the ability to hire private contractors or visit private businesses for the purchase of goods and services. Public employees don’t use a different currency or a different set of businesses. You cannot divorce them from the private sector.

And writing the public sector out of the equation like this really obscures the incredible nature of the depression in public sector jobs over the past few years. That shows up clearly in the graph above from Calculated Risk.

Why should the parastic rich pay a dime in taxes for teachers' salaries when obviously the "good" teachers are willing to work for free?

And if teachers work for free, what kind of freeloading commies are those cops and firefighters demanding money in return for their public service? And those fat-assed bureaucrats who make sure the water is fit to drink and the sewers flow freely and the roads are smooth and snow-free - why, they should be paying the one-percenters for the privilege of serving them!

Fuck you, teachers of Chester Upland School District in Pennsylvania - you're making everything worse.