A considerable degree of confusion appears to be attending the
ostensible conclusion to the Chicago Teachers' strike. Indeed, with various
interests proclaiming victory, it is difficult to arrive at a clear understanding
of just what the outcome portends. Before addressing the facts, however - which
are indispensable in any effort to evaluate a situation - a word ought to be
given to the context in which the strike unfolded. Among other things, it is
important to note that, beyond the talking points regarding school choice, accountability,
and teacher and student performance, we must recognize the key austerity
impetus subtending the efforts of Rahm Emanuel, and his ilk, to push forward
their plan to privatize public schools in Chicago and elsewhere. Like most
things that pass for social policy considerations these days, the purpose of
shutting down schools and so-called education reform is not the improvement of
education so much as it is an effort to convert public schools into private,
charter schools.
Whether advanced by the Koch Brother-funded
Republican
governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, or the no less business-friendly
Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel, the ongoing attack on labor and public
sector
employees and unions is at its root just this effort to transform public
education into private education. Just as the privatization of public
utilities
created and continues to create new markets - creating new sources of
profits for businesses and
further polarizing wealth - the privatization of public schools is a
bonanza
for businesses, while its benefit to most people is questionable at
best. Confronted by this, unlike the public transit workers' strike
waged in London earlier this summer,
in which London's transit workers' pushed for better working conditions
and
pay, the Chicago teachers' strike must not be seen as an offensive
strike.
Rather than striking to secure better working conditions and better pay,
per
se, the Chicago teachers' strike is a defensive, conservative strike,
one
in which labor is merely attempting to hold onto not only the wages and
benefits that were gained through decades of struggle and which are now
under
threat, but to their jobs themselves.
Under the familiar call for accountability, which masks the
push for of austerity (accountability which, it should be noted, is rarely
invoked to rein in corporate criminals) Emanuel demanded that Chicago's
teachers concede some of their benefits in the negotiations over the renewal of
their labor contract. Among the things that Rahm Emanuel, and the privatizing
classes, demanded were longer working days, greater power over the firing of
teachers granted to school principals, and teacher performance evaluations that
are tied to standardized test scores - the latter two allowing the mayor and
his constituency to more easily shutter public schools, and to replace them
with private, charter schools. Initially resisting these efforts, the Chicago
teachers soon found themselves facing Rahm Emanuel's threat of a court-ordered
injunction. Cowed by this, the teachers' union agreed to a compromise.
Among the concessions the union agreed to were just what Emanuel asked for: more rigorous
teacher evaluations (though they are only partially, rather than wholly determined
by standardized test scores), the aggrandizement of the power of principals to
hire or fire teachers based on performance -
with layoffs now for the first time being determined by teacher performance -
and a lengthening of the school day (an increase of half an hour a day for high schools, 75
minutes a day for elementary schools, and two weeks added to the total school
year).
Even a cursory look at these concessions must yield
the
conclusion that rather than achieving a victory, or even a stalemate,
the
contract under consideration represents a loss for labor in the ongoing
class
war of attrition. For, among other things, the lengthening of the school
day
and the school year alone amounts to something close to four extra weeks
of work for high
school teachers, and considerably more for primary school teachers. Such
an
extension of the time teachers are expected to work is hardly
remunerated by
the raises under negotiation. To be sure, when factoring in the
extra time
they will have to work, teachers won't receive much of a raise at all.
For the first
few years of their new contract, when their work load increases by close
to 10%
and their pay increases by only 3%, they will be taking a loss. And
while the teachers did attain some of their demands - books will be more readily
available to students - and stave off a more forceful attack by the
forces of privatization, they ultimately lost rather than gained
ground.
As it is highly relevant, it is worth reflecting for a
moment on the legal argument that Rahm Emanuel advanced in favor of seeking to
enjoin the teachers to end their strike. In addition to arguing that their
strike was illegal because they were demanding more than mere wages, Emanuel
argued that the strike was illegal because it threatened public health and
safety. Such an argument (which Bloomberg, by the way, invoked in order to
eject demonstrators from Zuccotti Park last year) requires a tremendously
narrow-minded and shortsighted conceptualization of public health, one which
has long been employed as a pretext for power's designs. Intimidated by this
threat, and vilified by the mainstream press, the teachers backed down. Rather
than submitting to his power play, however, and ending their strike, the
teachers should have counter-argued that it is not they, but Emanuel himself
who is harming the public health by creating social conditions that are
objectively harmful to not only teachers and students, but to society in
general. For if in the short-term the teachers’ strike is conceivably harmful
to the public health, Emanuel’s long-term designs pose a substantially greater harm.
Beyond the fact that public health requires a
reasonably
well-educated public - a public possessing not only a basic
understanding of such
health issues as the importance of nutrition, sanitation, and exercise,
but
also an awareness of the prevalence and transmissibility of communicable
diseases, not to mention the environmental issues that determine our
public
health, or lack thereof - such an education must itself be afforded in
conditions that are conducive to learning. Crammed into overcrowded
classrooms,
Chicago's students and teachers alike are consigned to operate in
facilities
that are neglected and decrepit to such an extent as to pose serious
risks to the public
health. Beyond their other deficiencies, many of the classrooms in the Chicago public schools
lack
basic air-conditioning. In Chicago's torrid heat, such conditions alone
can severely challenge students' health, and the public health in
general, not to mention the more serious problems attending a generally
dilapidated infrastructure.
In addition to the conditions that teachers and students encounter
within the schools themselves, however, who can reasonably maintain that it is
not in the interest of public health to provide decent living conditions to the
sizable portion of the public represented by school teachers? For, as
much as those who vilify them argue otherwise, teachers are not gluttons so
much as the victims of those very gluttons championed by their detractors. Not only is it
well-documented and well-known that nearly all teachers eke out a fairly modest
living, if the opponents of teachers, and of the working class, have their
way the result will be an even greater number of people living in conditions
of precarity – conditions which, it should be noted, have been demonstrated by
a mountain of studies to be a contributing cause of illness. Beyond the health
problems attending poor nutrition and poor housing, for instance, the stress
accompanying the inability to make ends meet is itself a significant cause
of disease. Producing such conditions can not possibly be in the interest of
the public health.
But Rahm Emanuel is not interested in the health of society
so much as he is interested in the health of a mere segment of society. This is
hardly new; appealing to health is an old trick of such political types. And though
he may not be referring to it by name, in arguing that the teachers’ strike is
a public health concern, and therefore justifies his putting it down by force (by violence, which is the opposite of health),
in many respects Emanuel is invoking the ancient Roman maxim Salus Populi
Suprema Lex Esto - the health of the people is the supreme law.
Attributed to the Roman statesman and orator Cicero, the
maxim has long been used to justify the machinations of the State and coercive
power. Modernly, one of the first political theorists to employ the ancient Roman
maxim was none other than the Renaissance political-theorist Niccolo
Machiavelli. Titling one of the final sections of his Discourses on Livy with the above maxim, Macchiavelli argued that
what was necessary for the health of the people was the supreme law, to which
all other laws had to yield. Of course, Macchiavelli's notion of what comprised
'the people' was limited, pretty much, to the prince. Then as now, the people
in general were considered something more like a resource from which profit
could be extracted. But the maxim’s use is not restricted to princes and their
followers.
Fighting against the Royalists in mid-seventeenth
century
England, and resisting the enclosure, privatization and sale of commonly owned
lands, the
so-called Levellers appropriated the maxim that the health of the people
is the
supreme law. Earning their
name from their practice of leveling the hedges used to divide the
commons, the Levellers argued that the maxim applied not to tyrants and
oligarchies, but to the
people in general. As such, the Levellers gave the maxim an emancipatory
interpretation. Maintaining that it granted people certain rights
against the crown, including
an extension of the suffrage, the
Levellers repeatedly employed the maxim
in their struggle for self-government and collective control of lands that had historically been held in common.
But the Levellers were not alone in deferring to the maxim. Around the same
time, Thomas Hobbes, the great theorist of absolutism, employed the maxim that the health of the people is the
supreme law. Rather than the Levellers' interpretation, however, in his treatise
Leviathan Hobbes' gives the maxim something closer to a Machiavellian reading.
Around the time of Hobbes's death, John Locke - whose thought was to exert a
significant influence on the thought of the North American colonists of the
eighteenth century - referred to the maxim in his Second Treatise of
Government. And
though Locke’s thought is deeply problematic, and he attributes the
designation
'people' to only a narrow segment of humanity, it is not only important
that he
employs it against the crown, but his liberatory interpretation of the
maxim would be imparted to the North American colonists fighting the
British
for the ability to govern their own lives. Playing a significant
part in the articulation of justice in the years leading up to and
beyond the American
Revolution, the maxim is appealed to repeatedly as an authority limiting
coercive power. Not only did it appear again and again in the writings
and speeches of John Adams, among other Founders, the sensibility that
the health of the people is the supreme law finds expression in the
Declaration of Independence. It is especially noteworthy to remark that
in the period following independence from the British, around the time
that Shays' Rebellion was being fought in New England by soldiers and
farmers whose homes were seized when they were unable to pay the debts
they had accrued while fighting in the war, in the south other debtors
challenged their debts as well. Invoking the maxim
Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto, they sought to discharge their debts
completely. Arguing that high debts
are onerous and against the health of the people, the debtors prevailed.
Much to the chagrin of their creditors, their debts were forgiven. If
the health of the people is the supreme law, the argument goes, that
which is hostile to the health of the people is invalid. As
such, contracts that would harm the health of the people were nullified -
something debtors today might
want to consider.
These two interpretations of the maxim, the
emancipatory and the dominating, were employed again and again
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Overriding contracts and
property law where these infringed on the health of the people, the
maxim was used to shut down slaughterhouses and tanneries, as well as to
regulate food production, and other industries. And while the maxim did
nothing to liberate people from slavery, and excluded Native Americans,
African-Americans, and women, not to mention
disabled persons as well as the poor from the designation 'people,' it
nevertheless possessed an emancipatory content in relation to the harms spread by business -
one that, today, ought to be expanded. As the 20th century progressed, however, its
emancipatory interpretation gave way to a reading more favorable to
dominating power. In referring to the health of the people as the
supreme law, this latter type of interpretation favors the health of the State and
business interests. That is, it possesses a narrow understanding of health that views the
people of the world as a population to be managed, a workforce from
which to extract profit, and a resource to employ to
further its own particular well being. Indeed, according to this reading, the
health of the people is for the wealthy what the health of
the horse is to the farmer. The horse, whose job's to drag and haul and
otherwise support the lavish carriages of plutocrats, is not to enjoy health for its own sake. It is this reading
of the maxim that Michael Bloomberg referred to in clearing out
Zuccotti Park last November, and which now Rahm Emanuel appeals to in
breaking the Chicago teachers' strike.
Elliot Sperber is a writer, attorney, and contributor to hygiecracy.blogspot.com He lives in New York City and can be reached at elliot.sperber@gmail.com
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