Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1081203
65 Q1 2019 / CINEMONTAGE The shutdown forced 800,000 federal workers to be sidelined without pay. Some 429,000 of these were forced to work with no pay, writes Rachel Layne for CBS News. The harm to the economy exceeds the billions of dollars in delayed salaries and the distress the delays caused. It did additional harm to the ability of the FBI and the US Coast Guard to do their jobs, and harms contractors and related businesses that will not have lost incomes repaid. In the days after the re-opening, many lawmakers considered preventing such a shutdown from happening again. The deal to re-open the government came on the same day that the number of furloughed air traffic controllers on duty at airports in several major cities fell below acceptable levels, wrote Patrick McGeehan in The New York Times. This caused a brief suspension of service. Only days before, union leaders had issued a dire warning about flight safety. "It is unprecedented," said the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the Air Line Pilots Association and the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA in a joint statement about the shutdown. "In our risk averse industry, we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break." Jacob Rosenberg reported on this in Mother Jones. Many unions and union members have loudly opposed the shutdown and have done so in large numbers. Several affected unions have sued over withheld pay, including air traffic controllers, and border and customs agents who work for the Treasury Department. On January 15, a federal judge refused to force the government to pay furloughed workers. What happens after February 15 is anyone's guess. Rank-and-file union members do not want to be used again as pawns in this titanic battle. LA TEACHERS STRIKE SETTLED More than 30,000 Los Angeles teachers of the Los Angeles Unified School District went on strike January 14, writes Katie Reilly in Time magazine. The strike — the first in 30 years — was due to failed negotiations over school funding, pay raises, classroom sizes and staffing issues. As they mobilized support, teachers also focused on the growth of charter schools as a central issue in the nation's second largest school district. A tentative settlement was announced on January 22 and ratified later the same day. LAUSD teachers returned to their classrooms January 23. According to the union, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), the deal includes increases in school funding and related staffing, increases in teacher funding, decreases in class size and promises of broad-based advocacy for more transparent oversight of charter schools. "This is a historic victory for…educators, students and parents," said UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl. "Class- size reduction, limits on testing, and access to nurses, counselors and librarians will change our students' lives forever. We won this victory through our unity, our action and our shared sacrifice." About one in five Los Angeles students currently attends charter schools, and charter school enrollment has kept growing in the past decade as overall enrollment in the district has declined. The city now has more charter schools and more charter school students than any other school system in the country, according to the Los Angeles Times. Most charter school employees are not unionized, wrote Reilly. THE RETURN OF THE STRIKE For years, many labor experts were ready to write the obituary for strikes in America, wrote Steven Greenhouse in The American Prospect. In 2017, the number of major strikes — those including more than 1,000 workers — dropped to just seven in the private sector. Sadly, over the span of the past decade, there were on average just 13 major strikes a year. That's less than a sixth of the average annual number in the 1980s (83), and less than one-twentieth of the yearly average in the 1970s (288). Things changed in 2018. We saw a startling surge of strikes in both the private and public sectors. More than 20,000 teachers and other school employees decided to walk out in West Virginia last February, followed by at least 20,000 more in Oklahoma. Probably the biggest teachers' strike was in Arizona, where more than 40,000 went on strike. There were smaller but still significant teacher walkouts in Colorado, Kentucky and North Carolina. Last September, 6,000 hotel workers went on strike against 26 Chicago hotels to demand year-round health LABOR MAT TERS Actor, musician and activist Steven Van Zandt joins Los Angeles teachers and students on the picket line in front of Hamilton High School on January 16. Photo by Richard Vogel/ Associated Press