Schools are a huge part of the economy—not just a place teachers and support staff and clerical workers and custodians work, but a place parents rely on to care for their kids so they can go to work. That means, as National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García said in a statement, “The American economy cannot recover if schools can’t reopen.” But reopening schools has to be done right, and without sacrificing students’ education, she continued, saying “we cannot properly reopen schools if funding is slashed and students don’t have what they need to be safe, learn and succeed.”
The NEA has offered its own guidance for reopening schools, calling for decisions rooted in science, with educators included in decision-making (they know their classrooms best, after all), access to personal protective equipment for students and school staff alike, and attention to equity in a pandemic that has hit Black and Latino communities especially hard. The union also calls for school systems to learn from the inequities exposed by the sudden move to remote learning, in which some students had computers and internet access and quiet places to learn while other students had none of those things. The NEA guidance is long, detailed, and thoughtful—and if you have many teacher friends, you may have heard that state reopening plans are … not necessarily those things.
● SEIU 32BJ is calling out a commercial property owner for laying off 40% of its janitors despite collecting 98% of its rents in April. The union notes that most commercial property owners kept their janitors on the job as essential workers.
● Just what we need: Gaps in the emergency paid sick leave law for healthcare workers.
● Guest workers describe coronavirus nightmare on Louisiana crawfish farm, Dave Jamieson reports:
Alvarez Navarro and Hernandez Villadares said they became “extremely sick” in mid-May, but were told to transfer to quarantine housing instead of seeking medical treatment. “I told my coworkers that I did not trust the company to take care of us and I thought we would all be safer going to the hospital immediately,” Alvarez Navarro wrote in her charge with the NLRB.
The two said they went to Acadia General Hospital for treatment on May 15 and did not return to the company housing. They were fired, and supervisors told them that the company was going to report them to immigration because they no longer worked for the company that held their visa, the pair said in their filings.
● Here’s a point-counterpoint for you: It's time to kick police unions out of the labor movement, Hamilton Nolan writes. But the central issue is police repression, not police unions, Bill Fletcher Jr. writes. Do not mistake Fletcher’s argument as coming from the right in any way.
● Speaking of, the Martin Luther King County Labor Council expelled the Seattle Police Officers Guild from its ranks.
● And Adeshina Emmanuel compares how Chicago treats its police union vs. its teachers union.
● When you hear police talk about their work, it’s important to remember that policing does not rank as one of the 10 most dangerous jobs in this country.
● Working America talked to Black workers about unemployment insurance, finding that just over one-half weren’t aware of the expanded federal benefits passed as part of coronavirus relief.
● Disney offers reopening details, but some workers want a delay (until it’s safe).
