If you have any doubt that there is a war against workers, consider what the Providence School Board did this week.
They sent letters telling nearly all of its 2,000 teachers that they’ve been canned. The move, city officials said, gives them maximum flexibility to make budget cuts. (Note: "Flexibility" is a nice way to say "union busting.")
According to the LA Times,
The school board of Rhode Island's financially troubled capital city has voted to send termination letters to all of its nearly 2,000 teachers after city officials said the move would give them "maximum flexibility" to make budget cuts...
Providence teachers received notices of potential layoffs before the board met Thursday night and voted 4-3 on sending termination letters. The notices don't mean the teachers will lose their jobs, but the vote means some of them could at the end of the year.
More than 700 teachers packed the Providence Career and Technical Academy gymnasium Thursday to tell school officials their hearts were broken, their trust was violated and their futures as teachers were jeopardized, the Providence Journal newspaper reported.The school district overspent its budget by $57 million last year. But the Providence teachers didn’t cause that debt. The recession did. And Wall Street's recklessness caused the recession. We've been over that ground before, and we'll go over it again.
Under the district’s layoff policy, teachers may be recalled based on seniority. But because they were fired, there's no guarantee that seniority would be used to bring back any of the fired teachers.
It's union-busting under the guise of solving a budget problem. Now where have we seen that beforee?
