https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU4xNt3NpvA
Friday, August 28, 2020
TikTok files federal lawsuit against the Trump administration
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/27/tikt-a27.html
By Kevin Reed
27 August 2020
On Monday, the social media platform TikTok filed a federal lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s xenophobic ban of the Chinese-owned company in the US if it is not sold within 45 days to an American-owned firm. The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California.
In a blog post entitled, “Why we are suing the Administration,” the company explains that President Trump’s executive order on August 6 forcing TikTok to divest its US assets on the basis of national security emergency powers is a violation of Fifth Amendment due process rights.
The TikTok statement says, “the Administration failed to follow due process and act in good faith, neither providing evidence that TikTok was an actual threat, nor justification for its punitive actions.” Trump’s executive orders against TikTok and the Chinese-owned app WeChat were based on provisions of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) that permit the president to regulate economic transactions during a national emergency.
The TikTok blog says, “Now is the time for us to act. We do not take suing the government lightly, however we feel we have no choice but to take action to protect our rights, and the rights of our community and employees.” The short-form video sharing app, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, has 1,500 employees and 100 million users in the US.
TikTok’s lawsuit thoroughly exposes the anti-Chinese political purpose of Trump’s executive order, “The executive order seeks to ban TikTok purportedly because of the speculative possibility that the application could be manipulated by the Chinese government. But, as the U.S. government is well aware, Plaintiffs have taken extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikTok’s U.S. user data, including by having TikTok store such data outside of China (in the United States and Singapore) and by erecting software barriers that help ensure that TikTok stores its U.S. user data separately from the user data of other ByteDance products.”
These measures were well-known by the US government as they were part of the requirements imposed on ByteDance at the start-up of TikTok in the US following the company’s acquisition of the Chinese company Musical.ly in 2017. At that time, ByteDance went through an extensive national security inspection which “provided voluminous documentation to the U.S. government documenting TikTok’s security practices and made commitments that were more than sufficient to address any conceivable U.S. government privacy or national security concerns.”
The lawsuit also says that “key personnel responsible for TikTok, including its CEO, Global Chief Security Officer, and General Counsel, are all Americans based in the United States—and therefore are not subject to Chinese law. U.S. content moderation is likewise led by a U.S.-based team and operates independently from China, and, as noted above, the TikTok application stores U.S. user data on servers located in the United States and Singapore.”
Furthermore, since the onset of the anti-Chinese campaign of the Trump administration and the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the company has cooperated for more than a year with a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), headed by US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
The TikTok brief explains, “During this period, and through the course of the CFIUS review, ByteDance provided voluminous documentation and information in response to CFIUS’s questions. Among other evidence, ByteDance submitted detailed documentation to CFIUS demonstrating TikTok’s security measures to help ensure U.S. user data is safeguarded in storage and in transit and cannot be accessed by unauthorized persons—including any government—outside the United States.”
Despite the cooperation, acting under the direction of the Trump administration and its increasingly aggressive economic attacks and military threats against China, CFIUS issued a letter five minutes before the expiration of its review deadline—at 11:55 p.m. on July 30—that was “principally based on outdated news articles, failed to address the voluminous documentation that Plaintiffs had provided demonstrating the security of TikTok user data, and was flawed in numerous other respects.”
True to his US imperialist bullying form and with a real estate speculator’s mentality, President Trump not only demanded that the assets of TikTok be handed over to American corporate executives and Wall Street speculators, he also insisted that a “very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the treasury of the United States. … It’s a little bit like the landlord-tenant. Without a lease, the tenant has nothing. So, they pay what’s called key money or they pay something.”
In response to this particularly criminal aspect of the entire project, the TikTok lawsuit says, “The President’s demands for payments have no relationship to any conceivable national security concern and serve only to underscore that Defendants failed [attempt] to provide Plaintiffs with the due process required by law.”
The US corporations Microsoft and Oracle were all too eager to jump on Trump’s anti-Chinese bandwagon. With dollar signs swirling around in their minds, corporate executives and investors for both software tech giants have gotten in line to make the purchase at a steep discount with the expectation of a massive post-purchase valuation on Wall Street.
A report in the New York Times on Wednesday said, “a deal with Microsoft could help propel the valuation of the app’s business outside China to as high as $80 billion,” and would provide TikTok with “the endorsement of a blue-chip American company to mollify the Trump administration, which had called TikTok’s Chinese ties a national security threat.”
Additionally, the Times report went on, “Bankers and investors, some authorized and some simply trying to gin up a deal, have also called Netflix and Twitter about buying TikTok, they said, though it is unclear if those companies have a genuine interest in an acquisition. … A deal price is unclear, though numbers have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion depending on what parts of TikTok will be sold, the people said.”
In other words, the vultures of the American oligarchy are expecting the forced sale of TikTok to rapidly yield as much as a 4-to-1 return on investment.
That there is both bipartisan support within the US political establishment and unanimity with the corporate elite for an aggressive takedown of the enormously successful Chinese mobile app developers was exposed by the Wall Street Journal on August 23.
In an article entitled, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Stoked Washington’s Fears About TikTok,” the Journal wrote, “In a private dinner at the White House in late October, Mr. Zuckerberg made the case to President Trump that the rise of Chinese internet companies threatens American business, and should be a bigger concern than reining in Facebook,” according to unnamed sources.
It was also after meetings that Zuckerberg held with Senator Tom Cotton (Republican-Arkansas) and Senator Chuck Schumer (Democrat-New York) that the two wrote a letter to intelligence officials demanding an inquiry into TikTok. A national-security review of the company began in November and the Trump administration began its offensive against TikTok in the spring.
Zuckerberg’s attempt to deflect government criticism of Facebook into a campaign against Chinese app developers is a particularly reactionary, but not surprising tactic for the American billionaire. In the end, the aggressive methods being deployed against TikTok will also be applied to the US-based social media platforms as part of the drive by the state to gain control of the information flow and to spy on the organization of the growing social unrest and class struggle against capitalism.
Markets focus on Fed chair’s Jackson Hole speech
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/27/hole-a27.html
By Nick Beams
27 August 2020
The eyes of financial markets around the world will be focused today on the keynote address to be delivered by US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to the annual Jackson Hole conclave of central bankers.
Powell’s speech, to be given in a completely virtual format because of the COVID-19 pandemic, will focus on the two-year review by the Fed of its monetary policy. The key question concerning financial elites around the world is how the Fed and other central banks intend to continue the stimulus to markets that has sent Wall Street to new record highs after it plunged in mid-March.
The massive $3 trillion injection by the Fed since the plunge, backing every sector of the financial markets, has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the coffers of the financial elites, above all those holding technology-based stocks.
Last May, Forbes ’ global rich list reported that the world’s 25 richest individuals had increased their total wealth by $255 billion in the space of just two months. With the continued rise of Wall Street since then, that figure will have further increased.
Powell has previously stated there are no limits to the Fed’s action so far as injecting money is concerned, and if there is another crisis it will act. But there are questions about what form such action will take under conditions where the world economy is experiencing its worst downturn since the Great Depression.
Mark Sobel, a former US Treasury official and now the chairman of a central bank think tank, told the Financial Times: “The Fed and the European Central Bank have used up a lot of ammo. Even when advanced economies are significantly recovering, there will still be a legacy of sky-high unemployment, large output gaps and enormous dislocations to deal with.”
As far as the real economy is concerned, further monetary stimulus will do nothing to lift output or ease unemployment. The central bank is “pushing on a string,” according to Adam Posen, the president of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“You can alleviate liquidity problems, you can put a floor under some asset prices, you can stabilise credit markets, all of which is constructive, but none of which is sufficient to create recovery,” he said.
Investors in the financial markets, however, are eagerly anticipating that the Fed will signal action to further expand monetary intervention to keep the Wall Street surge going.
However, there are concerns in some quarters about where the unprecedented intervention is going to end. According to Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, “There’s a legitimate worry at this point that we are doing a bit of levitation. The massive increase in leverage and the low rates forever… all of these things are worrying from a financial stability point of view.”
In the past five months, corporations have taken on massive amounts of new debt in order to stave off bankruptcy. According to the rating agency S&P, corporations globally have raised $2 trillion in bonds alone so far this year, an increase of $600 billion over the same period last year.
In the US, companies have issued a record $1.25 trillion in debt, of which almost $1 trillion was raised following the March 23 decision by the Fed that it would intervene to buy corporate bonds as a backstop to the market.
The largest share of borrowing has been by investment-grade companies. But money has also been raised by junk-rated companies, which have issued $220 billion worth of bonds so far this year.
The debt issuance has been predicated on the assumption that the economy will “bounce back” and the debt will be able to be paid back. But these expectations will be thrown awry if there is a second wave of infections and consumer demand does not recover. There is no prospect for an increase in investment—the key driver of the economy—as it was already in decline before the pandemic struck.
Even under relatively favourable conditions, S&P estimates that the default rate for US junk-rated companies will rise to 15.5 percent by next March, higher than the peak experienced in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis. And if there is a deepening downturn in the global economy, investment-grade companies will also be hit.
There is another significant development in the stock market that underscores the unprecedented character of the present economic and financial crisis. While Wall Street indexes continue to surge, the so-called “recovery” has been far from broad-based. It is concentrated in the high-tech stocks such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which make up a large proportion of the S&P 500 index.
This has given rise to what is being referred to as a K-shaped development—a situation in which the share prices of market leaders diverge from others. In analysis of the market, Vincent Deluard, the director of global macro strategy at the brokerage firm Stone Group, told Bloomberg: “I would summarize 2020 as the bear market for humans. Like many things, COVID is just accelerating social transformation, concentration of wealth in a few hands, massive inequalities, competition issues and all that.”
He pointed out that firms that have relatively few employees have beaten the more labour-intensive ones by 37 percentage points in 2020.
One aspect of the divergence is the fact that high-tech companies employ relatively few workers and have been able to benefit from the pandemic, as reflected in the 33 percent rise in the tech-heavy NASDQ index so far this year. The one exception is Amazon, which has been able to increase its sales because of the increased turn to online purchases.
Bloomberg cited one extreme example of this process. MarketAxess Holdings, an automated bond trading firm, has seen its shares rise by 29 percent this year, five times the gain in the S&P 500, and now has a market capitalisation of $19 billion, while employing just 530 people.
According to Deluard’s calculations, the cluster of companies with the smallest number of employees relative to market value has risen by 18 percent this year, while the group with the highest labour intensity has recorded a 19 percent loss.
This situation has far-reaching implications the workers employed in these industries. Under conditions where all companies operate under the dictates of market value and returns to shareholders—the vast bulk of which are hedge funds and investment banks—these companies will be under increasing pressure to boost their share price through job cuts and ever-intensifying exploitation.
New York City’s school reopening plan: anatomy of a crime
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/27/nycs-a27.html
By Alberto Escalera
27 August 2020
New York City’s self-proclaimed “progressive” mayor, Democrat Bill de Blasio, has proven just as willing to carry out the homicidal policy of school reopening amidst the coronavirus pandemic as his most reactionary Republican counterparts.
The claims being made by de Blasio and New York City schools’ Chancellor Richard Carranza that the Department of Education (DOE) is carrying out all necessary measures to safely open the city’s more than 1,600 schools—serving more than a million students—are a patent fraud. This is being sold to parents through a combination of half-truths and outright lies.
There is widespread opposition to the reopening of schools from teachers and school administrators. At the same time, a growing number of parents and students are raising concerns over both the safety and the viability of the city’s hybrid models, which bring students into school buildings between one and three days each week.
During the first two weeks of August, school principals and leadership teams from non-District 75 (a non-geographical district designated for special education schools) middle and high schools were told they had to select from one of five DOE-approved models for hybrid learning, despite having been asked previously to develop reopening plans grounded in the reality and needs of each school community. School leaders were told that waivers allowing for alternative models developed by school communities would not be granted.
An enormous amount of pressure has been put on principals to quickly select a pre-approved hybrid model even before the results from family surveys, in which parents can select between in-person, so-called hybrid instruction, or 100 percent remote instruction for their children. Similarly, model decisions were being made before final decisions on teacher requests for medical waivers for in-person teaching were forwarded to principals.
In other words, principals and school teams were essentially excluded from any meaningful input into the reopening process while being forced to choose a hybrid model without considering the kind of basic data on student population or staffing needed to make any rational decision. Parents were also being asked to choose a hybrid model without clear communication of the basic details of said models or adequate time to consider how they would impact work or childcare.
Chaotic changes from one week to another
The pre-approved models disseminated by DOE central provoked immediate disbelief and consternation among principals and school leadership teams because they lack consistency from one week to another, unnecessarily complicating the job of teachers now being tasked with managing multiple groups of students receiving instruction both in-person and remotely, and making the coordination of childcare onerous for parents.
For example, in so-called Model 2, which is listed as “chancellor recommended” for middle schools, students enrolled in hybrid instruction are divided into three in-person groups, or cohorts A, B and C, which meet alternately between one and two different days each week over the course of a three-week cycle.
School administrators and school-based leadership teams have been abandoned by district superintendents and DOE central administration and now face enormous challenges in solving complicated logistical problems stemming from the ill-conceived reopening policy.
For example, many school buildings have limited access points through which students can enter upon arrival at school. In the case of large school buildings and campus sites, i.e. buildings that house multiple schools, there is a high likelihood of students gathering in large concentrations as they wait to enter buildings after newly mandated temperature checks, often through scanning machines.
Additionally, families of many students that require school busses to get to school, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels, have been notified that they will no longer be able to receive this service due to scheduling difficulties and the absence of social distancing protocols for busses.
What about asymptomatic and infected children?
With much fanfare, de Blasio has stated that students and staff would receive daily temperature checks upon arrival at school. Yet, the spread of coronavirus from asymptomatic persons is a proven fact rendering temperature checks an inadequate means to identify people with the virus. At present, school administrators have gotten no response to the logical question of who is to be tasked with conducting temperature checks, nor have school personnel received trainings on how to properly and safely conduct said checks. Predictably, widespread opposition to the idea of conducting these daily temperature checks has emerged among non-medically trained school staff.
Likewise, other critically important questions around protocols for students or staff that display COVID-19 symptoms while in school remain unanswered. Even in cases where schools have an assigned nurse, which is not the case in every school, and a proper isolation space has been identified, the supply of appropriate PPE as well as questions related to the staffing of these specific spaces within schools are still up in the air. Guidelines issued by New York state prevent a school nurse from staffing an isolation room because of the need to respond to other potential emergencies.
Across New York City, school administrators, teachers and parents are also raising serious and still unanswered questions around protocols for regular cleaning and disinfecting of schools as well as ventilation.
At the same time that de Blasio and his schools’ chancellor have made promises to carry out nightly “deep cleaning” of school buildings, custodial engineers across city schools are seeing massive budget cuts and staff reductions. At some schools, custodial budgets are being slashed by as much as 20 percent, and already understaffed cleaning crews are being further reduced. Indeed, there is growing opposition to school reopening even among custodial engineers, who are increasingly expressing frustration over what they view as false promises being made from City Hall for which they will be held accountable.
Decaying infrastructure and poor ventilation
Perhaps no other school facilities issue has received more attention in the past weeks as the ventilation systems in the approximately 1,600 public schools in New York City. This is particularly due to the growing body of scientific evidence that identifies aerosol or airborne transmission as playing a greater role in the spread of the virus than previously understood. It is commonly known that defective and inadequate ventilation systems, along with lead-contaminated water, are major problems highlighting the decades of neglect that plague aging school infrastructure across many areas in the United States.
During a recent virtual town hall meeting with concerned parents, schools’ Chancellor Carranza blatantly lied to attendees when he stated that HVAC systems in schools across the city were being updated with enhanced filtration mechanisms over the summer in preparation for reopening. What he did not mention was that only a small percentage of the city’s school buildings have newer HVAC systems that allow for updates to air filtration mechanisms, and in most cases, the city is merely replacing old air filters with newer ones that have increased merv ratings, a measure for how much capacity a filter has to capture particles in the air. However, even this wholly inadequate “update” is limited to buildings constructed after the 1970s while the vast majority of school buildings in New York City, as in many other areas across the US, are significantly older and do not have central air filtration or even adequate air circulation systems.
In a similarly cynical example of intentional deception, the DOE sent all employees an email this past Saturday, August 22, offering them one-time, free COVID-19 testing with expedited results at one of nine test centers throughout the city between Sunday, August 23 and Thursday, August 27. Assuming that all of the approximately 80,000 DOE employees, most of whom are on vacation this week, actually showed up for testing at these centers, the likely backlog would wreak havoc at a time in which resources are being systematically siphoned away from testing centers for the public. In any event, a one-time test, two weeks before the projected start of school, even if the results were to arrive sooner than the current eight-day average wait for all but the super wealthy fortunate enough to have access to rapid result tests, is meaningless for teachers being asked to risk daily exposure.
Significantly, public school students are not even being offered this paltry, one-time measure much less access for them and school staff to frequent, free, rapid-result testing as one of the conditions for reopening schools.
The vast majority of the parents who have chosen to send their children back to school within these hybrid models have described the decision as agonizing, explaining that it is more a consequence of being forced back to work or concerns about the continuing loss of special services than the belief that schools will be safe.
Indeed, as many parents are increasingly coming to understand, the students returning to school will find it unlike anything they were familiar with. For example, class schedules are being designed to limit or prevent movement of students at the middle and high school levels in order to prevent now infamous scenarios of large numbers of students traveling through hallways, as was recently documented at a school in North Paulding, Georgia. This means that during the time in which students are present for classes, they will be expected to remain seated in one room.
Cooperative learning, an instructional approach recommended for decades by education experts that promotes active collaboration between students, will be all but eliminated from in-person lessons at all grade levels to adhere to social distancing guidelines. Many of the remaining enrichment classes such as music and physical education will be conducted online even for students attending in-person as these activities entail vigorous movement or the use of wind instruments. Complicated bathroom procedures will have to be developed and implemented to limit the number of students using these facilities at any given time and ensure thorough cleaning after each use.
Even the serving of school lunch raises serious concerns for which the DOE has no answers. For example, to avoid crowded cafeterias many schools are considering having lunches brought to classrooms in which students will essentially remain “quarantined” throughout the day, raising concerns around complicating the already difficult jobs of custodians as well as creating the contradictory scenario of indoor eating for school-aged children at a time when it is still prohibited in restaurants throughout the city.
Unions collaborate with de Blasio
Against the backdrop of this ill-conceived and homicidal drive to reopen schools, it is essential to recognize the role being played by teachers’ unions like the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).
In a clear example of its criminally complicit role in the fraud that de Blasio and his DOE cronies are attempting to carry out, the UFT recently began dispatching bureaucratic functionaries to schools to conduct so-called “safety walkthroughs.” These walkthroughs are taking place in coordination with the Department of School Facilities (DSF), largely behind the backs of rank-and-file union members, who are not being invited to attend. The UFT functionaries dispatched to conduct these walkthroughs are typically retired teachers without any background in building engineering or maintenance systems. They have been observed to simply follow a list of questions with boxes to check off, accepting as truth any response given by school authorities.
In one recent instance, a UFT representative became visibly upset when a rank-and-file teacher showed up uninvited for the walkthrough and questioned the validity of the blindly held assumption that windows capable of opening six inches provide sufficient airflow in rooms lacking other means to circulate air. In another, a UFT representative admitted to completing the checklist, which covers topics ranging from ventilation to the school nurse, PPE and lunches, via telephone with an Assistant Principal in charge of building security.
These bogus walkthroughs highlight the treacherous role being played by the UFT, which intends to ensnare teachers with a combination of empty threats to strike, while opposing any such collective action, as well as promoting illusions in the court system and the Democratic Party.
The improvised and reckless nature of school reopening policy in New York City is leaving teachers, parents and school administrators alike anxious, frustrated and angry. In response to growing popular opposition, de Blasio is doubling down as his cronies within the DOE impose new measures to censor communication between school staff and parents.
If educators are going to save lives, they must take matters into their own hands. This is why teachers, other school workers, parents and students need to form rank-and-file committees of their own, independent of the UFT, to organize genuine opposition to the homicidal school policy being imposed by the de Blasio-Carranza regime.
New York City has already been an epicenter of the deadly pandemic, suffering the loss of 24,000 people to COVID-19. If another catastrophe is to be prevented, teachers must unite with health care, transit, logistics and other workers to prepare collective action, as part of the fight for a nationwide general strike to halt the school openings.
Florida educators launch rank-and-file committee to oppose unsafe school openings
By Duval County Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee
27 August 2020
The following is a statement from the Duval County Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee, which was just established to oppose unsafe conditions in schools that have already been opened in Jacksonville. The county has recorded more than 25,700 cases of COVID-19. According to local polls taken in early August, approximately 80 percent of parents in the district are opposed to in-person learning.
We are forming the Duval County Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee to protect the lives of our students, families, and the most vulnerable members of our community.
After months of applying pressure to the Duval County Public School Board, Superintendent Dr. Diana Greene, and the Duval Teachers United union, our gravest concerns have gone unheard. Schools are open, and the virus is spreading. Teachers, fearful for their jobs and their lives, are trapped in unsafe classrooms without testing, social distancing, proper ventilation, or sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE). The promises made by Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran and repeated by the Board and Dr. Greene have gone unfulfilled.
These schools are not safe. Science has not guided this reopening; greed has. We refuse to lay down our lives for profit or participate in a poorly designed, underfunded, deadly experiment.
Therefore, we issue these demands as the basis for a struggle for a safe return to school in Duval County:
We call for the immediate closure of all public, private, and charter schools. Schools must remain closed until the rank-and-file safety committees, working in conjunction with trusted scientists and public health experts—not only the Florida Department of Health (FDOH)—can ensure the safety of children, teachers, and school employees.
Every student and teacher must be provided with up-to-date computer technology and Internet access for virtual instruction immediately. This technology must include working webcams and microphones.
School ventilation systems must be renovated or replaced to comply with scientific recommendations for a safe environment.
When schools reopen face-to-face, we demand mandatory rapid on-site testing once a week for all faculty, students, and staff. Registered nurses must be stationed at every school, authorized to oversee testing and robust contact tracing. Working alongside educators organized in the rank-and-file safety committee, they must ensure that safety protocols are fully enacted. Teachers have the collective right to refuse to work under unsafe conditions.
Full transparency. We demand daily reporting to the community on results and COVID-positive cases. No one can return to a school building without a negative test.
No loss of income for educators who choose to stay home. Teachers will not lose their position at their school if they decide to remain virtual. Teachers shall be provided unlimited COVID-19 sick leave.
For freedom of speech and the protection of whistleblowers to include teachers, students, and staff.
For the unity and safety of educators, parents, students, and workers in our community.
Full income protection to all parents and caregivers who stay home with their children.
These measures to be paid for by a surcharge on Florida’s billionaires. As of 2019, Florida was home to 52 billionaires, and 33 of these were listed on the Forbes 400.
We call on all educators, parents, and students in Duval County who agree with these demands to join our rank-and-file safety committee. We also appeal to the same layer of people in the rest of Florida, the United States, and the world to support our struggle and build their own safety committees to fight side-by-side with us for our joint interests.
There is a growing sentiment for a national strike to halt the homicidal reopening of schools across the United States. We in Duval County, Florida, support this movement and wish to lend our strength to those around the country looking for mass action of the working class because our lives are at stake. We call on all layers of workers—manufacturing, logistics, food processing, health care, public and private sector—in Duval County and nationally to support our struggle.
We urge you to join and build the Educators Rank and File Safety Committee Facebook group and register for our call-in meeting on Saturday, August 29.
A growing number of educators across the country are forming district-wide and state-wide safety committees and joining the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee, the national network set up to unify teachers, parents and students across the US, link up with other sections of workers, and prepare a nationwide general strike to halt the deadly reopening of schools.
There are many life-and-death issues behind the decision to form the Duval County Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee. Here are some of the key facts.
Educators, parents, and students have been staging protests against the school openings all across Florida for weeks, including here in Duval County, Pasco County, Hillsborough County (Tampa), and Escambia County (Pensacola). Ignoring mass opposition, districts have moved forward to reopen across the state, producing more than 600 confirmed COVID-19 infections among students and staff, the largest confirmed school total of any state.
Florida Education Commissioner Corcoran lies to the media, claiming that schools have adequate social distancing and PPE in place. Social distancing is not happening, kids are not wearing masks properly, and there is a massive cover-up in terms of the number of new cases within the schools, where rapid testing is not taking place. The real number of cases in Florida schools is undoubtedly far higher than what is being reported.
Educators in Florida have been told to use unpaid FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) days if they contract the virus. However, many who exhibit symptoms are afraid to use their extremely limited number of days until they are more severely ill. The result is that faculty, staff, and students are entering the schools even when they have symptoms. The only precaution being taken at the entryways are temperature tests, which are not adequate indicators of the presence of COVID-19.
Despite widespread anger, the Florida Education Association (FEA), the trade union that claims to represent the interests of teachers in the state, is opposed to a strike. Trade union bureaucrats have told teachers that they must not upset the “powers that be” and jeopardize their ability to collect dues from our paychecks. The local Duval Teachers United, which is affiliated with the FEA, has marched in lockstep with district officials.
The FEA’s primary response to the reopening was the filing of a lawsuit against the State of Florida, leaving the fight in the hands of the court system. The resulting decision, now in legal limbo, at most leaves the question of reopening up to district administrators, which means that counties like Duval can continue to operate face-to-face classes without interruption or adequate safety measures.
The FEA calls this court decision a “win,” but for rank-and-file educators this was no victory. Instead of the union’s promised demands of zero out-of-pocket costs for COVID-19 treatment; rapid testing for students, faculty, and staff; inspection, cleaning, and increased filtering of air conditioning units; and mask requirements for faculty and students—only the masking requirement (which costs the district nothing) is in place.
Finally, Florida has seen possibly the most aggressive drive in the nation for virtual charter schools and privatization. There is no doubt that the state’s demand for a return to school aims to both force workers back onto the job and continue to bleed public schools of resources through declining enrollment. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, an outspoken Trump supporter and school privatizer, has been a leading advocate of reopening schools in the state and has long aligned himself with the government’s attempt to destroy public education.
The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee has been formed to coordinate and facilitate the building of a network of rank-and-file safety committees in every school and neighborhood, to organize the immense opposition to the murderous plan to reopen schools. All those who agree with this perspective should contact us today, join our Facebook group and make plans to attend our next online call-in meeting Saturday, August 29. Register today and share the event widely with your coworkers!
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