Teachers for Ceasefire
Some of the country's largest teachers unions and their leaders have called for ceasefire in Gaza. What does a pro-ceasefire labor movement mean for a White House that counts on union support?
On Monday, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) adopted a resolution calling for a bilateral ceasefire in Israel and Palestine. The resolution, from America’s second-largest teacher’s union, followed a December tweet from the head of the country’s largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association (NEA), also calling for a ceasefire.
Nearly four months into Israel’s military campaign on Gaza, a growing coalition of labor unions has called for an end to fighting, citing mass civilian casualties and degrading conditions that threaten widespread illness and famine in Gaza. Among those are major teacher’s unions like the AFT, and smaller educator organizations like the Chicago Teachers Union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and the National Council of Urban Education Associations (the latter two of which are affiliates of the NEA).
The calls for ceasefire from some of the nation’s largest unions put those unions at odds with top Democrats, many of whom the unions conventionally (and still) endorse.
First Lady Jill Biden, an English professor, is a member of the NEA. AFT President Randi Weingarten named her an honorary AFT member in 2022, and Jill Biden has often underscored her connection to the teachers labor movement, speaking at an AFT conference and inviting the heads of the AFT and the NEA to meetings early in President Joe Biden’s tenure.
Before dropping out of the primary race, some 2024 Republican contenders even used the connection to take a sexualized swipe at teachers’ labor organizing.
“When you have the president of the United States sleeping with a member of the teachers unions, there is no chance that you can take the stranglehold away from the teachers union every day,” then-candidate Chris Christie said in a September debate.
But while Democratic presidential candidates can usually count on teachers unions to drive votes, recent statements from AFT and NEA leadership indicate a growing ideological rift with the Biden administration over Palestine. Where Joe Biden has repeatedly shrugged off calls for ceasefire, Weingarten, the AFT head, came out in favor of ceasefire on Monday.
“The time for war is over, and the time for diplomacy must begin,” Weingarten wrote in a statement on the AFT’s passage of its pro-ceasefire resolution. “We believe wholeheartedly that the path forward in the Middle East must end the decades of conflict and bloodshed by recognizing the rights of both peoples and affirming a two-state solution. Our work does not stop with a resolution: We will not shy away from continuing to listen to our members and our communities and endeavoring to move toward a lasting peace.”
The AFT represents 1.7 million members. Its resolution is the loudest of its kind thus far from the teachers’ labor movement, although other organizations and individuals from similar unions have made similar statements.
Although the NEA has not formally weighed in, its president Becky Pringle called for ceasefire on Twitter in December, and authored a November statement on the NEA website condemning the killing of children. “Regardless of what you call it, the killing of innocent people must stop,” Pringle wrote, in apparent allusion to many elected Democrats’ resistance to explicit calls for ceasefire (Pringle didn’t use the term in her November statement).
Smaller teachers unions have gone further, earlier.
On Nov. 1, the Chicago Teachers Union passed a resolution calling for ceasefire. That decision, one Chicago teacher wrote last month, emerged in response to the mass killing of Palestinian children, and the knowledge that Chicago’s school children were watching adults’ response to deaths of children who could have been their peers.
“Watching what is happening in Gaza has been soul-shattering too. Some 10,000 children have been killed since October 7; many are now without parents; some have been held hostage. Every one of them is someone’s child, someone’s loved one, someone’s student,” Chicago teacher Dave Stieber wrote in an essay for In These Times.
He went on to note that “a big part of our motivation is that we know our students are watching the same videos and seeing the same news on TikTok and Instagram as we are. We can’t pretend like the issue is not affecting their lives, and we can’t pretend like youth in the United States don’t overwhelmingly want the violence to end. As always, our students are watching us and seeing if we will teach about what is happening. They know we’re not robots, and they wonder what our values are.”
Other early advocates for ceasefire included affiliate unions with the AFT and NEA, some of which are pressuring the NEA to withdraw its endorsement of Biden, the Nation reported last month. In a five-point list of demands, an NEA coalition of “Educators for Palestine” is calling on the union to take back its endorsement until a permanent ceasefire is reached, the U.S. ends cuts off funding and supplies to Israel’s military, and Biden commits to “a fair due process for asylum-seekers and refugees.”
The threat of a withdrawn NEA endorsement is unlikely, but speaks to growing discontent with Biden’s Gaza strategy, from a labor movement that usually represents a reliable Democratic bloc.
In late January, the country’s second-largest union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) issued its own pro-ceasefire resolution. “We call for an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and the delivery of life-saving food, water, medicine and other resources to the people of Gaza,” SEIU president Mary Kay Henry wrote in a statement.
The American Postal Workers Union, the California Nurses Association, and the Communications Workers of America have also called for ceasefire, as has the influential United Auto Workers.
The UAW’s ceasefire call was complicated last month when the union endorsed Biden’s reelection bid, putting the union’s Gaza stance in conflict with its candidate. Some UAW members who have personally spoken in favor of ceasefire described the Biden endorsement as tactically necessary ahead of Biden’s almost-inevitable rematch against Donald Trump.
Brandon Mancilla, a member of the UAW International Executive Board, wrote on Twitter that he had voted for the Biden endorsement while also expressing “deep reservations about President Biden’s policies and the vital importance of our union’s call for a ceasefire in Palestine and Israel.”
“Many of our members have expressed their dismay because the White House’s current policies are in direct opposition to our call for a ceasefire,” he wrote. “This endorsement means that our union must do even more to pressure President Biden and other representatives on our domestic policies and international solidarity agenda.”
Other UAW members have argued that the union should have withheld its endorsement to pressure the Biden administration on Palestine, as the UAW previously did during a 2023 autoworkers strike, and over subsequent disagreements with the White House on electric vehicles.
“[W]ithholding the endorsement didn’t just make concrete wins possible for autoworkers and the climate movement,” UAW member Aparna Gopalan wrote in Jewish Currents last week, “it also set the groundwork to move the Rust Belt away from Trump, who has tried to capitalize on autoworkers’ concerns that Biden’s green transition policies will impact their livelihoods.”
A teacher-backed movement for ceasefire might not be enough to divorce union leadership—or even the majority of its membership—from support for Biden. (Certainly it’s hard to imagine NEA member Jill Biden and other prominent colleagues pledging to withdraw reelection support.) But neither can union membership be counted on to act in lockstep with Democrats.
Instead, a misalignment between Biden and large, lean-Democratic voting blocs risks eroding Biden’s 2024 support. Nearly three-quarters of voters between 18-29 disapproved with Biden’s handling of the conflict in Gaza, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll in December. That age bracket usually votes Democratic by a considerable margin; the generation’s registered voters backed Biden by 10 points in July. But by the December Times/Siena poll, 49 percent of those same voters said they were leaning toward a Trump vote, whereas just 43 percent backed Biden.
Hey, thanks for reading MomLeft! Here’s what I’ve been reading this week:
-Schools across Texas are planning for deep cuts, as the state’s Republican leadership refuses to pass a school funding bill. State lawmakers have not increased school funding since 2019, with Gov. Greg Abbott and allies threatening to block educational funding bills that do not include a voucher program that would distribute public funds to private schools.
"That's unfortunate that our budget is being held hostage by a policy that has not been, by law that's not been approved or a bill that's not been approved by the state multiple times,” Jim Chadwell, superintendent of Texas’s Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD told Fox4. “Multiple times. So that's the situation we're in right now.”
-In New York Magazine, Rebecca Gale explores the complex matrix of economic shortfalls, staffing crises, and personal preferences that cause some parents of young children to forgo formal childcare. 35 percent of parents with children under age five were reported to have no childcare. Of those who had childcare, more parents reported relying on family members than formal systems like daycares or after-school programs, with some telling New York that they turned to extended family to keep costs down. Experts emphasized the importance of flexibility for parents, whose childcare needs are often in conflict with workplace schedules or rules (one parent quoted in the story insisted on anonymity because he was secretly caring for his child while working from home, in violation of his employer’s rules).
-A new Utah bill would hold teachers criminally liable for allowing students to access certain banned books, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. The bill would make it a misdemeanor (punishable by a minimum $500 or 30 days in jail) for teachers to keep “objectively sensitive” materials where they can be accessed by students. A second bill, proposed by the same lawmaker, seeks to define “objectively sensitive” material as “patently offensive” descriptions of sexual content or nudity—hardly an objective standard months after book-banners successfully removed an illustrated version of Anne Frank’s diary from schools over its supposed objectionable sexual content.
-I really adored this profile of the grandmothers powering the climate movement.
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