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On Friday, hundreds of striking teachers flooded the foyer of the West Virginia capitol building in Charleston. Holding signs that read “Whose side are you on?” they voted to occupy the building until their demands were met. As the Supreme Court considers the Janus v. AFSCME case this very week — posing an existential threat to public sector unions throughout the country — labor movement activists should be watching the West Virginia teachers’ strike closely. The coincidence of the two events seems almost scripted: as Janus promises to gut the legal framework for public sector worker organizing, West Virginia teachers are militantly flouting the law. Many in the labor movement contend that this level of rank-and-file engagement is the key to surviving right to work. The question is, how does a militant mood in a workforce like West Virginia’s teachers come into being? Finding the answer in this case requires paying attention the central demand that caused workers to defy union leadership and embark on one of the largest wildcat strikes in recent American history: adequate health care.

Back to the Table Three days prior to the building occupation, the West Virginia governor’s office announced that it had reached a deal with the state teachers’ union leadership. The agreed-upon 5 percent raise for teachers and 3 percent for all public employees was supposed to mark the end of the statewide teachers’ strike. The state had already seen four days of school closures in all fifty-five counties, the result of a work stoppage involving twenty thousand teachers. But the teachers weren’t satisfied with the deal. At the meeting where it was announced, they began to chant, “Back to the table!” and “We are the union bosses!” According to the agreement, the teachers were supposed to return to work on Thursday, but by Wednesday night all fifty-five counties were again reporting school closures. The strike was still on. The primary source of striking teachers’ dissatisfaction is the state’s meager offering of a “task force” to fix the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA), West Virginia’s health insurance program for public employees. Tax cuts have resulted in changes to the insurance plan, sending co-pays and out-of-pocket expenses through the roof as teacher pay remains among the lowest in the country. One projection shows premiums under PEIA rising as much as 11 percent per year starting in 2020. “This has been a huge issue, causing problems for years,” said one striking teacher. “They’ve been cutting our health insurance over and over, making it really expensive to survive.” Throughout the strike teachers held signs that read “Will teach for insurance” and “I’d take a bullet for your child but PEIA won’t cover it.” According to the strikers, the 5 percent raise offered won’t reverse the damage that rising health care costs have done to West Virginia public employees’ ability to make ends meet. Explaining why she chose to remain on strike, one teacher said, “The number one thing was we needed a permanent fix to PEIA. It wasn’t about the money at all. It was about the insurance fix.”

Social Unionism Labor will need many more West Virginias to climb out of the ditch it’s in, and health care has an important role to play in the task of rebuilding the movement. Socialists see building a sense of class consciousness — a working class that identifies as such, knows it’s exploited by capitalists, and is united in struggle — as a necessary condition for the labor movement’s success. To that end, socialist labor strategists have proposed that unions focus on demands that benefit the entire working class, not just this or that individual union’s members. The idea is that focusing only on narrow wins for specific groups of workers actually atomizes the class, heightening competition rather than solidarity — and resulting in a cautious, transactional union bureaucracy leading a disengaged, depoliticized membership. It also ensures that victories are temporary; without challenging capitalist power beyond the bargaining table, any gains made will be rolled back in no time. What socialists want instead is a labor movement that advocates for ambitious policies that build worker power across society, not just for workers in a particular shop or trade. Adolph Reed Jr and Mark Dudzic call this a social-unionist orientation, observing that: Many unions are beginning to redefine their battles against voracious profiteers and privatizers not as defensive struggles to preserve rights, privileges, benefits and conditions already lost by most of the working class, but as far reaching campaigns for the public good, and they are sinking resources into building the kind of alliances necessary to win. Some ambitious examples of this type of unionism are offered by Sam Gindin, who calls it by its more common term, social-movement unionism: Autoworkers could push to rejigger their workplaces so they could make the goods needed to confront the ecological crisis. Steelworkers could fight for the renovation and expansion of public infrastructure. Construction workers could demand public housing and the green retrofitting of existing housing stock. At this particular moment, health care has an exceptional power to galvanize workers. The issue is urgent and personal; as we’re seeing in West Virginia, it inspires people to fight tooth and nail. Plus its appeal isn’t limited to particular industries — every worker needs health care, and every worker is getting squeezed. What if unions carried out their own contract campaigns for better health care alongside a collective, movement-wide campaign for federal single-payer health care? This effort would satisfy two conditions at once: tapping into working people’s organic desire to challenge the current capitalist health care regime, and bringing individual union struggles into contact with broader movements to build power for the entire working class. This idea is already gaining steam. A growing number of locals and internationals have endorsed the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, which maintains that labor must lead the charge in fighting for universal, decommodified health insurance. National Nurses United in particular have stepped to the fore, campaigning for “an improved Medicare-for-All system where everyone — rich or poor, young or old — has access to the same standard of safe medical care.” We need many more unions to follow their lead.