A Tale of Two School Strikes
By Daniel Forrester
In the last few weeks, both school teachers and their students have been on strike to demand a better future. The students are calling for urgent climate action, while the teachers are fighting for better pay and better conditions — for their students as well as themselves, with their core demands including better overall funding for education, and a significant reduction of class sizes. It could not be more important to highlight the fact that both the climate crisis and the education crisis have the same root cause — capitalism. And it is imperative for students and teachers to stand together and fight side by side, in order to win both struggles.
The logic of the capitalist system essentially boils down to this: things get produced and exchanged in order for corporations to make profits, and never purely because of human need; when capitalism does help people, it is always a by-product; the primary goal is always profit. Two of the major consequences of the system are overproduction and mismanagement of resources, resulting in an utter neglect for unprofitable social goods, such as our natural environment and our public services. The neglect is generally equal in extent to however much the capitalists and their bought politicians can get away with before ordinary working class people start properly fighting back.
A good example of this overproduction and resource mismanagement is starvation. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has reported that from 2015 to 2017, the world produced enough food to feed every human being 2904 calories per day (for reference, 2000-2500 calories is the daily recommended intake for an adult). Despite this overabundance of food, the World Health Organisation notes that 821 million people were undernourished in 2017, roughly 1 in 9 people. Sure, some food produced will inevitably be wasted — but the problem is ultimately that, in many cases, it is more profitable to allow people to starve than it is to feed them. In Aotearoa alone, the average grocery store threw out roughly 160 tonnes of food in 2017; according to researchers at the University of Otago, 23% of that went straight into the landfill.
The climate crisis is created by the exact same system which creates this shocking amount of pointless global malnutrition. Although there are many sources of carbon dioxide emissions, one of the main sources is electricity generation — according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, 28% of carbon dioxide emissions in the USA in 2017 were from energy generation. Being another part of the capitalist economy, the energy sector faces a similar problem as food distribution, where the primary motive behind economic actions is always profit first, and people second. It’s been proven that phasing out fossil fuels in energy generation certainly isn’t logistically difficult when there is a profit incentive to do so; for instance, 98.1% of Costa Rica’s energy generation in 2016 was from renewable sources, mostly from power stations built by the government-run for-profit agency Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad; built to exploit the country’s mountainous landscape of torrential rivers and geothermal activity. If a transition to renewable energy sources was executed so effectively in a rare occasion where the generation of profit aligned with the needs of people, who’s to say we can’t push a transition to renewables the world over, ignoring profit? Why is it that we always hear that it’s not possible, and shouldn’t be attempted because it’s not profitable? We need 100% renewable energy now. We should never have to justify our needs against the vast wealth of the people who profit from the fossil-driven global economy — the needs of the people should outweigh profits every single time.
When the world’s governments offer the bare minimum necessary to avoid mass uprisings by putting forward toothless and flawed policies such as the Zero Carbon Act, what does that mean for us as people? Who actually benefits from extending the life of unsustainable industries for as long as possible? The people making the profit. If you’re a teacher, this is where the parallel between the teachers’ strike and students’ strike becomes clear. Ultimately, the same people who benefit from policies which protect their profits in the energy sector are those who benefit from keeping funding for public education low.
The main argument which Labour and their allies are making for why they can’t meet the teachers’ demands — for a 16% pay rise, more staff, and smaller class sizes — is that it would be inappropriate in the “current fiscal environment”. But the real reason these demands aren’t being met is that the less money the Government dedicates to funding schools and paying teachers, the more money it can dish out to big corporations and the super-rich in the form of tax cuts and oil subsidies. Even if it were true that the Coalition didn’t have enough money, which it isn’t — the Government currently has a $3.5 billion surplus and one of the lowest public debt levels in the OECD — the money could be raised through higher taxes on the vast pool of wealth which currently sits in the hands of the top 10%. For example, Aotearoa remains one of the few advanced economies in the world which doesn’t have a Capital Gains Tax (CGT), a levy raised on the increasing value of investments people own — essentially, a tax which would clearly only affect the super wealthy. So who benefits from the Government backing down on bringing in a CGT, while refusing to provide teachers with adequate living and working conditions? Shouldn’t the need for teachers to afford to live and have adequate work conditions outweigh the profits of wealthy investors?
Graeme Hart is the wealthiest resident of Aotearoa. He has a net worth of US$9.2 billion. As an investor, he doesn’t pay tax on the money he makes, because of the lack of a CGT. Why should teachers, or anyone working in genuine labour, have to get the short end of the stick when it comes to government funding? Why are Mr. Hart’s profits treated by our nominally progressive Government as being more important than the needs of other people? Our teachers need better pay and conditions. The needs of people should, but currently do not, outweigh profits — are you noticing a pattern here?
The system our students are fighting against is the very same system our teachers are fighting against. The education crisis and the climate crisis can only be resolved by students and teachers joining together, recognising capitalism as the root cause of both crises, and fighting alongside each other and the rest of Aotearoa’s working class for a future for all of us. For all the students striking: march with your teachers when they are taking industrial action. And to all the teachers striking: stand with your students and demand climate action. We’re all fighting the same evil. If we succeed in overthrowing capitalism, then and only then can we build a new world, where education, sustainability, and human need are placed front and centre in all political and economic decisions, instead of greed, profit and exploitation ruling over us all.
Daniel Forrester is a student at the University of Waikato. He is a new member of Socialist Aotearoa, and the Assistant Education Officer.
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Socialist Aotearoa is a working class revolutionary organisation. We operate primarily within the trade unions, arguing for workers to discover their collective power and strike against exploitation, and for more direct worker leadership of, and control over, the union movement. We help build coalitions around key issues, and have lead campaigns against privatisation, corporate globalisation, racism and war. While fighting for immediate reforms to improve life for the majority of people, we believe ultimately that capitalism must be overthrown and replaced with socialism — a world of equality and workers’ democracy. We try to educate, agitate, and organise to that end.
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