Stop the mass layoffs at East Orange Public Schools in New Jersey!

This week, at a packed school board meeting, appointees of the Democratic Mayor of East Orange, New Jersey, Ted Green, announced the decision to lay off more than 90 educators and school staff in the district. As the presidential candidate for the Socialist Equality Party, I denounce this attack on public education and call for the mobilization of workers to oppose austerity and defend public schools.

Yesterday morning, the school district abruptly dismissed students after a half-day, reportedly due to a mass abstention by teachers and school staff. The Socialist Equality Party calls for full support for this job action, which must serve as a catalyst for a broader struggle.

Educators in East Orange have had their pay frozen for years, as the union, the East Orange Education Association (EOEA), has kept them on the job under an expired contract. In advance of the layoff announcements, the EOEA posted a threatening letter on social media, warning that “all actions that are planned that haven’t been sanctioned by the EOEA... MUST Cease and Desist!” The post went on to threaten arrests and the loss of tenure for all those who participate in unsanctioned action.

While the union attempts to suppress a struggle, rank-and-file educators are taking matters into their own hands. East Orange educators find themselves in a similar situation to workers everywhere, forced to rebel against the union bureaucracy to carry out a fight.

At Boeing, 30,000 machinists rejected a sellout agreement put forward by the union, initiating their ongoing month-long strike. Earlier this month, the union bureaucracy aborted the two-day dockworkers’ strike, despite no agreement on the key issue of job-killing automation.

Conditions in East Orange reflect the grotesque levels of inequality permeating the United States. More than a quarter of children in East Orange live in poverty, while parts of the surrounding New York City metropolis boast some of the wealthiest areas on the planet. The state of New Jersey has a higher rate of millionaires than any other state.

Meanwhile, state education funding provided to East Orange has flatlined over the past 15 years, despite increasing needs, and federal school aid has fallen off a cliff as the Biden-Harris administration allowed $190 billion in pandemic aid to schools to expire.

Throughout the country, Democratic and Republican administrations alike are taking the axe to public school budgets and preparing a jobs bloodbath in education. In Chicago, officials are preparing to close as many as 100 public schools. In Texas, more than half of the state’s school districts face budget shortfalls, with Houston already cutting hundreds of jobs. In Seattle, officials have proposed closing schools and reducing staff to make up for a $100 million budget deficit.

At the same time, the Biden-Harris administration has joined with Republicans in Congress to allocate virtually unlimited funds for war. Last year, the US spent over $900 billion on the military, supplemented with billions more to arm Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians and accelerate the war against Russia in Ukraine, risking an all-out world war.

However, a rebellion is brewing. We call on education workers in East Orange to organize into rank-and-file committees, independent of the union bureaucrats and both parties of big business, and to coordinate their struggles with other workers through the expansion of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.

Workers are taking an initial step, but political conclusions must be drawn. We cannot tolerate a society where schools are crumbling, teachers are being given pink slips, yet the unheard-of wealth produced by workers is hoarded by billionaires and squandered on war. Whatever their differences, both Harris and Trump share a common program of austerity, war, and dictatorship.

The Socialist Equality Party campaign is fighting for a break from both these parties and build a socialist movement to expropriate the financial and corporate oligarchy and redistribute their vast wealth to meet social needs, not private profit.