Messaging in society differs depending on which sex class you happen to inhabit. I for one, have never experience this much fucking elation eating crunchy green water.
In Alberta our current government is off the rails. They are enacting austerity programs that are targeting the public sectors of our society during a pandemic. The quarrel with Alberta doctors over their working conditions during this exceptional time exemplifies the negligence of this UCP government.
This same radical right United Conservative government laid off thousands of Educational Assistants and support staff during the pandemic as well. The pattern is clear. The UCP are starving each of the public sectors of our society of the funds and people necessary for them to function efficiently. The next round of bullshit will be point out how these same gutted public sectors are not doing a good job and therefore must be replaced with private, more efficient, systems of delivery.
The UCP of Alberta are taking plays from the very first page Disaster Capitalism’s playbook. They are pushing through reactionary anti-education, anti-worker, anti-public health, reforms in the legislator at a marathon rate with essentially no debate. Albertan’s will be waking up to a very different set of ground rules in society, and most of said rules will be making their lives marginally worse.
Speaking of marginally worse, the contract for Alberta Teachers is up on August 30th. There will be no joy at the negotiating table this year, let me assure you. Austerity will be the only option – while we generously fund pipelines to nowhere – for Alberta Teachers.
Plastic shields for students? Netherlands is doing it. Alberta is not.
Concomitantly, Teachers will be asked to perform their duties under conditions that are directly hazardous to not only their students’ health, but theirs and their families as well. No additional funding for pandemic measures is on the table for the opening of the school year. No PPE, no classroom caps of 15, no additional cleaning personal or cleaning routines will be available. Teachers will be expected to take up the pandemic slack, as do ‘the best they can’ with the dangerous circumstances mandated by the UCP government.
This is unacceptable. Teachers should not have to unreasonably risk their lives and the lives of their families working in unsafe conditions. Is it just to expect teachers to be responsible for the death of their aging parents, or young children because of the government’s mandated unsafe working conditions in the schools?
Alberta teachers will not get, as in the previous agreements, another cent more in wages. Cost of living be damned. We expect that, especially with this government that is so completely beholden to private sector; especially Oil and Gas. The continued existence of the white elephant Energy War Room more than proves this egregious bias, the fact that it continues to exist during the pandemic will be one of the darker stains on this government’s legacy.
Wages aside, it is not reasonable for Alberta Teachers to risk their lives (and their families) to perform their duties. We are being set up to be the at the very nexus of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The situation, as currently mandated, is a untenable situation.
We must seriously consider a strike because our government seems unwilling or unable to adequately protect the students and teachers of this province. We should also consider coordinating with healthcare professionals because this government is serious about dismantling our public systems, and we need to present a united front that is too big to fail and cannot be punitively,and in piecemeal, legislated back to work (which will happen).
We let this happen at the ballot box, and now the grave consequences of voting in a American style government with a unhealthy privatization fetish, are here. We cannot sit back throw up our hands and somehow think that students and teachers dying at school because of the malfeasance of the government is in anyway okay. We are better than that as a teachers and as Albertans.
Signed,
A very concerned Alberta School Teacher.
@albertateachers
@rachelnotley
@albertandp
@ucp
@edmontonjournal
@adrianalagrange
The upcoming election in the US, at least from a Canadian perspective, a bit lost in the deluge of media coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. The American Left business party has a chance to regain the White House, but Webb asks the question in his essay on Unherd, “What if the new American Left is — as the philosopher Richard Rorty put it, exhausted?”
“And, he argued, national pride in America is just what the American left had lost — and if that was true in 1998 it is true with knobs on in 2020: to quote the great philosopher, “a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left” understands the nation in a way that “leads them to step back from their country and, as they say, ‘theorize’ it. It leads them to … give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”
Suggested readingRorty, who died in 2007, was not an complete enemy of the new Left’s keenness on race and gender — he thought they had a point — but he knew that it would end in tears. He knew that identity politics would ditch the uncomfortable, sweaty-smelling folks in the unions, the welders and electricians and carpenters and that those (mainly white) men would in turn ditch the Democrats. And so it came to pass, and now we might be post-Rorty with no road back.
Does the American Left have what it takes to knit together the nation when its modern iteration so clearly dislikes so much about it? After the statues ,what else must fall? What other horrors must be uncovered? The jury is out, to put it mildly, on whether American atonement might be over soon or just beginning. If the question is between social solidarity or continued struggle, plenty of modern Democrats have had it with the former and are willing to embrace the latter.
They may or may not be right, or justified, but if America finds no comfort and no direction we will all suffer the consequences. There’s a lot riding on the Biden presidency, if it comes. For them, and, as ever, for us.”
The other problem I see is that Biden may want to return to the status quo which if one recalls – the permanent war economy, gilded age level of economic inequality, and predatory capitalism – isn’t exactly a noble cause.
The Intransigent One
Mystro
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