March 2018 – Michal Rozworski

This episode is dedicated to the recent, inspiring and victorious teachers’ strike in West Virginia. West Virginia teachers went out on strike in late February over low pay and continued attacks on the health insurance plan they share with all other state workers. They stayed out despite an initial deal signed by the Governor and their leadership and ultimately won a 5% raise not just for themselves but for all public employees in West Virginia as well as promised reforms to their insurance plan, known as the PEIA. I spoke with two teacher leaders from West Virginia and an expert on teacher unionism to get some perspective on how this strike came about, how it won and what others can learn from its example.

My first guest is Emily Comer, a high school Spanish teacher in South Charleston, West Virginia; she is a rank-and-file activist in her local of the AFT, the American Federation of Teachers and co-author of this excellent piece on the strike. I next speak with Lois Weiner, professor in the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education at New Jersey City University and a specialist in urban teacher education and teacher unionism. Her research actively supports teachers who want to transform their unions; she wrote this piece on the strike that I reference in my interview. My final guest is Brandon Wolford, local president of the WVEA in Mingo Country. The WVEA is the West Virginia Education Association and alongside the AFT it is one of the two big teachers’ unions in West Virginia; Mingo County has a storied place in labour history as an epicentre in the Mine Wars and mining struggles throughout the 20th century.

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Jobs data doesn’t say much about the minimum wage (yet) but lots about growing inequality

We’ve had two months of jobs data in Canada since Ontario increased it’s minimum wage from $11.60 to $14 on January 1, 2017. When January’s Labour Force Survey numbers came out and showed some of the biggest month-over-month losses in years, there was a slew of predictable, reflexive commentary blaming Ontario’s minimum wage hike. Now that we have a second month of data that show modest job gains as well as falling unemployment, down to 5.8% nation-wide and 5.5% in Ontario, the same critics are silent. The lesson is that they should have also been silent about January’s numbers.

Simply put, we don’t know enough to lay the blame for good or bad jobs numbers at the feet of a minimum wage hike in Ontario. Both January’s negative data and February’s positive data should give us pause. The monthly jobs data are volatile. The drop in January was so out of line with long-term trends that it raised the eyebrows of nearly all economists. Part of January’s losses are due to the typical rash of post-holiday lay-offs. But these numbers also seem at least in part statistical error rather than a reflection of something happening in the real world, especially when compared with February’s return to the trend of consistent, if modest, job growth.