Hundreds of protesters lined the sidewalk in front of Colorado Springs City Hall this Labor Day as part of the Workers over Billionaires rally organized by 50501 Colorado Springs, Indivisible Colorado Springs, and El Paso County Progressive Vets. Among the speakers were local members of labor unions, including teachers who referenced an upcoming strike in Colorado Springs School District 11.
“D11 teachers are going on strike this fall because our Board of Education is full of anti-union, anti-teacher and anti-student members,” said educator and Colorado Springs Education Association (CSEA) member Sam Farnham. “They ended the contract with our union and we need your support to flip the board this election season.”
Last year, D11’s board voted 6-1 to end the only master agreement with a teachers union in El Paso County, which had been in place for over 50 years. In recent years the D11 board has been dominated by a conservative majority. Following the 2023 election, five of the six sitting board members are part of a conservative slate that has been supported by prominent Colorado Republicans, activists, and consultants who consider teachers unions their opposition.
“As an educator, as a union member, I know that the best way for me to fight back against the billionaire ruling class and their attack on public education is to build my union, build our local educators associations.” said Joe Mangels, vice president of the Pikes Peak Education Association and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. “If you haven’t heard about it already, the District 11 School Board recently decided that they were no longer going to negotiate with the teachers union. Effectively, that means the teachers have lost their bargaining agreement overnight, so there’s lots of benefits they’re just immediately losing. So CSEA will be striking at some point in the near future. The date will be announced soon.”
Last year, former CSEA President Joe Schott told Colorado Times Recorder, “The interest for teachers is for stability. Teachers want to teach. They don’t want to have to worry about whether or not their rights are going to be curtailed at some point soon. They just want to get in there and teach … They want to put their heads down, nose to the grindstone kind of thing and teach their students. That’s what they want. They want to know that their rights are secure, that they can look to fair treatment, transparent process. If something goes wrong, they know how things are going to happen. They know their voice in setting, curriculum and all this stuff. They have a right to being part of the decision-making … What they don’t want to do is have to fight over it all the time. They just want to teach. The length of contract, the term of contract is really about that stability, so that teachers can focus on their students and not on ideological battles.”
Farnham discussed hardships teachers face in the profession. “I love to teach, but it’s frustrating, and it’s not the kids,” he said. “They’re great. What’s frustrating is that the job I went to college for and took out loans to pursue is not enough to pay back those loans, but this isn’t unique to teaching. There is a large number of other professions where this is the case, and that number continues to grow. Why? Why are we grinding endlessly and working our hands to the bone to break even? To live paycheck to paycheck? To survive rather than flourish? The bottom half of households in the United States own 2% of the wealth. That’s 67 million households made up of people being underpaid and over-exploited. These exploited workers are our nurses, librarians, and many more. These human beings are the backbone of our country.”
Other pro-union speakers also shared support for organized labor during the rally. “I have been a teamster at UPS for over five years now, and my union is very dear to me,” said Kyle Burroughs of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. “It affords me healthcare, job security, a living wage, and most importantly, an avenue to fight back against the boss. Everything I want, the boss does not want. We have nothing in common. We cannot collaborate. And any give and take we have is the company taking from us. Every hour that I work, I am making a profit, but not for myself. I am making a profit for the boss. Carol Tomé, the CEO of UPS, she owns my time, owns my labor, owns a large portion of my life. A large portion of my life is devoted to making someone else rich and this is the case for tens and hundreds of millions of people living in the US and billions of people across the globe.”
Unions have long been opposed by the wealthy, business owners, and conservative political figures, and Burroughs raised concerns about the current state of organized labor. “When Elon Musk chose to fire eight SpaceX workers who came together to write a letter against him and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) stepped in to review what is clearly an unfair labor practice, Musk and SpaceX ultimately won the lawsuit against the NLRB,” he said. “The idea that having a board to review labor relations is somehow unconstitutional is now on the table. Musk and his team are paving the way to potentially eliminate the NLRB. The NLRB helps protect the formation of unions, but it also serves the boss’s interests by avoiding production stoppages and loss of profit. If the NLRB were abolished, the pitched strikes of the 1930s would come back, because this would be the only way we could win against the boss. If what they want is the intense, scab-blocking strikes of the early 20th century, I’ll tell you what, we are going to give it to them.”
