Members Are Leading, Leaders Need to Follow

West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona. No hotbeds of worker consciousness these. Yet there they are, playing host to the most encouraging display of union member activism in many a year! Not John Lewis’s miners, mind you. Nor Walter Reuthers’ auto workers. Not Bill Nuchow’s Teamsters, nor even the Memphis sanitation workers with whom Martin Luther King marched before he died.

No, this hotbed of worker activism is not comprised of the blue-collar core of the Great Depression, who sometimes engaged in street fights with the authorities. It consists of ...TEACHERS! Teachers. The shapers of our young minds. The minders of our civic learning. The conduits of our historic understanding of how democracy works. It is these Teachers who are teaching us how to fight for our rights, our dignity, our very survival as a democracy. May God bless them. But more importantly, may their union leaders understand, support and learn from them.