After one-day strike, West Virginia teachers face battle over wages and medical benefits

[TexasTowelie]

After a one-day walkout in defiance of the state’s anti-strike laws, West Virginia teachers are still facing a fight against the state legislature’s efforts to maintain their low wages and to impose higher out-of-pocket medical expenses.

Last Friday, 2,000 teachers and state employees demonstrated and carried their signs into the state capitol building in Charleston while state senators unanimously approved a bill that includes a derisory 1 percent annual wage increase for teachers who already rank 48th in the nation in salaries. A similar bill will be voted on by the House of Delegates.

Governor Jim Justice, a Democrat-turned-Republican, and the Republican-controlled state legislature, also want to destroy teacher seniority rights while a bipartisan financial board is sharply increasing the premiums and deductibles paid by teachers and other state workers enrolled in the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA).

The one-day strike forced the closure of schools throughout the southern coal counties of Logan, Mingo and Wyoming. Teachers who are demanding a pay raise of at least 5 percent and no increases in medical costs are taking strike votes in other counties.

Read more: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/02/06/wvts-f06.html

[Staph]

1. My sister is a school teacher.

Despite the projected 1% salary increase, she would actually earn considerably less next year, due to the health insurance increase (Public Employees Insurance Agency or PEIA). While we were at a church supper, her libertarian husband tried to justify it by asking where did she expect the funding to come from.

And at our table was Jeanette, a friend who is running for the state House of Delegates. Jeanette blew him away, by mentioning the natural gas severance tax that the Republicans refuse to enact, a tax that would fully fund PEIA. West Virginia could have enacted a coal severance tax in the middle of the last century that would have kept state government well funded forever, but it's apparently more important for our politicians to keep the out-of-state extraction industries happier than the actual citizens of the state.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. GOP hates education

Ignorant voters are more easily manipulated.
Taking public money to pay private business makes for future donors.

GOP considers it a win-win situation.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. I hardly know where to begin,

except to note that in countries where teachers are valued and paid well, their kids learn a whole lot more.