Red State Revolt by Eric Blanc

Author:Eric Blanc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

First Steps

The first few months of the fight for a PEIA fix were an uphill battle. It seemed like 2017–18 could very well end up like school years prior, during which employees vented their anger about rising costs without taking any substantive action. With Republicans in power locally and nationally, many educators and union leaders felt that nothing could be won before the November 2018 midterm elections.

Charleston’s cluster of DSA teachers took a different approach. Comer explains: “Last October, when the latest changes to our health care came down, we immediately knew that with this Republican legislature, it was going to take something really big to win. Our goal was to do whatever it took to beat back these attacks and fix PEIA. Realistically, we saw that this could very well could require a strike—or at least a credible strike threat. We didn’t know what would happen; we didn’t know that it would have to come to that. But we knew that it could. So we were definitely talking strike from October onwards. But our goal wasn’t a strike per se, our goal was to win. Either way, we knew that we needed to begin with a bunch of escalating steps to build up power.”

O’Neal decided in late September to create a Facebook group with him and Comer as co-moderators. As is the case with most serious organizers, O’Neal was just trying to replicate what he saw work well elsewhere: “Honestly, I got the idea to form the group from my experience participating in DSA’s New Members Facebook group. It’s funny, because that DSA page ended up getting pretty out of control, but at least it made me see that social media could actually be used to build an on-the-ground movement.”

For Comer and O’Neal, the main purpose of West Virginia Public Employees United was to create a forum through which workers from different unions could join together to begin collectively organizing. In Comer’s words: “It’s strange: union leaderships here in West Virginia often spend more time trying to compete with each other for members than they do fighting the boss. So we needed to get around the fragmentation—we weren’t going to get anywhere with three separate orgs with three separate strategies.”

Seeking to build the broadest possible working-class unity, Comer and O’Neal also chose to heed Ryan Frankenberry’s suggestion to make it a group of and for all public employees, rather than just teachers. Without this early decision, it’s hard to imagine the chain of events leading to the state’s eventual granting of a 5 percent raise to every public employee. The fact that Comer and O’Neal made it a statewide Facebook group was no less consequential. By eventually uniting educators in all fifty-five counties, the movement constituted a significant advance over the 1990 strike, as well as over the localized WVEA walkouts that had sprung up in 2007.

Nevertheless, in the first month of its existence, the group didn’t “catch.” To O’Neal and Comer’s dismay, few people were joining or commenting.

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