You haven’t heard from the FOS Collective for a bit because like many other teachers, professors, parents, school workers, we’re been overwhelmed at navigating our personal and work responsibilities while seeing and trying to stop unending barbarisms.

We might have been energized – but haven’t been, yet – to protest the War in Iran by a significant victory. As Ken Klippenstein explains, it was not publicized by the media or politicians who say they identify with our ideals: the public fired Kristi Noem. Also not recognized is that education workers were a significant factor in making that happen. As was so apparent in Minneapolis, education workers joined with other unions, parents, students, neighbors, friends – coming together as a single force. Our actions and ideas have made the billionaire class and the President they selected step back.

Education workers are first-responders and comprise a disproportionately large segment of activists and leaders in movements for social justice, from health care to peace, anti-racism to trans rights, climate change to disability rights, reproductive freedom to calling out the surveillance state. We organize in our communities, write letters and petitions more than do workers in other occupations, to save funding for the arts, libraries, housing, and hospitals.

Though our unions often don’t live up to their potential or what should be our expectations, the Right considers them – us – the most dangerous political force in this country. They see what we do not. Our location in society makes us so, because of “union density,” our presence in every community, our role in reproducing (or disrupting) what we believe and do as a society, which demands speaking truth to power, more vital and perilous because of the Right’s vendettas against individuals.

Last month education workers in the SF Unified School District organized and went on strike, the first in nearly fifty years. The strike shows what I’ve been hearing from staff and activists in the past few months: A new generation of education workers is ready to fight for conditions in schools that communities, parents, and students agree are needed immediately, like significantly improved conditions for special education students and staff.

At the same time that we’re seeing increased militancy in a fight for schools students deserve, I’ve read many exchanges on social media that illustrate education workers are far from unanimous about challenging ICE’s atrocities, sometimes because they agree with the deportations and also because it’s too “political.” The line of thinking goes the union’s job is to protect our economic interests and everything else is verboten because it’s “political.” Many teachers have been persuaded by ICE’s brutality that protecting our students is an extension of our professional responsibilities. Yet, they’re still uncomfortable and unwilling to have our unions take positions on “foreign policy.” Why? What makes many of us feel our government’s support for violence beyond our borders is hard to raise in our unions, “political” in ways its use of ICE and the DHS to terrorize people in our communities is not?

The problem goes beyond what we believe about Venezuela or war in Iran. For example, the FOS collective has not yet posted an article about what we want our unions to do about the carnage in Palestine – though as individuals we know about and support activists in education, higher ed and prek-12 who have been doing this, with courage and success: Educators for Palestine NEA Caucus and AFT4Palestine .

I think “foreign policy” can feel remote from our daily lives, which is not an accident. We live in a political culture that assumes this country has a right to overthrow another nation’s elected officials when the US government thinks that’s best. Moreover, we – our government – intervenes when the President and his advisers want. Congress basically allows that to happen, and both parties have gone along with it. Who asks you if you want US money, military intelligence, and “advisers” used to depose, kidnap, or murder elected officials – rather than being spent for more federal funding for our schools? Were you asked if you want the government that speaks in your name and uses your taxes to violate international law to give Israel weapons used to destroy hospitals and schools and murder civilians, including children?

So who is consulted in those decisions? The answer illuminates how we can talk about “foreign policy” in our unions, to colleagues who want the union to defend their pensions, salaries, and voice in pushing back on the administration but think “foreign policy” is too “political.” The billionaire class that controls the economy and has expanded its power dramatically under Trump, pushing cuts to school funding and siphoning off tax money to enrich private companies and replace public schools with charters, also pours money into both parties to determine how our government uses its power outside our borders. Whether we call them “oligarchs,” or “billionaires,” or the “ruling class,” the powerful, unimaginably wealthy elite, which shows it wants to pauperize working people and repress our freedom- for more profit and power – calls the shots, about everything. And there is big, big money to be made in war, which is not being hidden. Speaking for Trump and his allies, Senator Lindsey Graham boasted on Fox News “We are going to make a ton of money” with this war.

Though we don’t yet have a snappy explanation that connects what occurs outside our borders to what we experience as workers, we see the connections daily in the millions of undocumented immigrants whose children are in our schools. As the Zinn Education Project materials explain, our border crisis results from people fleeing their homes in Central and Latin America because of the US government’s policies, supporting wealthy elites rather than the rights and well-being of poor and working people. If our national unions pushed to create political space to describe US history and current reality accurately, honestly, along with the need for solidarity with working people across borders, “foreign policy” wouldn’t seem so … foreign. Still, our unions not doing what they should can’t be an excuse for our not doing what we must.

The war in Iran is not the end of Trump’s manic pursuit of power internationally. The billionaires backing him have shown they will support him as long as they can get profits and power. I asked Melissa Tomlinson, a longtime education activist, about what working educators could do, at this moment. Her ideas about building a movement to make our unions do what they should to defend us as workers are as useful in raising the war in Iran as they are about union activity in general: We need to take matters into our own hands and not wait for the union. “The unions have always operated on this idea that if we have the numbers we will have the strength. And I completely disagree with that. It’s the strength that attracts people and builds the numbers.” The majority of people in the US do not support this war, and since our national unions are not organizing against it, we must do it in our locals and states and draw them with us.

Still, anyone who had spent time in schools knows education workers are not a socially or politically homogeneous group. Divisions among us reflect social, economic, and political conflicts in our society – and world. Those divisions are bridged by building a contract fight that supports our colleagues ti see their self-interest differently, understanding a commonality of interests with parents, students, and community. While the contract fight creates spaces we can use, it doesn’t automatically lead to hard conversations about “foreign policy.”

What might support those discussions are the murmurings about new security dangers because of the war in Iran. Whether actual or imagined, we should have learned these will be the pretext for increased surveillance and denial of rights to speak, write, and organize, repression far greater than what we’ve seen. The billionaire class that tramples on our rights at home and has bought politicians in both parties will support Trump in destroying innocent lives, everywhere. The aim of this powerful elite is profit and control, not the better world we want for ourselves and the kids we teach. Our responsibility is to fight them using all the resources we can gather. Topping that list is our own unrealized power and the potential of our unions.

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