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00:00:01
Emergency ep: Jason Kenney's 26,000 surprise layoffs
66 Plays4 years ago
Jason Kenney just committed the biggest mass layoff in Alberta's history in the middle of a pandemic. It's the kind of cruel and contemptible behaviour we've come to expect. To help us process and understand the fallout from the brutal decision to fire 26,000 education workers we have Edmonton Public School Board trustee Bridget Stirling on the pod.
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:15
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording today here in my bedroom in Amiskwichi, Waskagand, otherwise known as Edmonton, here in Treaty 6 territory.
Mass Firing Announcement
00:00:27
Speaker
And today we're talking about a day that will live in infamy.
00:00:31
Speaker
And really, what better way is there to announce the largest mass firing in Alberta's history than on a Saturday afternoon with 15 minutes notice to the school boards and doing it via tweet. That is how Jason Kenney announced the firing of 26,000 K-12 educational workers.
Economic Impact Discussion
00:00:51
Speaker
And there was no press conference. The justification beyond it is a very stupid wave to the notion that this money would be repurposed towards the coronavirus response. Economist Trevor Toome said, quote, this alone is one percent of the entire province's labor force, massive scale, unquote.
00:01:10
Speaker
For a government and a politician in Kenny who said he was laser focused on job creation, it is truly something else to see him firing one out of every 100 workers in just one fell swoop. He is a truly legendary piece of shit.
Interview with Bridget Sterling
00:01:27
Speaker
And to help us process this, we've got someone on the line who has to deal with the fallout from this brutal decision. We're very lucky to have Edmonton Public School Board trustee Bridget Sterling on the pod. Bridget, welcome to the progress report.
00:01:39
Speaker
Hi, thanks. I can get to talk to you today. Yes. Thanks so much for coming on on short notice. I know you're still in the midst of dealing with all this, but before even that, are you staying healthy? You're self isolating. Yeah. I think like a lot of people, I'm in a higher risk category. So I'm spending a lot of time hanging out at my house with my dog. My dog is living her best life right now, but yeah, we're doing okay. We're staying healthy.
00:02:05
Speaker
The doggos are definitely getting a lot more daytime attention than I think they are usually accustomed to, which, you know, good for them. At least there's one upside to all this. So one upside to this whole coronavirus social distancing hell that we're going through right now is that my cousin had to cancel her gender reveal party. So there's at least kind of like one that and the doggos getting more attention. You know, we've got to find our small wins.
Details on Funding Cuts
00:02:32
Speaker
So where do you want to start? Like, what's the damage here? You're the second largest public school board in the province, right? And kind of maybe just walk us, you've had, I mean, you've only had a few days to kind of process this, but you are better equipped than most to kind of like walk us through what the actual physical consequences of this are going to be. Yeah, and we're still trying to figure out all of the consequences ourselves, but what we do know is pretty dire
00:03:01
Speaker
So we received the message from the, we received sort of a short message from the minister and not a message from the deputy minister with the details of what we were being expected to cut over the weekend. We received that, I think as you said, we had very, very short notice Saturday morning, only shortly before the information went out, or Saturday afternoon before the information went out to the general public
00:03:30
Speaker
So what we've been told is that there are two reductions, one of which is 14% reduction to monthly allocations for the base instruction grant, which is the bulk of education funding to public school boards for operational funding, and the other one, which is a 51% reduction to transportation funding. But the biggest impact of that is the reduction to the base instruction grant
Impact on Educational Staff
00:04:00
Speaker
And I think what a lot of people don't know about schools, perhaps, is that when we're talking about our funding, the majority of that is those two salaries. Education, like most caring professions, is really people intensive. And when we're talking salaries, what we're really talking about, of course, is jobs and workers. It's very easy to sort of talk about these numbers in the abstract, but they really are about people's lives and people's jobs.
00:04:28
Speaker
And the message specifically directed school divisions to cut jobs for substitute teachers, educational assistants, non-essential support staff, and for those divisions that employ bus drivers directly, bus drivers. And very specifically, it said that we are to limit the use of substitute teachers
00:04:57
Speaker
give way off notices to educational existence and what they deem non-essential support staff. We don't think most of those workers are non-essential, but the government's determination of non-essential courses is very different than perhaps ours might be.
00:05:16
Speaker
So let's just round that up again. So the people being laid off are substitute teachers, educational assistants, non-essential admin and support staff, bus drivers, if they are employed directly by the school board, and janitorial to custodial? Well, we don't know for sure yet, because what followed this message, and this is part of why this has been an incredibly frustrating situation, is initially it was very directive saying,
00:05:45
Speaker
these specific groups of people. Now, what's come back to us is, well, no, you might not have to lay off all of the people in those categories. You can do whatever you need to do to meet the 14% reduction, which means we could look more broadly at other staff groups, but that doesn't mean that that won't mean lay off the cross staff groups. Having more flexibility with a 14% reduction in the grant still means cuts to staffing
00:06:14
Speaker
inevitably wherever those people work. So whether we talk about educational assistance or custodial workers or maintenance workers or teachers or anybody else, those are all important education workers who are currently working like crazy to support the education of our kids.
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah, and that's an excellent segue to the natural follow-up question, right? We know how these workers are being affected.
Effects on Students and Schools
00:06:39
Speaker
They're getting cruellously laid off in the middle of an incredibly uncertain time. But how is this going to affect students as well? Yeah, and some of the confusion around this, I think, stems from a misperception of what's happening in schools right now. I think a lot of people in the province, maybe if they don't have kids, think that schools are closed. Schools aren't closed. Our school buildings are closed.
00:07:03
Speaker
We have been given very, very clear directions from the ministry that we are to ensure continuity of learning. So what that means is we need to shift to some form of distance education, whether that's online learning or for students who live in areas where there isn't good internet access or whose families don't have internet access, providing other forms of at-home learning materials so that those kids can continue to be educated. We think it's really important to continue education
00:07:34
Speaker
You know, children have limited windows of time, and we want to make sure that we continue their learning. So those records have been hard at work in a lot of different ways, ensuring that we can be ready to provide education to kids, right? So parents are home, and parents are really good experts in their own kids generally, right? They know their child really well. Parents are not trained as teachers.
00:08:03
Speaker
And then they're also not trained necessarily at their parents or children with disabilities or things like that on how to modify classroom materials to support the learning needs of a child. Families may not have technology in their home, and so they may need some help getting access to technology or access to the internet, a whole bunch of different things, right?
00:08:32
Speaker
All of these folks have been continuing to provide support to kids as we've been transitioning into this new learning environment. You know, online learning isn't free. You know, it's not necessarily more simple or more easy to provide, particularly when we're talking about children. That's a very different context than it is for adult learners.
00:08:57
Speaker
Are you saying it's harder to wrangle nine-year-olds on a Zoom call than it is a bunch of adults? I'm not going to lie. A lot of nine-year-olds are pretty adept at technology, but keeping kids engaged and figuring out how to teach online is actually pretty complicated, especially with younger grades. With our younger kids, a lot of our learning is activity-based and play-based instruction for the very early years.
00:09:27
Speaker
You know, our kinders and grade ones, we do a lot of that kind of stuff. You know, it's one thing to give kids a signed reading. It's another thing to try to do a classroom science project over Zoom or that kind of stuff, right? So we're trying to figure out how do we adapt all of these things teachers do to distance delivery is actually quite complex.
00:09:48
Speaker
And the example of the educational assistance, too, of these kind of people being earmarked to be laid off, I mean, I think we really, the broader public, if you're not kind of directly working with these people who are aware of the work they do, they are absolutely crucial.
Support for Children with Disabilities
00:10:03
Speaker
to folks with disabilities so that they can go to school and learn, right? And I think that there was a viral kind of like Twitter thread over the weekend that really did kind of make this point. And it was from a parent named Dwayne Freese.
00:10:20
Speaker
And we will put the Twitter thread in our in our show notes But it starts out like this. It says dear minister Adriana Lagrange. This is our seven-year-old Nonverbal daughter interacting with her educational assistant last week from home her educational assistant Modifies classwork to allow her to keep up with community school peers your announcement today to NDA support is devastating for our family and others and
00:10:44
Speaker
Our daughter, because of Rett syndrome, has severe gross motor impairment, but no cognitive impairment. Her EA modifies work for her eye gaze and has been providing daily support to us through the COVID pandemic. And it goes into the kind of further details about how even from a distance these EAs are working with this girl to make sure that she continues to learn. Yeah, for sure. And that's one
00:11:11
Speaker
very excellent example of how the EEA is supporting both the child in their learning and the teacher in the provision of learning, that they are a really key part of that child's whole educational team to ensure that that child gets the same fair access and equitable access to education as another child. When we think about other kids, we think about a child with autism. For a lot of autistic children,
00:11:39
Speaker
Stability and security in their environment is really important. And this disruption already to going to school and learning. And then maybe being at home has already been a huge adjustment for a lot of children. And that relationship they have with an EA who may have a lot of expertise and training in supporting children with autism. Having that stable person continue to have that relationship with them is really critical.
00:12:08
Speaker
for a student with severe dyslexia. I was chatting with her friend this morning about her experiences with her children. Her child may pull out reading time within educational assistant who has expertise in working with students who have learning disabilities and not having that opportunity
00:12:30
Speaker
continuing at a distance to spend that one-on-one time with the EA additional and in support of the time that the teacher spends with the child, it's hugely important in that child continuing to gain ground on literacy. And we know being able to read is fundamental to having access to opportunity in adult life. It's a huge, and if we fall behind on that children's development of their literacy skills,
00:12:58
Speaker
They may never regain that ground or it may be incredibly hard to gain that back after a substantial gap in that support.
00:13:06
Speaker
Yeah, like the possible long-term consequences of this are extremely dire for like a generation of kids. And it's not, it's almost impossible for me to not read this decision in the most kind of like critical way possible.
Criticism of Government Decisions
00:13:24
Speaker
Like I don't know how we can look at this and not be mad, right? But I look at a government that right now has pulled together a panel to talk about how to
00:13:38
Speaker
restart the economy after the end of a crisis. Like I said, I said, how are we going to get businesses back from their feet after this? And we're going to pull together this huge fancy panel to get through this now. And yet seems to think that it's appropriate during a crisis of this nature to stop thinking about how we make sure that kids get through this in the best shape possible so that they continue to have
00:14:06
Speaker
a future opportunity and they continue to be able to have access to a meaningful and self-loving life after this pandemic. How can we have the foresight to say we want to help all these businesses and corporations survive this situation and yet we can't think about how do we make sure our kids come out of this in the best possible shape possible. The priorities seem really messed up, this claim that we need to
00:14:31
Speaker
claw away resources from children for an immediate short-term need, and yet we can already be talking about how we help corporate interests survive afterwards. It's incredibly short-sighted.
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah, what will we do about the oil and gas industry, Bridget? I mean, come on, we've got our priorities here as a, as a UCP government. I mean, the other dark, you know, cynical reading of this is that this is, you know, the shock doctrine being played out, right? Never waste a crisis. And there's very real scenario that exists that a huge chunk of these people are just never going to come back to work. And that these, these cuts can be permanent in this context.
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah, and I've been thinking about that in the light of what we know already we're going to be facing in the 2020-2021 school year after the spring budget, which was already founded in ridiculous assumptions about oil prices and revenues. But we already have seen substantial cuts to education again. And school divisions now no longer have the reserves they used to fill in the gap this year. So this is kind of compounding.
00:15:38
Speaker
And so we knew that in the fall, we were likely to see substantial job losses in education. And I can't help but think that it's very convenient for this government to force massive layoffs now so that there's not that bad news story in the fall when those workers are just not hired back. It's a lot harder to tell the story of people who just aren't hired back than to talk clearly about what's happening with the impact of layoffs in the fall. It allows them to detach the story of their cuts.
00:16:09
Speaker
from the layoffs, right? So they can say, oh, no, no, no, that was the pandemic layoffs. That's nothing to do with our cuts.
00:16:18
Speaker
Yeah, right, like this pandemic is an excuse to not only speed up the timeline of their austerity, but to like do austerity on steroids, like to make it even bigger and worse than was originally announced in what was already really fucking bad, right? Like school boards were already, like this summer was going to be a bloodbath when it came to firing teachers and educational assistants and admin and support staff.
00:16:40
Speaker
janitorial folks like anyone who had a job in the educational system like you could be laid off this summer and and now it seems even more likely and not only that like you may never get a job again right well we talked about this idea of non-essential staff through sort of last year's cuts plus a longer term terms of austerity and education going back for decades you know for
00:17:10
Speaker
Most divisions have very few non-essential staff left. We have cut down in incredible ways. I know for us already this year because of the anticipated, because of the cuts in the fall and then the anticipated cuts to come, we had already been scaling everything back and trimming everything back to the essentials. So to then take another 14%, there's not a lot of non-essential here that we're talking about.
00:17:39
Speaker
I don't consider our workers to be nonessential.
00:17:59
Speaker
Our number one priority continues to be the safety of all Albertans, including our students and teachers. That's why we are temporarily adjusting payments to school authorities to further support Alberta's COVID-19 AB
Justifications and Federal Support
00:18:10
Speaker
response. More information here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The frame that they're using is that we're cutting funding to our education system because we need the money to fight the coronavirus. I mean, are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, I don't buy it.
00:18:28
Speaker
I don't buy it because they're also continuing to go ahead with other cuts in healthcare. Also, you know, you think about temperature, I'm sorry, I told you about, you know, this isn't really like, that's not how government budgets work. You don't just, you know, take the education money and put it back over here. Money is fungible, which is something that Jason, which is something that Jason Kenney has said a bunch of times, actually. Yeah.
00:18:58
Speaker
I don't think this is really about COVID-19 response. I think this is really about making up for the fact that this government rushed through a budget with terrible assumptions on the resource royalties. And at the same time as they've continued with their massive tax giveaways, so they've cut themselves massively on the revenue side and made some really poor assumptions on what was going to be coming in through these royalties.
00:19:27
Speaker
So they dug themselves into a situation where through these things, their numbers don't work and for whatever ridiculous reason, push through a budget anyway. And they're now in a situation where rather than doing what I think most sensible governments would do in this situation, which is look at borrowing and look at revenues to figure out how you're going to fund a crisis, instead they're going out and they're looking anywhere they can
00:19:57
Speaker
to get costs off their books. And what this really seems to be about to me is taking the cost of all of these workers who are actually doing meaningful and important work in supporting children and instead taking them out of jobs where they're actually doing work, you know, these are working people.
00:20:19
Speaker
And instead putting them on to the responsibility to federal government by pushing them off on to employment insurance and the emergency benefit program, right? So it's just a way of shifting the cost onto a different government. So then they can believe a different government for the debt.
00:20:37
Speaker
Yeah, like, laying off tens of thousands of Albertans doesn't make them more safe in any way, right? It makes them panicky, anxious, scared that their government is abandoning them during a crisis. And it is, when you look at it, it seems like just an extremely cynical and contemptible move, right?
00:20:59
Speaker
to essentially foist all these people off onto the shitty and labyrinthine E.I. program and say, hey, federal government, deal with it. Deal with it. Here's 26,000 new people. Go nuts. This is going to affect all other Albertans who are trying to access the E.I. because of what's happened with their jobs right now, too. You dump another suddenly 26,000 people into the system. You're going to slow it all down. You're going to make it even harder for people. Right. And, you know, you're not
00:21:29
Speaker
You're not making it work better. And at the same time, what we've seen from the federal government is the announcement of a 75 percent. Now, people had to fight to get it to 75 percent, but a 75 percent wage subsidy to employers. And they just said this morning, no matter what the size of the employer, so that they could avoid laying off workers, because what they said they're saying is don't lay off workers. Keep them working if you can.
00:22:00
Speaker
It's better to keep people employed, even if their hours are scaled back, even if you're paying them their wages and they're only working a few hours a week. It is better to keep people in the payroll system rather than dumping more people in TEI. So at the same time, as the Fed they're saying, keep your workers, keep people employed, do whatever you can to avoid laying people off. You could even rehire people that you laid off in the last two weeks. You can keep them on payroll systems. We've got a provincial government kicking, you know,
00:22:30
Speaker
you know, tens of thousands of workers off the public payroll system where they are employed, they're working and they're doing meaningful work into federal support and aid systems that are already overstretched. And I don't think this is going to be the end of the credential layoff. You know, I think there's probably more public sector layoffs coming across the GOA employees as well.
00:22:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's worth pointing out this is all being done despite Education Minister Adriana Lagrange saying on March 15th, like literally just two weeks ago, that school boards would receive their full funding for the school year. I will work with school authorities throughout this process and school authorities will receive their full allotment of funding for the 2019-2020 school year. Okay.
00:23:20
Speaker
I gotta bring it up. And the fact that this promise was broken so fast, and the fact that this government seems to be reacting to bad news in shittier and shittier ways, is this the proverbial dead cat on the table to distract us from health minister Tyler Chandro making an embarrassment of himself and yelling at a doctor and having that become blowing up to be a province-wide news story?
00:23:47
Speaker
You know, I've heard some speculation on this, and it may be that the choice of timing on it, on when to announce it was sort of a dead cat scenario, but I actually think this was planned earlier. I think this may have been in the works since the school closure decision was made to have these workers continue working to sort of get through the initial transition period and then to force layoffs.
00:24:15
Speaker
So, you know, I've heard the speculation about the dead cat scenario and I think the announcement timing may very accurately be that, but I'm not sure that this decision wasn't made sooner than the announcement was just held until the weekend because it was, or was made on this weekend because it was convenient timing to announce something of that nature. I think it might have originally been planned to have been announced alongside other layoffs across the public sector.
Promises and Historical Context
00:24:44
Speaker
I mean, I have an extremely low opinion of our government, so I mean, nothing surprises me. I mean, it would be surely an incredible fucking thing if they laid off 26,000 people purely for news cycle bullshit. I mean, it's possible. But yeah, maybe the announcement was affected by the news of our health minister doing some driveway canvassing of his neighborhood doctor.
00:25:11
Speaker
Yeah, well, and the other, the other piece of that, that commitment that was made a couple of weeks ago is, you know, whether, whether or not we should have, I don't know, but we believed the minister's promises on that. And so when school divisions started developing their plans on how to deliver education to children, we made those plans believing that we would have our educational assistants and office administrators and bus drivers and
00:25:40
Speaker
for divisions that do directly employ bus drivers. Edmonton Public doesn't, but other divisions do. Custodial workers, all of these people to help support that work, right? So our schools still continue to need to be cleaned. We do still have some workers working on site and also in light of a pandemic, we need to do a deep cleaning. But our
00:26:07
Speaker
Our other workers are a big part of this, so EAs are an important part of how we've determined how to deliver education at a distance. But so are office administrators who have been working hard to do things like find contact families who they think may not have to find out whether they have access to appropriate technology. It's like those who don't to find Chromebooks or other technology to figure out ways for them to get internet access, all of these things.
00:26:37
Speaker
In the city, some of those office workers and rural areas, some of the bus drivers and other workers have been doing things like ensuring that families who depended on nutrition programs were still able to get access to food. We saw in the medicine hat, I think the bus drivers who worked for the school division working with the local food bank to help families get access to food. They're also helping deliver educational materials because
00:27:06
Speaker
While in the city, even if the family doesn't have a home internet, there may be other places they can go to access it. In rural Alberta, there are parts of rural Alberta where there's just no internet access. It doesn't matter how much money you have, there's just no local internet access, or unreliable, so there's a living educational material. So it's not just that, well,
00:27:32
Speaker
We sort of were mad because we're losing funding. The problem is that we have made our plans on how to keep delivering education to kids based on expecting that we have a team of people to deliver it with and now suddenly we're going to be missing each chunk of those teams.
00:27:47
Speaker
No, it's a betrayal. It's an utter betrayal of families, of workers, of students. They went back on their word two weeks after making it. And the effects, I think, are going to royal through this province for years to come. And I think the scale of this, I think, is 2B. It is hard to believe. When you look at the biggest layoffs in Canadian history,
00:28:12
Speaker
There is really only one in the kind of short time that I did the research for this that really seems to be higher. And that is the collapse in cod stocks in Newfoundland and Labrador in the early 90s. And the federal government announced their immediate moratorium on cod fishing that threw out about 38,000 people out of work. That's the only mass layoff I can find that is larger than this one.
00:28:42
Speaker
Yeah, and I think even with those, those are sort of over, over short periods of time, this one, I mean, depending on how you count it, right, school divisions will now have to, to go through and actually start laying people off that, you know, when you think about a one-day layoff, there are very few moments in Canadian history that have ever come close to this.
00:29:03
Speaker
Yeah, like other big ones are like Target, when Target shut their doors in 2015. You know, we've got AV Row Canada, which was the manufacturer of the Avro Aero. When Eaton's went bankrupt, laid people off, they laid off 13,000 people across the country. You know, Air Canada, Air Canada around September 11th, again, this is kind of over a year long period, 13,000 people again, like
00:29:32
Speaker
Anyways, what were you going to say? I was going to say you look at how this government recently responded to layoffs of 6,000 people at WestJet, which is an Alberta-based company, and their promises to work to help WestJet in light of that kind of massive layoffs. And then for them to turn around and do the same thing to education workers in this province. You know, you claim to be job creators, right, but
00:30:00
Speaker
I don't know, I'm not seeing that job promise out of putting 26,000 maybe families into the precarious situation of being able to work. And I'll add, most of the workers who will face layoffs through this are some of the lowest wage workers in education, right? They're vital parts of what we do, but the average annual income for an educational assistant in Alberta, I think, is about $27,000 a year.
00:30:30
Speaker
And the ones most likely to be laid off are early career ones as well who haven't gone up the scale. Yeah, exactly. So the earlier in a career somebody is, you know, they tend to be very often women who are doing these jobs, often, you know, taking this work on because they are, they care a lot about children and they want to do that work and they want to be in the school. A lot of people get into being educational assistants through
00:31:00
Speaker
being involved in their own child's school. And, you know, and they're really, really important parts of what we do. But they are often the more precarious and low wage workers in the system. So they're families who are already often, you know, they're not people who have a lot of savings to fall back on right now or have a lot of resources to help them get them through. Yeah.
00:31:25
Speaker
It is, it is truly contentible actions from this government. Um, so, okay.
Organizing Against Cuts
00:31:31
Speaker
I mean, the way I want to close, right? Is like, how do we organize? Like, how do we fight back? Well, and I'm, you know, I've been really thinking about how to do that downtown because we are all, and I think that's part of why this kind of shock action I was taking right now is we are all very, very atomized, right? We are in our homes.
00:31:54
Speaker
We're in a context where there are public health orders in place that say we can't gather in groups of more than 15. Where social distancing means we need to all be a couple of meters apart while we do that. You can't get right now 10,000 Albertans on the steps of the legislature like we had just a few weeks ago. You can't hold a town hall for parents to talk about the impact with a lot of
00:32:20
Speaker
school boards and school board trustees have been doing over the last few months to talk about what's happening in education. And so we're really trying hard to figure out how to communicate the impacts and how to help people respond in a time when, you know, what do we do, post angry things on Twitter, send emails, go yell on a minister's front driveway. Apparently that's acceptable behavior.
00:32:50
Speaker
It is really, really challenging to organize right now. What I have seen people doing is doing things like organizing a phoning campaign where they are overwhelming NLA offices with phone calls or contacting people in other ways to kind of get the message out. But I think we have to be really creative right now in how to organize. But it is really hard.
00:33:18
Speaker
when people are isolated in their homes and feeling pretty alone already.
00:33:24
Speaker
Yeah, it is hard, but I think where it has to start is building a coalition between parents and workers, and that includes teachers, but also all of the other workers, as you talked about, and the kids and the students. I think some of the most effective actions are the ones that are led by the kids with the help and done in concert with both parents and the workers.
00:33:54
Speaker
Yeah, and we have these kind of broad organizations and coalition groups out there, right? We have, you know, the labor unions, and what I really, really, really hope is that the ATA takes clear and decisive action in support of other education workers, because their, you know, ATA members may be a bit less at risk in these layoffs to some extent, although substitute teachers will certainly be impacted, but I hope that
00:34:23
Speaker
label organizations are going to work in solidarity with each other, but also reach out to other groups, right? There are parents and community groups out there who are really, really powerful in the way they organize to think about inclusion, Alberta's leadership on the fight against occlusion rooms. I think about the work that, you know, school councils can do in organizing their community.
00:34:48
Speaker
I think about the work that kids have done, students have done together through groups like their GSAs and things like that to organize resistance in the past. And so those networks are going to be really important. And I think it's a good example right now of why that organizing and solidarity building all the time, whatever the circumstances and whatever we're facing is really important, even in the good times, because that's what's going to help us be able to organize and fight back during a time like this.
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's, I mean, we also can't ignore the work of support our students, Alberta, who have kind of done incredible work working with parents and breaking down how kind of messed up our educational system is. Yeah, SOS has been incredible on this. I have to say they are, they've driven so much of this conversation. They've really been trying to call people's attention to austerity and education and in what's coming.
00:35:48
Speaker
And I was having a conversation with someone from SLS recently, and I was talking about how, you know, this government is going to use this time of change to try to shock the system, right, to sort of bring in these sort of neoliberal policies, this extreme austerity. You know, we know that that's part of kind of a playbook. But what does it look like if we also take advantage of the moment of
00:36:18
Speaker
of change that's happening here, right? So if, you know, these sort of destructive forces have historically learned to take advantage of moments of crisis and moments of transition, what does it look like if we come out of this ready to fight and do the same, right? Like what does it mean if we use this time and opportunity and space to demand something better? If you look at the 1918 flu pandemic,
00:36:48
Speaker
That was followed by the Winnipeg General Strike. What does it look like when we come out of this ready to fight, too? And I think we need to remember that the opportunity for massive change doesn't just go one way.
00:37:04
Speaker
Yeah, never waste a crisis, right? And I think we do need to remind ourselves that austerity is a feature and not a bug of capitalism, right? It is a constant reality that our capitalist society is going to kind of cut back public services as much as they can get away with.
00:37:24
Speaker
And yes, I think we're also seeing in real time what can happen to an economy and to society and to the powers that be when regular ass people don't show up to work.
00:37:39
Speaker
We are seeing in real time what happens to the gears of this incredibly complex economic machine that we've built. When the sanitation workers are now critical infrastructure, when the grocery store workers are now critical infrastructure,
00:37:59
Speaker
you know, when educational assistants are now critical infrastructure, now that we've actually realized that, I think it's time to actually realize that those folks and that us together, we have more power now than we've ever had at kind of any point. And it is incumbent upon us to realize that we have that power and to flex it and to exercise it. Yeah. And this was, you know, this is the moment when capitalism is going to try to take up just enough stuff from socialism to save itself.
00:38:29
Speaker
You know, it's going to take up just enough of these kinds of policies to get through the crisis. And then they're going to try to take these things away from us again, right? And we have to demand that these things stay in place, right? Why don't we have a system that supports all workers who lose their employment all the time, right? Why don't we have decent living wages for,
00:38:59
Speaker
people who work in grocery stores all the time. Why does it have to take hero pay? These are the questions that I think are being exposed.
Role of Critical Workers
00:39:07
Speaker
I think we have to say, you don't just get to bring in a little bit of socialism to save yourself right now. We're going to demand a better world all the time.
00:39:18
Speaker
Yeah, right. And socialism isn't just the government paying for stuff. I mean, if we really wanted to do socialism right now, like, yeah, let's buy up all of the oil companies. I mean, I think you can get a pretty good deal on them at the moment. Yeah, yeah. There's some airlines really struggling right now. Maybe we could go back to nationalizing Maryland.
00:39:55
Speaker
earlier in the interview talking about how, if you're a family working with an EA this week, photograph your sessions and explain to the public what it is that your EA did and does, and just for people to really understand.
00:40:03
Speaker
Real socialism, baby.
00:40:14
Speaker
these are, as you said, critical workers, essential services. I think if you are one of those workers, I want to hear your story. I want to know what it is that you're doing and how important it is to keep our education system working. Yeah, and I think don't definitely put that stuff up on social media because that's one of the really important ways that people are staying connected right now. Also, tell your friends, your family, and your neighbors.
00:40:43
Speaker
I was reminding parents when we're talking about organizing that grandparents are powerful, right, aunties and uncles are powerful. The family members and friends of education workers are powerful voices tonight. Like we need to remember to continue not only to use social media, but also to reach out through our phone calls and, you know, conversations from the end of the driveway while we're waving goodbye after we drop off the groceries to grandma or whatever we're doing to really
00:41:12
Speaker
help people understand that education hasn't stopped in Alberta, that education workers still matter in Alberta, that they are part of how we will survive this thing. I think also emails are awesome. Phone calls are even better. They take up a lot of time. They take up energy. There's a lot of this stuff that you can keep doing right now. Yes, you're mostly at home, and you're doing the social distancing thing to keep safe.
00:41:42
Speaker
we can still talk to each other. This whole idea of being apart but being together is really, really powerful right now. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Engagement and Support
00:41:52
Speaker
Bridget, thanks so much for coming on. I think that's where we're going to leave it. How can people follow along with you on social media? What's the best way to keep track of you and what you're saying to the world?
00:42:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm a big loud mouth on Twitter. I'm an average at Sterling on Twitter, and she can drop that into the show notes too. So I'm trying to raise attention and permission there at a public page as a trustee on Facebook as well. And then, you know, we're trying to also communicate to our families and having some public schools.
00:42:25
Speaker
They should be watching for some messages coming out from the full board this week, not just from the chair, but from the board as a whole talking about the situation while we continue to be having conversations with our families. But yeah, Twitter is probably my most loved place. Oh yeah, my Twitter time has gone way, way up. Much to my detriment, and my screen time too, I think there should be an option to just get rid of the screen time update you get on your iPhone every week.
00:42:55
Speaker
Oh, yeah, no, that's really depressing right now. Don't look at that. Yeah, yeah. And and folks out there, if you like this podcast and you want to keep hearing it, there are a few things you can do to make sure that this, you know, keeps happening on a regular basis. The easiest, best thing for you to do is that if you like this podcast and you want more people to listen to it, share it.
00:43:17
Speaker
However you share it, whether it's, you know, you're on our page, you're going to our page, you're sharing the URL, whether you're just in your iPhone or whatever it is, your podcast app and directly sharing this podcast with a friend, whether you're posting about it, talking about it, word of mouth is really the like strongest and best way.
00:43:34
Speaker
to help us out. Another really kind of easy granular thing you can do for us is leave a review. If you leave a review, not just a star review, but also a few sentences about why you think we are good and useful and people should listen to us, that also really helps as well. And finally, the other thing that you can do that really also helps us out is you can support us financially if you are able to.
00:43:57
Speaker
A small monthly donation, five, ten dollars a month, really does help us out and really does provide social proof to the rest of the folks out there that we are doing important independent media work. Because at the end of the day, this is a pretty small independent media project.
00:44:13
Speaker
Also, if you have any notes thoughts comments things you think I need to hear about either related to this podcast or anything else You can reach me on Twitter at Duncan Kinney and you can reach me by email at Duncan K at progress Alberta ca Thanks so much to cosmic family communist for the amazing theme. Thanks so much to Bridget Sterling for coming on the show and Thank you for listening. Goodbye
00:44:34
Speaker
Did you know that Progress Alberta is part of a national community of leftist podcasts on the Ricochet Podcast Network? You can find the Alberta Advantage, 49th Parahel, Kino Lefter, Well Reds, The Progress Report, Leafy Sales, Out of Left Field, and Unpacking the News, as well as a bunch of other awesome podcasts at Ricochet Media or wherever you download your podcasts.