West Virginia Teachers and the NY Times

Some New York City based NY Times reporter opined on the West Virginia teachers strike. Her comments notes:

As long as the teachers stay out, they serve as a symbol not just of a renascent labor movement, but of a citizens’ uprising that’s taking different forms throughout the United States. Fones-Wolf thinks the strike goes hand in hand “with a much more generalized discontent. You see evidence of it from these school kids in Florida, who are really quite amazing. Maybe we’re on the cusp of a time when people say, ‘enough.’” If that’s true — if a spirit of revolt really is sweeping across the country — it will be the one way Trump has helped make America great again.

Now I have a daughter who is one of the strikers and four grandchildren in the state. As such I have a rather personal nexus. I am not a New York City commentator, I have some pound of flesh in the battle.

The problem is simple. The Legislature is, in my opinion, in the pockets of the coal and gas owners. Labor has always been a second thought in West Virginia. Remember that the Democrat Senator has a daughter who runs the drug company that took epinephrine emergency units and raised the price more than 6 times! Then the teachers were getting one of the worst health plans in the nation and one of the lowest salaries. The unions from my understanding did nothing.  It was the teachers alone, doing it themselves, who pushed the issue.

It is not resolved. The pay increase is one thing, the health plan is a disaster! The Legislature wants to increase the monthly charge almost 12 fold while reducing the benefits to less that one would see in some forth world country. For example, if you have a child with cancer, you get to go to Morgantown, even if you are near Baltimore. Over the Cumberland gap, through snow and ice and pray your sick child is still alive. Then pay for your hotel and the list goes on! West Virginia, in my opinion, is the only state where Medicaid is better!

The issue is not unions, in my opinion, it is the gross disregard of state employees and the favoring of wealthy local interests.

The comfortable, and what seems in my opinion uninformed New York City big paper commentators know-it-all states:

Yet if the strike is rooted in the specific conditions and history of West Virginia, it’s also part of a nationwide upsurge in intense civic engagement by women. “As a profession, we’re largely made up of women,” Amanda Howard Garvin, an elementary school art teacher in Morgantown, told me. “There are a bunch of men sitting in an office right now telling us that we don’t deserve anything better.” In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, she said, women across the country are standing up to say: “No. We’re equal here.”

Well, there are still men going down into the mines, working crops, hauling loads across highways. Why everything gets turned into a women's issue when it is a global issue of the special interests and their money, not the workers and their horrible conditions. One should not bait one group of impressed by another and disregard the true oppressors.

The teachers are back, and as I am led to understand not due to any help from their "unions" who opposed their actions. Yet the health care issue is still a disgrace. Perhaps the NY Times can send someone down into West Virginia. I suspect they may not have done so since Kennedy ran for President!