LOS ANGELES, May 18 — “Teachers at three schools have already held illegal wildcat job actions protesting layoffs. The union leadership fears following the leadership of rank-and-file teachers,” declared a PLP teacher at the May 6 House of Delegates meeting. On May 12, a judge, acting for the bosses, granted an injunction prohibiting a teacher strike, threatening fines and revocation of teachers’ credentials.

“We should have no illusions about the power of the state apparatus,” another PL’er said. “The government is a weapon of capitalist rule against the working class. They’ll bring their full power against us by imposing an injunction, but we must be prepared to defy it.”

Such speeches exposed the union president’s fear tactics. He warned that an injunction against a planned illegal one-day job action and potential fines of $1,000 per teacher would break the union. Teachers in PLP had joined with others to fight for a one-day strike on May 1, International Workers’ Day. Although we won support for this in many areas of the city, the union leadership, appealing to anti-communism and anti-immigrant racism, pushed through a counter-motion for a one-day strike on any day in May except May Day. Teachers voted by 75% for a one-day walkout on May 15.

But even this was too much for the mis-leaders. They caved in to the injunction, blocked the strike and instead organized civil disobedience. The union president and 40 teacher activists sat in at an intersection, were arrested and spent the day in jail, hoping to diffuse the anger of the teachers at being sold out. Many teachers called this “just theatrics.”

The LA Times reported the union president’s proposal that teachers suffer a pay cut in exchange for retaining the jobs of the 2,600 laid-off teachers, while throwing 2,500 non-teaching employees to the wolves.

Instead of leading workers in a life-and-death struggle against the bosses’ system, the union leaders’ role is “negotiating” the attacks on public employees, trying to convince them that there’s no alternative to capitalism, fascism and imperialist war. As the bosses’ crisis deepens, they must bail out the banks and expand the war, leaving teachers to face huge layoffs.

The layoffs are racist, increasing class size and disrupting mostly black and Latino working-class schools, as are the cuts in the non-teaching staff, many of them black and Latino new-hires.

After layoffs were announced in March, teachers and students at three high schools held unsanctioned one-hour job actions against them, two of which involved over 90% of the faculty. Students in CHALLENGE readers’ groups gave leadership in forums, demonstrations and in the PLP May Day contingent.

Since teacher layoffs are not part of the contract, job actions are illegal. The union leadership failed to prepare the members for this and caved in to the injunction, provoking tremendous district-wide anger and frustration. The injunction claimed leaving students unsupervised for a day constitutes “irreparable harm.” This implies a blanket prohibition of all teacher strikes.

Like Obama’s forced bankruptcy of the auto companies and the attacks on autoworkers’ jobs, wages and pensions, this is a fascist attack. As UAW mis-leaders help the bosses slam autoworkers, the teacher union leaders are doing the same by refusing to defy the fascist injunction.

While Obama counts on these mis-leaders to pacify workers and win them to patriotic sacrifice for the (bosses’) nation, communists prepare and call on workers to take the fight outside the bosses’ laws, with wildcats and non-union job actions, aiming to build forces for revolution.

The union leadership called for picketing before school and civil disobedience at the Board of Education. Teachers and students at many schools picketed in the morning, angry at the Board of Education, the judge, and the union leadership. All three — plus the bankers and bosses’ courts — represent the dictatorship of Capital, the capitalist class, attacking the working class to save a system which can’t meet workers’ needs but must use fascism and world war to preserve their blood-soaked profits.

We distributed CHALLENGE on the picket lines. This led to many important discussions with fellow teachers — who read the paper — about growing fascism, the bankruptcy of the union leadership, the dead-end liberalism of civil disobedience and the need for political leadership whose goal is communist revolution.

We rely on the working class, including teachers, students and parents. Our goal is to increase youth and workers’ understanding and hatred of the system, to build the long-term struggle to take political power from the capitalists. Our aim is a communist world, a workers’ dictatorship, where nobody starves and there no bosses, living in luxury off workers’ sweat. The victory is more CHALLENGE readers, militant study-action CHALLENGE groups, the Summer Project, and a growing commitment to destroy this fascist system.