Dear brothers and sisters,
We are the teachers of many of your children in Detroit public schools. We ask that you join us in demanding that schools remain closed and that our children and our communities are safe. The Omicron variant of COVID-19 continues to rage across the city and state, as well as across the United States and around the world.
By keeping Detroit schools closed since the holidays, the test positivity rate has dropped from 40 percent to 20 percent in the city. This proves that the temporary closure of schools significantly reduces the transmission of this deadly disease. Now is not the time to retreat and unleash a new, even more gruesome wave of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
For the first time in Michigan’s history, there were more deaths of state residents in 2020 than births, due to the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19. More than 30,000 Michigan residents have died since the pandemic began, more than in all of Canada. Nationwide, 1.1 million children became infected last week, the highest number since the start of the pandemic, and 27 died, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
We appeal to you because the only reason politicians want schools open is so workers can be kept in equally dangerous factories to produce big business profits. We know that COVID-19 is rampant in auto factories and many workers have lost their lives unnecessarily. With thousands of Detroit-area autoworkers on sick leave, auto companies are struggling to keep production going by forcing many workers to work 12-hour shifts, six or seven days a week.
Keeping the assembly lines running, no matter how many sick and dead workers there are, is the only reason they want schools open. It’s not about learning. They even went so far as to pass a law in Michigan that allows school bus drivers, cafeteria workers and other non-teaching staff to replace sick teachers.
In her State of the State address earlier this week, Governor Whitmer said, “I want to be perfectly clear. The place of students is in school. We know that’s where they learn best. Remote learning is not as fulfilling or conducive to a child’s growth. »
Is it “conducive to the growth of a child” to contaminate him with COVID-19? What long-term trauma do children go through who inadvertently infect and kill their loved ones? Politicians like Biden and Whitmer, and their Republican counterparts feign concern for the emotional and mental health of children. But, they cover up and ignore reality. Schools are hotbeds of infection, and more than 167,000 American children have lost their parents or their day-to-day caregiver to COVID-19.
The Biden government and governments around the world are conducting a chilling experiment on our children. Scientific studies have warned that the long-term impact of COVID-19 on children’s mental development can be as bad or worse than lead poisoning. And then there are the thousands of children who suffer from Multisystem Inflammatory-Child Syndrome, or MIS-C, a condition characterized by inflammation of vital organs like the heart, lungs and brain.
It may be hard to believe, but the truth is that politicians deliberately want to infect our children. It’s part of their crazy “herd immunity” policy, the quack theory that if everyone gets infected and COVID-19 becomes “endemic”, it will eventually go away. They never openly say how many people will die from this reckless policy, which threatens to produce more deadly, vaccine-resistant variants.
In March 2020, when the number of infections in the United States approached 10,000 and COVID-19 had caused fewer than 40 deaths, workers at the Jefferson North assembly plant and factories in Michigan, ‘Ohio, Indiana and other states have gone on wildcat strikes, forcing the shutdown of the North American auto industry and saving hundreds of thousands of lives. But corporations, politicians and unions rushed to reopen businesses and schools because they were determined to save profits, not lives. As a result, there have been over 900,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States, with a current daily average of 2,500 deaths per day.
All of these deaths were and remain entirely preventable. If the United States and other countries had followed the basic public health measures implemented in China, New Zealand and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the transmission of the virus could have been completely halted, and businesses and schools reopened safely.
It is not too late to act now and prevent an even greater tragedy from occurring.
We know that auto workers face the same problems as teachers. The United Auto Workers, like the Detroit Federation of Teachers, worked with businesses and city and state officials to force us to to work. That’s why we organized the “Michigan Basic Teacher Safety Committee” (Michigan Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee– MERFSC), independently of the unions. The goal is to unite teachers, parents, students and other workers to fight to close schools and save lives.
We urge you to create and develop your own grassroots committees to unite with teachers and other workers to fight for this. In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of teachers and students, from Chicago, New York, St. Paul, Oakland, and Okemos here in Michigan, to France, Greece, Israel and Austria, have engaged in strikes, student walkouts and other protests to oppose the thoughtless reopening of schools.
We do not appeal to the power in place. All they care about is protecting profits, not lives. We want to unite with autoworkers and other workers to prepare for a citywide strike to fight for the public health measures needed to stop the spread of COVID-19 in Michigan, in unity with grassroots committees around the world fighting for the same global strategy to end the pandemic.
What should we do?
- All schools and non-essential workplaces must be closed, and all workers and small business owners must receive a full income until it is safe to reopen. If these temporary closures are combined with mass testing, an aggressive contact tracing campaign, isolation of infected patients and quarantine of contact cases, scientists say, it would take two to three months to eliminate. COVID-19, just as smallpox and other diseases have been eliminated in the past.
- Instead of granting tax cuts to companies, billions of dollars should be immediately allocated to guarantee free and quality Internet service, as well as computers allowing distance learning. Meals should be provided for low-income families whose children eat breakfast and lunch at school. These measures must be financed by a sharp increase in taxes on corporations, including GM, Ford and Stellantis, which have earned billions during the pandemic.
- If we can win in Detroit, we will have the powerful support of workers across Michigan, the United States and around the world. We will not let our children, other family members and co-workers suffer lifelong debilitation or die idly. We are humans, not machines, and we will fight for the right to live.
Join us in this fight today!
Fraternally,
The Michigan Basic Teacher Safety Committee
(Article first published in English on January 29, 2022)