Yesterday was a massive rally in Trenton against the governor’s attempts to demonize teachers as the villains in the state’s budgetary crisis, and also to transfer state taxes from public schools to private schools (which his children all attend). He hypocritically ignores the fact that the state legislature refused to fund the public employee pension funds (including police, firefighters, state workers and teachers) 8 times in the past 10 years, even though the state courts ordered them to do so, calling the missed payments illegal. So our pension funds were seriously shortchanged, one of the primary causes of the budget crisis, yet the governor expects public employees to shoulder most of the hardships in the crisis, while exempting people earning more than one million dollars per year from any of the burden. Sadly, many of the state’s private workers agree with the governor, selfishly anxious to put the hardship on anybody but themselves.

35,000 people attended the rally. Our goal was to influence the legislature that if we can get that many people to march on Trenton, consider how many voters we can influence to vote them out of office if they give in to the governor’s goals? There are currently 200,000 teachers in the state, and probably another 100,000 other public employees. That is a lot of angry voters! The teacher’s association president stated, “If the legislature remains silent, they are [the governor’s] accomplices.”

We’ll see if it does any good as the governor proposes more anti-public worker bills.