Music

Greetings friends, it's your chapeau for this week. We've got a jam packed show for you

today filled with labor and education issues kicking off with a great interview with a

teacher currently on strike in West Virginia. So let's dive in.

Music

Okay, so joining us this week we have a very special guest. It's Michael McHaden who is a

teacher in West Virginia who's calling in from there right now to tell us a little bit about the amazing

strike that's been going on over the past week in West Virginia. So Michael just think it started

just in very very generally like the background here. Why did this strike happen? What was his

initial cause and what were your as the teachers? What was your initial ask here? Well the long

and short of it is this anger has been brewing for quite some time. The natural gas industry,

the co-industry has continually asked for lower and lower taxes and our public and led legislature

and for the longest time, democratic legislature has been more than willing to give them those

lower taxes. So we've seen the effects of neoliberal capitalism in this state, the result of lower

taxes, meaning fewer funds for public services. So we knew that this was coming probably the biggest

spark to it all was this little thing in our healthcare program called Go 365. So if your listeners

haven't heard what Go 365 is, I'll try to briefly summarize. Basically it gamifies your health.

So you have to check in with your smartphone or Apple Watch or something to show that you're doing

some type of exercising and so you would have to get 3000 points one year, 5000 the next year,

so on and so forth. So for teachers who already work about 12 to 15 hours a day between lesson

plans, grading, monitoring kids, second jobs, you name it. Somewhere in between there we kind of had

to find time to go to the gym and that was kind of the breaking point for a lot of teachers who felt

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