Professor of philosophy resigns post at the University of Alabama at Huntsville in protest of the school’s inadequate COVID-19 health and safety measures.
Alabama schools set to fully reopen as child COVID-19 hospitalizations nearly triple in a week
A surge of COVID-19 cases is rapidly engulfing Alabama, fueled by the Delta variant, low vaccination rates and the abandonment of all mitigation measures. With schools just weeks away from beginning the year fully in-person as the vast majority of children remain unvaccinated and school mask mandates are being ditched statewide, the fall is on course to be a deadly semester. Dr. Brytney Cobia of Birmingham summarized the situation to
AL.com, “All these kids are about to go back to school. No mask mandates are in place at all, 70 percent of Alabama is unvaccinated. Of course, no kids are vaccinated for the most part because they can’t be… So it feels like impending doom, basically.”
Alabama educators join the growing international support for striking Volvo workers
The Alabama Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee extends its full solidarity to the 3,000 workers at the New River Valley Volvo plant in Dublin, Virginia who have now been on strike for one month. After overwhelmingly defeating two concessionary contracts, the workers are already exposing a new tentative agreement pushed by the UAW for making further inroads on health care and the multi-tiered payroll schemes for which the union has become notorious. As one Volvo worker commented, “Looks like a fluffed-up version of the original like lipstick on a pig.” Workers have found that the key to their struggle is the newly formed Volvo Workers Rank-and- File Committee. This committee has put forward demands based on what workers need, not what the multinational auto corporation Volvo Group and the UAW attempt to dictate. The committee has exposed the duplicity and betrayals of the pro-corporate UAW
Montgomery educator denounces firings and COVID-19 case suppression as Alabama abandons pandemic health and relief measures
The school year draws to a close on unsteady footing at Montgomery Public Schools (MPS) in Alabama. Over the past year, courageous teachers protested the premature, unsafe reopening of school buildings, beginning in October, with no aid from the local Alabama Education Association (AEA). Between November 2020 and January 2021, eight MPS educators died from COVID-19, forcing the school board and superintendent to temporarily concede to fully remote teaching and learning. Beyond the direct attacks on teachers’ lives, the push to turn public schools into privately run charter schools has deepened over the past year.
COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations on the rise in Alabama after easing of restrictions
On Saturday, April 24, at 2 p.m. CDT, the Alabama Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee is hosting a meeting calling for the unification of all workers in Alabama: “Support educators, Warrior Met miners, and Amazon workers! Unite our struggles to save lives AND livelihoods!”
and invite your coworkers, friends and family to this important meeting.
On April 7, Alabama’s Republican Governor Kay Ivey lifted the state’s mask mandate, citing a decline in cases and hospitalizations since peak numbers in January. During a press conference, both Ivey and State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris spoke gushingly of the state of the pandemic in Alabama, saying “we’ve finally rounded the corner” and that the “pandemic is almost over.” Obligatory mention was made of the fact that the virus continues to spread, but they assured the public that “common sense” and “personal responsibility�