Elizabeth Catte on the pros and cons of the West Virginia Strike deal by Off-Kilter Podcast published on 2018-03-15T19:08:59Z From the March 9th episode of Off-Kilter with Rebecca Vallas, titled "Minimum Wage Equal Pay Day" Transcript: VALLAS: Help us understand what the pros and cons are of the resolution. CATTE: So the pros are obviously the 5 percent raise across the board. When the teachers went into the strike what their objective was in terms of their wages was a 5% raise for teachers and 3% for other service personnel and now we have 5% across the board for everyone and that is tremendous and that is 100% to the solidarity of teachers. The insurance issues are tabled for now but looming as we celebrate this victory is the sense the legislature of West Virginia might try to save face by passing on the cost of the raise and some of the rectifications that need to happen from social services programs by slashing the funding of community college, for example, the general services Medicaid fund, from tourism, I don’t think we’re at the point where we know exactly where that money will come from apart from a general services fund but what a lot of teachers had hoped and what a lot of observers in the region had hoped is that the funding gap would be taken care of by raising taxes on natural gas, corporate taxes which are artificially low in the state of West Virginia. So if the legislature does what it plans to do we might have a situation where other poor people are paying for the cost to make it a little bit easier for West Virginia teachers.
