So the teachers don't want to go back to work, and ultimately want to carry this winter break into a completely remote semester, I think...
There's all the usual names you give people like this; lazy, toxic, unpassionate - and its all largely true.
But hopefully this drops enough hints to the general public that teaching as a line of work sucks. I'd honestly liken it do being a prison guard.
It follows the same pattern as the coal mining did when the USA was industrializing, except we don't see Pinkertons and strikers blowing each other away with Remingtons. Yet. The general gist was that the industries that unionized the first and most forcefully were the ones whose work sucked the hardest.
Just like then, nobody could easily come out today and say that the nature of the job sucked. If the coal mines weren't centralized corporate structures and it was a pleasant job, there wouldn't have been any violent labor struggles, no matter how poor the workers were. Period. The first reason nobody would ever focus on conditions was most likely because there was no feasible way to improve it, and the second was complaining about work was a deeper faux pas then than now.
Thats why the final drafts of union demands is almost always monetary compensations (ie more money) instead of suggestions to make the actual work more bearable. Really, its blatant money grubbing, and a cynical and backward way to operate your life. In teaching, it will be a cold in hell before school staff admit the abject nightmare it is to handle the 'children' in this country, for obvious reasons. They're the proverbial coal dust of this whole dilemma.
It isn't about covid. Its about minimizing the time they have contact with the students and our penitentary resembling schools. They don't want to see, hear ,or think about them, and frankly I don't fault them for that. Without germ hysteria, the plan was another twenty years of pretending to teach hellspawn grammar before the sweet sweet promise of an early jetset retirement and public pension. I imagine many of them reach that point pretty washed up. Stress kills.
Don't be the type of person who bitterly despises your job, like teachers, and just slog through for some kind of monetary promises some two decades down the line.
