Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino offered his thoughts on the ongoing teacher’s strike in Oklahoma, saying that as purveyors of “an essential service,” the teachers should just be fired en mass if they didn’t like the conditions they signed up for.
“If you don’t want to be a teacher, you know, do something else. Those are the rules of the game. You are working for the government,” he said on set with Fox News host Neil Cavuto Saturday. “Think about how crass that is, you know you’re providing an essential service, you cut a deal already and then you go on strike? They should all be fired.”
“I have a real problem with public sector people who go into a job working for the government, getting benefits from government, you don’t have to work during the summers, you get a nice pension. I have a problem with them just going on strike,” Gasparino added.
The comments are par for the course for Fox News, taking a reliably anti-union line. Gasparino is well-known as one of the channel’s more colorful characters and for his pugnacious online persona. On Twitter, has blocked critics who could not prove that they didn’t live in their mom’s basement.
Teachers in the Sooner State have been on strike since early last week, while they agitate for across-the-board pay increases. The demands include $3.3 billion over the next three years, which would be used for salary increases, school funding and additional benefits. A union leader told NBC that the strike would likely continue into next week and that measures so far proposed by the state were insufficient.