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2. THE TEACHER REBELLION

In many ways, the public employee upsurge of the 1960s and 1970s began with the organizing efforts of a handful of teachers in New York City. Because of these committed teachers, in the course of a decade, the United Federation of Teachers went from being one of several tiny teacher organizations to a collective bargaining agent representing 55,000 members. This transformation was the direct result of repeated strike activity, which won collective bargaining rights, union representation and major improvements in pay and working conditions for teachers. By the power of example, these teachers in New York spurred a teacher rebellion that swept through the entire nation.

Entering the 1960s, teacher salaries lagged far behind those of other private sector workers in New York.¹ Things were so bad that a New York Times editorial asked why anyone would want to be a teacher when they could make more money working at a unionized car wash.² Teacher unions were also weak, with several competing organizations together only representing a fraction of the 35,000 public school teachers in New York. Elementary school teachers formed the bulk of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), while high school teachers belonged to a separate High School Teachers Association which focused on the divisive issue of establishing a pay differential between elementary and high school teachers.

Within the UFT, however, a movement was afoot to gain support for a strike-based strategy in order to improve the benefits and working conditions of teachers. This effort was led by a pair of tenacious organizers, each of whom would later go on to become president of the American Federation of Teachers, David Selden and Albert Shanker. Building from the ground up, Selden and Shanker spent most of the 1950s trying to gain support within the UFT for a strike. Their efforts finally paid off on November 7, 1960, when New York City teachers walked off the job in a system-wide one-day strike. While newspaper estimates concluded that only 5,600 of the city’s 35,000 teachers had struck (a further 2,000 had called in sick), the fact that the organizers were able to even get 5,600 of their co-workers to strike was itself a major victory, as strikes by public employees were illegal in New York State and subject to harsh penalties under the Condon-Wadlin Act. [3] The one-day strike proved to be a smashing success, mainly because the organizers had scheduled the strike for maximum political effect—the day before Election Day. As a result of political pressure, and support from the then powerful labor movement in New York, the Board of Education agreed not to enforce the Condon Wadlin-Act, to hold a union election, and to establish collective bargaining for teachers. A year later, the UFT was overwhelmingly elected to represent teachers in New York City.⁴ The one-day strike not only spurred the organization of teachers in New York, but would become “the watershed for teachers’ strikes in the twentieth century.”⁵

The UFT went on to strike twice more over the next seven years, winning major improvements in the quality of work life for thousands of New York City teachers. In April 1962, half of the city’s 44,000 teachers joined the picket lines.⁶ Through this strike, teachers won a thousand dollar across the board raise and free lunch periods. The next strike occurred in 1967, when 47,000 of the city’s 59,000 teachers struck for two weeks. This strike earned teachers a 20 percent raise in pay and benefits, the right to have disruptive students removed from their classes, and additional funding to lower class size in schools identified as “high-need.”⁷ (In many of these early teacher strikes, contract demands included issues benefiting students, such as lower class size.) As a result of their strike activity, by the early 1970s, teacher salaries had quadrupled. Labor historian John Lloyd notes how, “The significance of the early UFT strikes is difficult to overestimate, for the UFT had now set the standard for teacher contracts nationwide.”⁸

The Teacher Strike Wave

Following the UFT’s lead, teachers across the nation began to strike for recognition. From no reported strikes in the entire country in 1958, the number of teacher strikes soared to 112 in 1968.⁹ Teacher strikes during that year ranged “from a strike in a one-teacher school in Maine to the massive state-wide strike conducted by Florida teachers of the NEA and the UFT strikes in New York City involving 57,000 teachers and excess of 1.1 million school children.”¹⁰ While the actual number of strikes constituted a small fraction of the nation’s school districts, many of the strikes and threatened strikes were in large districts comprising thousands of teachers. Speaking about the wave of strikes and threatened strikes, David Selden concluded that “it is no exaggeration to say that a clear majority of the nation’s teachers were involved.”¹¹ Even where teachers did not strike, they took to the streets, packing school board meetings and protesting working conditions. As one account points out, “When not striking, teachers…carried their picket signs to city hall, held massive rallies and demonstrations, threatened to carry out mass resignations, and invoked what the NEA calls ‘professional sanctions,’ advising its members not to accept jobs in certain school systems.”¹² This shift in membership activity was amazing. Whereas an average of only three districts per year saw strikes during the 1950s, by 1980, there were 232 teacher strikes nationwide.¹³

The time was ripe for a teacher rebellion. With industrial workers benefiting from sustained strike activity during the 1950s, teacher pay and benefits had fallen far behind that of other blue collar work groups. Additionally, at a time of massive expansion of the educational system, the profession was becoming increasingly bureaucratized, causing teachers to become “increasingly restive…regarding their lack of a greater voice in the determination of policies under which they work and what they consider as the economic neglect of schools in our affluent society.”¹⁴ As a result of their increasing militancy, teachers won unionization in city after city. By 1968, the AFT had become the collective bargaining agent for teachers in New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Kansas City, St. Louis, Toledo, New Orleans, and many other cities.¹⁵ Teachers also struck in unlikely places, including a 1964 statewide strike in Utah and a one-day “professional study day” in Kentucky in 1966 “to protest the education budget passed by the State legislature.”¹⁶ John Chase, an organizer with the Washington Education Association, explained that the strike was the key weapon in winning these early teacher contracts. “When you create power,” said Chase, “and the other side says no, you had to use your power! We did not want to resolve conflict. We had to have confrontation….To take the strike out of the equation would have meant we would not have been a union.”¹⁷

Through this intense upsurge of member-driven activism, teacher unions grew dramatically. By the late 1970s, over 70 percent of public school teachers were members of a union that represented them in collective bargaining, compared to less than a dozen school districts who could claim the same thing in 1961.¹⁸ In little over a decade, teacher unions had gone from a negligible part of the labor movement to among its largest and most powerful organizations.

Teachers in Washington State Win Unionization Through the Strike

Although the Washington Education Association (WEA) had 34,000 members in 1964, “Teachers were not involved and in control of their organization,” as school administrators had disproportionate influence in WEA affairs, occupying positions of power within the union.¹⁹ However, a new generation of teachers, influenced by the civil rights and anti-war movements, was demanding change. By the early 1970s, these militant teachers were “vying for control of WEA and its local associations … [seeking] a stronger voice for classroom teachers in decisions vital to education and their own welfare.”²⁰

Although the Washington State legislature, at the prompting of the teacher’s local in Seattle, had passed a public employee bargaining law in 1965, the statute had no mechanism to actually settle disputes. Understanding that the bargaining law had few teeth, school districts routinely ignored it. As a result, teachers became dissatisfied, and started pushing for greater control over their lives, “demanding to be equal partners at the bargaining table.”²¹ By the early 1970s, with school districts stonewalling, WEA affiliates began to strike. Leading the way were not the big urban locals as one might expect, but rather teachers in rural areas. On May 11, 1972, teachers in the small coastal community of Aberdeen, Washington staged the first strike of K-12 teachers in the history of the state. Although they went back to work after an injunction was issued, a blue ribbon panel was created in the wake of the strike, which granted the teachers many of their demands. Next, up was the Evergreen Education Association, outside of Vancouver, which would go on to win the first teacher collective bargaining agreement through striking in Washington State. In the fall of 1974, teacher strike activity continued with strikes in Federal Way, Tacoma, and Mukilteo.²² In the face of this repeated illegal strike activity, legislators amended the state’s collective bargaining law in 1975 to allow for, and regulate, strikes.²³

Because of its militant actions and repeated strike activity, by the late 1970s, the Washington Education Association had established itself as a major force, and teachers in Washington State were now covered by strong collective bargaining agreements. The WEA, which had been dominated by school administrators in the early 1960s, had been transformed into a real union.

A Quarter Century of Strike Activity in Chicago

The experience of the Washington Education Association was replicated in state after state. One of the most militant groups of teachers was the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Over a twenty-five year period from 1963 to 1987, the CTU repeatedly used the strike or the credible threat of a strike to gain collective bargaining rights, substantial pay increases, and to defend the public school system from harmful budget cuts. In virtually every negotiation during this period, the CTU contract was settled only after a strike, or at the strike deadline. Ultimately, Chicago teachers became among the most highly paid in the country, in the process transforming the nature of teaching. Equally important, through their strike activity, the teachers improved public education in Chicago by reducing class size and preventing cuts to educational services.

For years the CTU, represented by longtime president John Fewkes, would make annual appeals to the Chicago Board of Education for collective bargaining rights, which the board routinely denied. The issues motivating teachers included low pay, safety in the classrooms, no duty free breaks, and lack of input into policy. As in New York, teachers in Chicago were divided between several competing organizations, including the local affiliate of the Illinois Education Association, which opposed collective bargaining and instead pushed school administrators to include teachers on committees and accept their input on educational policy decisions. By 1963, Fewkes was able to use the teachers strike in New York as a bargaining chip during negotiations, telling the Chicago Board of Education, “It is our desire that the board enter into good, fair negotiations without such strife as occurred in New York City.”²⁴ Unlike in previous years, the union had something to back up its appeals for bargaining—the threat of a strike.

With the board of education continuing to refuse the union’s attempts at bargaining, the CTU began preparing for a strike in March 1964. On the eve of the mailing of strike ballots, however, the school board reversed course and agreed to a collective bargaining memorandum.²⁵ One strike vote had accomplished what decades of begging and appeals to reason had failed to do. Unfortunately, the memorandum failed to provide for real collective bargaining or establish exclusive representation for teachers. Outraged, more militant teachers put pressure on Fewkes, denouncing the agreement as a “fake.” The police had to be called when fifty members protested at a CTU meeting.

Ratcheting up the pressure, in each of the next three years, the CTU took strike votes and in each instance settled right at the strike deadline. In 1965, the strike threat won pay raises, and more importantly, an agreement to hold an election to determine which union would be the exclusive representative of Chicago teachers. In 1966, a strike was narrowly averted when the school board agreed to a $20 million settlement, including $500 pay increases and binding arbitration. In 1967, the CTU threatened to strike once again, settling only because of the mediation efforts of Mayor Richard Daley. Still, the union won a $1000 pay increase, ten paid vacation days, and more class room aides for elementary school teachers. A 1967 article in the Chicago Tribune concluded that the “strike gets results,” and, commenting about the rising tide of teacher militancy in the greater Chicago area, added that:

Teachers by the hundreds forsook textbooks for picket signs in the school year now ending in an unprecedented display of militancy to press for salary increases, collective bargaining rights, improved working conditions, and a share in making education policy. The Chicago area has been hit with nine teacher strikes since last November. Walkouts have been threatened in another dozen school districts.²⁶

In 1968, Chicago saw its first teachers strike, although it was not officially sanctioned by the CTU. The core issue was the denial of full time status to a large group of primarily black teachers who were also denied membership in the largely white local. With the expansion of enrollment, schools in Chicago had come to rely on what were called Full-Time Basis Substitute (FTB) teachers. These teachers—who were mostly African-American—worked full time, but lacked the benefits and job protections of regular teachers, and were not permitted full membership in the union. For years, the FTB’s had fought for equality in their jobs and equal rights within the union. After a referendum to give them full membership within the union was rejected, the FTBs struck, without the approval of the union.²⁷ The strike impacted several hundred schools, lasting between two days and two weeks. While the strike did not produce immediate results for the FTBs, it did help build momentum for what happened the following year, when the CTU finally struck. The two-day strike won a $100 a month pay increase for teachers, and provisions improving public education, such as no cutbacks in summer school programs and class size limits. The strike also provided full certification for FTBs after three years on the job.²⁸

Through strikes both real and threatened, the CTU was able to raise teacher salaries 90 percent between 1966 and 1974.²⁹ The union also gained substantial input into educational policy, paid vacation, group insurance, limitations on class size, and more preparation time for teachers. Over the next fifteen years, the CTU would strike eight more times. However, with the waning of the social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, the bargaining climate became increasingly difficult. As a result, CTU strikes became longer and increasingly bitter, including a fifteen-day strike in 1983 and a month-long strike in 1986. By the mid-1980s, the CTU had come under more conservative leadership, and for the next twenty-five years abandoned the strike, until waging a high profile strike in 2012 against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to gut public education.

Learning from Defeats

Even during the height of public employee unionism in the 1960s and 1970s, not every public worker strike ended in a resounding victory. No matter how supportive the environment, striking is never risk free, and American labor history is littered with the debris of failed strikes. Whether it was the great rail strikes of the late 1800s, the 1919 steel strike or the 1934 textile strike, striking workers have experienced their share of tough losses. That does not mean that these strikes weren’t worthwhile, as successive generations often learned from, and built upon, the struggles of their predecessors.

One of the main lessons failed strikes taught public workers in the 1960s and 1970s was the necessity of community support. For example, most of the unsuccessful teacher strikes of the era occurred in rural, politically conservative areas without significant labor populations, where the striking public workers were isolated from supportive community forces. In 1969, 150 of the 430 school teachers in Minot, a small city in northwest North Dakota, struck over pay and working conditions.³⁰ Even after a state judge issued an injunction, the teachers continued to picket. In a case of unfortunate timing, a record flood hit Minot several days into the strike, pulling the public’s attention and sympathy away from the teachers. However, the most damming element for the striking teachers was the political climate of the city of Minot. In the highly unionized urban areas of the northeast, striking teachers could rely on the support of unions and other progressive political groups. In conservative areas like Minot, politicians did not have to contend with such pressure and were free to take drastic measures against striking workers. In the end, the strike in Minot was defeated, and many teachers were fired.

Another failed teacher strike of the period that demonstrated the need for community support occurred in 1974, in the rural community of Hortonville, Wisconsin. Prior to the strike, the teachers in Hortonville had not received a raise for three years. The Hortonville School Board, however, refused to budge. Under Wisconsin state law at the time, a union had few options at the conclusion of negotiations; it could either accept the employer’s final offer or be forced onto an illegal strike. Choosing to fight, on March 19, 1974, eighty-four Hortonville teachers struck for a fair contract. It was a tough strike, featuring sheriffs escorting scabs through picket lines and the arrest of over seventy strike supporters. Taking a hard line, the Hortonville School Board fired all the striking teachers on April 1. The teachers attempted to rally support, and despite solidarity from teachers around Wisconsin, were unable to reverse the school board’s decision. The union then tried to salvage the situation legally, but the courts proved to be of no help, although the issue of the firings went all the way to the US Supreme Court. In Hortonville School District v. Hortonville Education Association, the Supreme Court rejected the union argument that the firings violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.³¹ The union argued that the school board should have given teachers individual hearings before depriving them of their jobs, but the Court brushed those concerns aside.

The strike was devastating to the teachers involved, with many forced to move out of state to find employment. Despite their defeat, the struggle of the teachers in Hortonville was not in vain. As the Wisconsin Educators Association Council notes on its website:

Every Wisconsin school employee is indebted to the Hortonville 84. Their firing heightened support among teachers for amending a bargaining law that forced teachers to strike illegally to achieve equity at the negotiating table. WEAC lobbying, along with nearly 50 other teacher strikes in the 1970s, and general unrest in teacher negotiations throughout the state, graphically revealed the flaws in the old bargaining law. The result was passage of a bill that legalized strikes and put in place a system of binding arbitration to resolve disputes.³²

For today’s public employee unionists, the lessons from defeats such as Hortonville and Minot should not be that striking is bad. After all, during the 1960s and 1970s, these defeats stand out more as exceptions rather than the rule. Nor should we read them to mean that public employees could not strike because strikes were illegal, as public workers successfully executed thousands of illegal strikes during this period. We also need to remember that although private sector workers supposedly have the “right to strike,” many private sector strikes in the 1980s ended with workers out of jobs because they were permanently replaced after striking. Instead, the real lesson to be drawn from these failed strikes is that political context matters and that before striking, public workers must carefully assess their sources of support. In these strikes, public workers struck without sufficient support and suffered the consequences.

The War on Teacher Unionism

Fast forward to today, and teacher unionists find themselves under attack from every angle, including:

• Legislative efforts to change bargaining laws to limit their rights

• Attempts to limit or eliminate teacher pensions and tenure

• Efforts to privatize public education through the use of charter schools

• Attempts to deskill the teaching profession

Taken together, these attacks are taking a toll on teacher unions. The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher union, has lost 230,000 members or seven percent of its membership since 2009.³³

These anti-teacher efforts are spearheaded by well-funded conservative groups who hide behind progressive sounding rhetoric which masks their anti-union and anti-public worker agenda. Well-known intellectual Henry Giroux writes that

What is truly shocking about the current dismantling and disinvestment in public schooling is that those who advocate such changes are called the new educational reformers. They are not reformers at all. In fact, they are reactionaries and financial mercenaries who are turning teaching into the practice of conformity and creating curricula driven by an anti-intellectual obsession with student test scores, while simultaneously turning students into compliant subjects, increasingly unable to think critically about themselves and their relationship to the larger world.³⁴

The underlying philosophy of these “reformers” is based on right-wing economic theory. As commentators Doug Henwood and Liz Featherstone note, “To charter-school boosters, education should be restructured to resemble the free market of economic theory, in which sellers of school product compete for the custom of parents.”³⁵

None of this is to say that the educational system does not face severe problems, including urban school districts that have been hit hard by de-industrialization, continued racial segregation of housing and labor markets, and declining tax bases. Yet, as education activist Lois Werner states, these so-called reformers “presume that if children do not succeed at school, the responsibility rests solely with the school. Such an approach destroys the structure and organization of a publicly-funded and presumably publicly-controlled system of education begun more than a century ago.”³⁶

Rather than fight back, the predominant response of many teacher unions has been to attempt to appear reasonable and “negotiate for change.” The problem with this strategy of cooperation is that there is little reason to believe that corporate education reformers are actually looking to improve public education. Instead, their real goal is to privatize the educational system, remove the autonomy of classroom teachers, and most importantly, get rid of unions.

For these reasons, teacher unions need to rediscover the lessons of their own history. Fifty years ago, teachers raised concerns over lack of professional autonomy and input into educational decisions, responding to attacks with an outpouring of militancy which established collective bargaining and “changed the fundamental relationship between teachers and administrators. It promised teacher more say in the conduct of their work, more pay and greater job security. It essentially refined and broadened the concept of professionalism for teachers by assuring them more autonomy and less supervisory control.”³⁷ It is a time for today’s teachers to take a page from their militant predecessors.