Strike Back. Joe Burns
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.
3. THE BACKLASH AGAINST PUBLIC EMPLOYEE UNIONISM AND THE DECLINE OF THE STRIKE
As the US economy sputtered in the post-Watergate era, a backlash developed against public employee unions. With workers continuing to press wage demands and strike repeatedly while the economy suffered, unionized employees were now being painted as overpaid and taking advantage of taxpayers. In this anti-union climate, many politicians—both Democrat and Republican—realized that political gain could be had by getting tough on public employee unions. As Joseph McCartin explains, “By the mid-1970s, government officials at all levels dealt with the growing fiscal crisis through budget cutbacks, hiring freezes, and hardline union negotiations. As often as not, the austerity programs were instituted by Democratic administrations once allied to the public sector union movement.”1 Pollster Louis Harris told the US Conference of Mayors in 1975 “that the way to get elected was to get tough on public workers.”2 Some mayors even tried to goad public workers into striking in order to create fights with unions they were now confident they could win. For example, the mayor of Utica, New York complained to Business Week in 1975 that “I can’t get anyone to go on strike against me. I think city government needs a showdown with the unions.”3
The shift in the bargaining climate is best demonstrated by the changing fortunes of sanitation workers in the South. During the 1960s, the struggles of southern sanitation workers were embraced by the civil rights movement. In cities such as Memphis and Charleston, civil rights leaders were arrested on the picket lines while supporting striking workers. Even as late as 1970, when the white mayor of Atlanta threatened to replace striking sanitation workers, civil rights organizations lined up to oppose the move.4 With the civil rights movement still strong, and the memory of urban rebellion fresh in the minds of local officials, compromise was the preferred method of settling disputes. Joseph McCartin writes about how the sanitation strikes that erupted between 1968 and 1972 in cities such as Cleveland, Miami, Washington DC, Lubbock, Texas and Atlanta “were typical of a new pattern of municipal labor-management conflict…During each of these strikes, officials had the power to replace striking sanitation workers. Yet in each case officials either decided not to use this tactic or, after attempting to replace strikers, dropped the effort under pressure.”5
By the mid-1970s, however, with the country facing a fiscal crisis, “‘standing up to’ public sector unions became the litmus test of a politician’s sense of fiscal responsibility.” This was particularly true for Democratic politicians, “who