Struggle and Strife: Personal sacrifice leads to professional gains
Personal sacrifice leads to professional gains
Retired teacher Marilyn James fought back tears as she perused the notes her late colleague Rose Marie Archer had written when the St. Regis Falls United Teachers went on strike over class size. The notes from 1984 said: "With colleagues and former teachers ... with natives of St. Regis Falls and alumni of the school where we have chosen to teach ... we are joined in a struggle for the value of education, for our present students' and for our future students' sake. We know our cause is honorable and we believe our strike is just."
Six weeks later, after picketing through Adirondack sub-zero cold and watching bused-in substitutes earn double pay, the 32-member union bargained a contract that preserved the class-size provision. "That clause remains today," James said, proudly.
Victory at St. Regis Falls came at a high price, as it has in scores of other strikes where New York State United Teachers' locals took the ultimate stand.
Striking public school teachers lose an extra day's pay for each day on strike under the state Taylor Law's swift and automatic fines. "We didn't get a regular check until the last pay day," James recalled. "I cashed some that totaled 60 cents."
Fortunately, no St. Regis teachers were jailed for striking. But in the decades of the '60s and '70s, 84 unionists statewide went to jail. The honor roll of those who sacrificed for the common good included members and leaders of locals at Lakeland, Levittown, Nyack, Schenectady, Eastchester, New York City, Beacon, Orchard Park, Yorktown, North Syracuse, Lindenhurst and Massapequa.
By the late 1970s, a public backlash grew against sending teachers to jail. Gov. Hugh Carey in 1978 said, "Teachers don't belong in jail; they belong in the classroom," after he granted executive clemency to a jailed leader.
A dozen strikes concluded after one day, while 17 strikes lasted three weeks or more. Most ran two weeks.
The United Federation of Teachers in New York City struck for two weeks in 1967, largely to expand a school improvement program and develop a disruptive child program; 35 days in 1968 to protect teachers' due-process rights; and one week in 1975 after decimating layoffs sent class sizes soaring. Those layoffs also sharply cut services of paraprofessionals, attendance teachers and counselors.
Such sacrifices, however, helped spur Taylor Law improvements and better conditions that members enjoy today. School boards often took advantage of the law's weaknesses to force situations that gave them leverage in bargaining. For example, some forced bargaining deadlocks so that contracts would expire, along with their provisions. That problem was eliminated in 1982 when the Legislature, under heavy lobbying from NYSUT, passed the Triborough Amendment to the Taylor Law. It protects provisions in an expired contract until a new pact is in place.
"Triborough was a tremendous gain for teachers," said Levittown United Teachers President Charlie Kemnitzer, whose local struck for 34 days in 1978 after the school board threatened to cut salary steps, health insurance and class size limits from the expired contract.
After Triborough, school boards could no longer eliminate contract provisions on a whim, and the number of strikes dropped dramatically in the public sector.