Notebook: Collective Bargaining in Education
Brooks, Thomas R.
Our neighborhood school, P.S. 29, is 75 per cent Negro and Puerto Rican, mostly Puerto Rican. The kids are a tough lot, coming from the tenements off Columbia Street, which runs south from...
...Obviously, despite current postures, accommodation will one day be inevitable...
...Some months after the second oneday walkout, Pyles was saying what a pleasure it was to teach...
...The AFL-CIO, which had not noticeably aided teachers in the past, provided organizing services and loaned out organizers for AFT campaigns...
...The three men were the only teachers in the school to respond when the United Federation of Teachers struck the New York school system in 1960 and again in 1962...
...For a union of 110,000 to reach these would be expensive and difficult enough even without the rivalry of a larger, well-financed teacher organization...
...Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph and James Farmer were also involved in winning Philadelphia for the AFT...
...Bayard Rustin was brought to Philadelphia to speak and help organize...
...The new contract, he added, "ensures the teacher's right to proceed to higher salaries automatically...
...Sanctions have been imposed 15 times since the NEA chose this "ultimate weapon" in 1962...
...Radical intellectuals, who over the years had become increasingly disenchanted with organized labor, began to talk of a revived labor movement and of the possible impetus to white collar organizing...
...The National Education Association has a direct membership in the national organization of about 940,000...
...Currently, the NEA has imposed a state-wide sanction on Oklahoma...
...This civil rights-labor coalition is effective both ways...
...Social workers, however, have been inspired by the teachers' success...
...Peaceful coexistence between the AFT and the NEA certainly is not impossible, nor is an ultimate division of labor...
...First elected head of UFT in 1951, Cogen developed a young and vigorous secondary leadership group within UFT, including 36-year-old Albert Shanker, now UFT president, and David Selden, now Cogen's assisant...
...Three years ago, there were 1,500 high school classes with more than 38 pupils in each class...
...Significantly, while both the AFT and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees are fast growing unions, the fastest are those of Federal employees —the independent National Federation of Federal Employees and the AFL-CIO's American Federation of Government Employees...
...This group led the New York local in its stunning 1960 and 1962 successes...
...The kids saw teachers on television, fighting...
...Although Cogen immediately predicted that the AFT would have 200,000 members before his first term expired in 1966, the AFT has settled down for the long haul...
...There is no hesitancy about asking for —and getting—the floor at the monthly Delegate's Assembly meeting of the New York UFT, for example...
...Note, too, that the AFT's major successes—New York and Philadelphia—took place in cities whose governments also encourage collective bargaining...
...The best known was the state-wide sanction against Utah schools in 1964 which began with a two-day walkout...
...All this suggests that the next great spurt in teacher organization will take place as state and local legislation bodies adopt codes favoring collective bargaining among public employees...
...In 1960, the starting salary in New York for elementary school teachers was $4,800 with a top in 14 steps of $8,300...
...Teacher pay has gone up...
...The Wisconsin law is already several years old, and the AFT and the NEA are deeply engaged in recognition rivalries...
...In New York City, however, one-third of the teachers are now earning nearly $12,000...
...The three months vacation became a nightmare that had to be filled with a second job...
...The closest parallel to collective bargaining developments within teaching is found within nursing...
...ing expertise...
...Teachers and nurses are public service employees...
...The drift is unmistakable...
...Even with AFL-CIO help it is doubtful that the AFT can hope to offset this advantage in the near future...
...All this, incidentally, accompanied a decline in the big city school systems...
...Moreover, I do not see how an organization the size of the AFT and with its necessarily limited resources can realistically hope to supplant the 100 year old NEA...
...Success in New York stimulated ac tivity elsewhere...
...Things were a little better in the suburbs where more money was offered to lure teachers away from the city...
...AFT organizing campaigns also became one of the few instances of real cooperation between the civil rights and labor movements...
...As a staff member told me in an aside, "They carry democracy to the point of anarchy...
...But the raising of funds is only part of the task before them...
...This makes us tops for a big city," says Shanker...
...moonlighting, too, became common...
...This move, in the end, did not do NEA much good since the AFT won the representation election...
...The union won the election and the right to represent the city's 44,000 teachers in bargaining...
...Cliff-hanger" negotiations this fall ended in a $68million package that means a $100 rise in wage minimums to $5,400, effec tive October 1, 1966, and a $900 rise in maximums, in two steps, to $11,500...
...Today, under the new UFT contract, there will be only 36 students in high school classes except where there is a lack of space...
...The results of bargaining must be approved by the members...
...He was asked why this year was so special...
...New York became a symbol of what could be accomplished through hard bargaining...
...The new scale moves New York ahead of Los Angeles with its starting salary of $5,500 and a top of $11,100...
...The answer, I think, is found in the revival of teaching as a respected profession, a revival that has been reinforced by the teacher's own militancy...
...There is not much question but that those teachers within the AFT are unionized...
...On November 7, 1960, 6,000 teachers struck for a day to secure a representation election...
...but the basic development is the same—a well organized profession slowly taking on the appurtenances of trade unionism...
...Where the NEA finds "sub-minimal" educational conditions, it puts sanctions in effect...
...Of this, $417,000 is earmarked for "Federal relations" and "legislation" —euphemisms for lobbying that gives the NEA considerable strength in Washington on educational matters...
...But NEA has not hesitated to use such laws on occasion...
...Chicago with a starting scale of $5,300 and a high of $9,450...
...At the 1964 convention in Chicago, militants ousted a moribund leadership and elected New York's Charles Cogen president...
...Delegates at the 1965 convention last August set up a one-million-dollar organizing fund to be financed through a dues increase, the sale of bonds to members and contributions from sympathetic unions...
...Meanwhile, one can say that the country's teachers are already organized though perhaps not unionized...
...The kids are a tough lot, coming from the tenements off Columbia Street, which runs south from Atlantic Avenue along Brooklyn's waterfront into Red Hook...
...It also offers the teacher a measure of participation—both within the union and school systems— lacking in the NEA scheme of things...
...These factors, he said, "may contribute to the development of a more political labor movement...
...The New York success also led to a change in the leadership of the AFT...
...The NEA's success as a research and service agency probably cannot be surpassed by the AFT, just as the NEA may find it cannot outdo the AFT on the bread and butter issues...
...Our neighborhood school, P.S...
...Those members already working within such a system are encouraged to find jobs elsewhere as soon as their contracts run out...
...class size has gone down...
...In the end, no one listened to the teacher, neither child nor parent, administration or community...
...The AFT is a democratic union with a vigorous and vociferous membership...
...Organizers who are trying to organize clerical and white collar workers tell me that it is nice to say, "Look at the teachers," but considerably more useful to talk about automation, phony paternalism and the growing distance between employee and boss in the white collar glass-front factories...
...over 90 per cent of the nation's teachers are either directly enrolled in the NEA or in state and local organizations affiliated with the national body...
...Recently, Connecticut, Michigan and Wisconsin passed legislation favorable to collective bargaining by public employees...
...Traditionally, the NEA eschewed affiliation with any labor organization, collective bargaining, or strike action...
...In Philadelphia, too, the NEA violated another long standing tenet to demand exclusive recognition in an effort to fend off the AFT...
...The sanction was lifted when the State Legislature granted an additional $24.6million in state aid to the schools over a two year period...
...Before World War II, teachers enjoyed considerable status...
...the work was steady, the pay (comparatively) good and the vacations three months long...
...Bill Pyles is one of three men out of a total staff of 35 teachers...
...NEA members are not supposed to apply for jobs within such blackballed school systems...
...But under pressure from its members and in face of competition from the AFT, the NEA has drifted into what amounts to collective bargaining in its relationships with a growing number of school boards or administrations...
...So they listen when we teach...
...Washington, D. C., with a minimum of $5,350 and a maximum of $10,000...
...The New York City welfare workers' strike of 1964 is the major example...
...We won the strike and won the kids' respect...
...It has offered the state's 22,000 teachers a list of vacancies elsewhere and has barred its members from seeking employment in Oklahoma until teacher salaries—the state average is $5,160 a year, $1,000 below the national average—come up to par...
...No one as far as I could see felt any reluctance about telling UFT officers how to run the union...
...Since NEA members didn't hesitate to stop work in Utah, the differences between sanctions and striking may ultimately disappear...
...Bill Pyles' class wasn't the only group to sit up and take notice...
...The NEA, in fact, won an important victory in Milwaukee...
...10988 of January, 1962, which provided for recognition of, and collective bargaining by, organizations of Federal employees...
...The NEA still condemns strikes as "unprofessional," preferring the use of what it calls "sanctions" to bring recalcitrant school systems ifito line...
...Obviously, it is hoped that Cogen's leadership will do the same kind of job nationally—will, indeed, make collective bargaining a fact of life in every American school system...
...In Philadelphia the 500-member AFT local found it could not win collective bargaining rights without the support of Philadelphia's more than 3000 Negro school teachers...
...What explains this new movement towards collective bargaining and the growth of teachers' unions...
...We were tough like truck drivers and Jimmy Hoffa...
...The American Fed eration of Teachers, which had been dawdling along for years with a mem bership of 40-50,000, began to win bargaining elections in other big cities: Cleveland, with 5,200 teachers, Detroit with 9,700, and Philadelphia, with 11,000, as well as in a number of smaller cities, bringing AFT member ship to 115,000...
...Still, says Shanker, the maximum is a realistic one...
...It takes 13 years to hit the top scale...
...The national average is $6,235...
...I think it was the strike," he answered...
...teachers, in effect, may shop for the best deal and the bidding by both sides has the effect of raising pay and standards...
...What impact has the new militancy among teachers had on the labor movement and on white collar and professional organizing...
...Whatever happens, however, collective bargaining is in education to stay...
...It was public reaction, in a way, that forced the AFL and CIO unions to call a truce some time before merger...
...But no one is on it...
...Taking note of this "resurgence of militancy" among teachers, The New York Times editorialized: "There was mounting evidence that teachers are no longer content to rule only the classroom to which they are assigned...
...Meanwhile, there is the rivalry between the AFT and the NEA to consider...
...At the moment it is indeed advantageous...
...Nonetheless, the AFT does offer the teacher considerable collective bargain...
...They want a hand in the assignment and a voice in the policy that controls their professional lives...
...For several summers now the AFT has sent teacher volunteers to staff Southern Freedom Schools...
...There are no rival organizations competing for the loyalties of the nurses...
...Other differences between the NEA and the UFT may also disappear...
...There are some 8.5-million local, state and federal government employees, comprising roughly 16 per cent of the total U. S. labor force...
...NEA's national budget runs almost $10-million a year...
...And it is here that the clues to the future of teacher unionism are to be found...
...The number of male teachers fell off as non-teaching jobs proved more attractive...
...The Industrial Union Department also provided help and has given over a half-million dollars to date...
...No one would listen until teachers struck...
...This year NEA claimed formal "written professional negotiation agreements" in nearly 364 school systems...
...Still, even outside the city, the trend toward larger, more central school systems entailed a greater centralization of decisionmaking, a greater distance between administrator and teacher, and more bureaucracy...
...In a speech to the 1963 AFT convention, Walter P. Reuther issued a call for a one-million member AFT...
...In some other communities the scale looks good at the top...
...In 1962, the NEA convention adopted a resolution declaring that the "NEA insists on the right of professional associations . . . to participate with boards of education in the determination of policies of common concern, including salary and other conditions of employment...
...and Philadelphia with a start of $5,300 and a top of $9,000...
...But this can backfire with the public, especially that portion of it that ultimately pays the bills...
...New York City became the first major metropolitan school district in the country to engage in formal collective bargaining...
...But here, too, emulation is not overly significant in terms of numbers...
...Gus Tyler, labor intellectual and assistant president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, noted that teachers were "more verbal" and were used to dealing with governments...
...The ten to one membership ratio between the NEA and the AFT has been steady for more than a decade and has not been changed by the AFT's recent gains...
...When it comes to negotiations the UFT leadership is —from the professional collective bargaining point of view—burdened with too many demands since it must present all that are formulated by the representative bargaining committees...
...As Shanker told me, "We may not end up organizing all teachers, but the teachers are going to end up with a union-like movement...
...No administrator can withhold the advance...
...Accord ing to the U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, there are over 1.5-million teachers employed in the public schools...
...Cogen, a veteran teacher-unionist, was chairman of the Social Studies Department at Bay Ridge High School in Brooklyn at the time of his election to the AFT post...
...As far as I can tell, the answer, through no fault of the teachers, is not much...
...It is also clear that teachers are moving in the same direction...
...Still, the NEA made the request...
...All the public service employee organizations are currently devoting much time to lobbying for this at state legislatures and city councils...
...Last summer, Arthur Reece, a Detroit teacher and AFT vice president, coordinated Freedom School-AFT efforts...
...The UFT's achievements were impressive...
...In Detroit, the NEA chapter petitioned for state labor board mediation of teacher grievances...
...Nora: This article was written with the support of the David Stern Family Foundation whose help is gratefully acknowledged...
...The reason for this growth is simple: implementation by government departments of President John F. Kennedy's Executive Order No...
...NEA policy directives, for example, condemn teacher coverage under state labor laws, dispute procedures and the like as "professionally inappropriate...
...The UFT grew in membership from 7,500 in 1960 to its present strength of 33,500...
...But after the war, when even truck drivers achieved steady work and increased pay through the exercise of collective bargaining, teaching declined severely in status and in professional emoluments...
...29, is 75 per cent Negro and Puerto Rican, mostly Puerto Rican...
...Some foot-dragging over money matters on the part of the Board of Education led to a second strike on April 11, 1962, which pulled out 20,000 teachers and won the UFT its first contract...
...They are not asking to run the schools, but they want their views heard and heeded...
Vol. 13 • May 1966 • No. 3
