movements waned and/or became institutionalized, sanitation strikes became less successful.)
In addition, since the private sector labor movement was far stronger than it is today, public employee unionists could point to other work groups such as unionized autoworkers or janitors who were receiving the benefits of collective bargaining. This not only fueled their demands, but made their arguments more credible to policymakers. Private sector unions also proved to be strong allies for striking public workers, with union labor councils pressuring public officials to settle disputes. Since private sector strike levels remained high during this period, public employee strikes reflected what was considered “normal” labor relations of the period.
All of these factors combined to create a favorable climate for public employee strikes during the 1960s and 1970s. Obviously, many of these conditions no longer exist. The modern private sector labor movement is on life support, barely able to sustain itself, let alone assist public employees under threat. Other social movements are similarly weak, with the great grassroots activism of the 1960s largely absent today. Despite all of this—or maybe because of all of it—the lessons of the militancy of the 1960s and 1970s are more important than ever for today’s public employee unionists.
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,
