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.
