Teachers Beyond the Law: How Teachers Changed Their World

by Oscar Weil

Overview

Before the late 1950s and the early 1960s, teachers in Illinois and the rest of the country generally did not participate in a formal process to establish their salaries and working conditions or to influence policies that affected the nature and quality of their services. Teachers beyond the Law tells how a group of groundbreaking educators organized unions and established collective bargaining as a process to determine their own economic and professional destinies.

Because the laws of the state and nation not only gave little recognition to their rights but also actually established multiple layers of legal and bureaucratic barriers to their unions, teachers and their leaders were frequently punished for using traditional union methods to assert their rights as citizens and professionals. They were discriminated against or fired for joining unions or participating in union activities. Courts routinely enjoined their unions from striking, sometimes without a hearing, and jailed leaders and members for refusing to cease striking until they had negotiated satisfactory agreements with their employers.

The Illinois Federation of Teachers successfully opposed many efforts to pacify teachers and other public employees with legislative bills that would have mandated recognition of their unions but also prohibited strikes. Finally, in 1983, after decades of effort and self-sacrifice by union leaders and members, the Illinois legislature and governor enacted laws regulating and supporting collective bargaining for teachers and other public employees without restrictions on the right to strike.

Teachers beyond the Law tells the true story of how these courageous teachers took a stand and changed the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781462063246
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/20/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	712
File size:	3 MB

Read an Excerpt

TEACHERS BEYOND THE LAW

How Teachers Changed Their World

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By Oscar Weil

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Oscar Weil
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-6322-2

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Chapter One

The Long Beginning

I waited in the Cook County, Illinois, courtroom with Norman Swenson, president of the Cook County College Teachers Union, Local 1600, and other leaders of the union for the proceedings to begin. Swenson was in danger because he had violated a judge's injunction during a strike four years earlier, an action for which he had received a thirty-day jail sentence, punishment he was still appealing. He could be a two-time loser this time.

What would the judge do? He had already issued one injunction against the current strike and ordered negotiations between the union and the Chicago City College Board—negotiations that went nowhere.

During the eight years since I had left my classroom to organize teachers' unions, I had been in many courtrooms with teachers who struck only to be ordered back to work, or in some cases, ordered to appear in court to show why they should not be punished for refusing to obey court orders. Usually we had found ways to work around such orders, sometimes by appealing to political friends I met while lobbying in Springfield. At Swenson's request, I had also worked with his union numerous times before.

Members of Local 1600 packed the courtroom, also waiting to see what the judge would do. They were angry and frustrated by the lack of progress, though they observed the court's decorum. I knew they would surely renew their strike unless there was some kind of positive development. Then the judge would have to enforce his injunction. There could be jail sentences and other punishments, just as there had been in other teachers' strikes.

I looked across the aisle at Ed Lev, the college board's chief negotiator, who had been hired to weaken teachers' working conditions and benefits under the union's contract. Lev and Oscar Shabat, administrative head of the City College, sat together and whispered to each other from time to time. They had initiated the court proceedings by petitioning for an injunction against the strike and were thereby responsible for the court proceedings. They had smug and confident looks. For months, Lev had been unbending in negotiations, with apparent intent to force a strike and the inevitable court action. He was a lawyer who had come from Massachusetts, a small man with a cocky, arrogant manner. We seldom used lawyers directly in bargaining and often referred to people like him as legal goons.

Shabat was a man of medium height and build who liked to talk and control the conversation. He irritated Swenson, but I told him, "Let Shabat talk. He'll hang himself sooner or later, because he thinks he's smarter than anyone else." Lev and Shabat expected the court to order the teachers back to work; then we would be at their mercy.

Shortly, the court was called to order, and Judge Nathan Cohen spoke: "I have ordered the parties to court today to begin bargaining directly under my supervision. I intend to see that the strike is settled with good faith proposals from both sides. When settlement has been reached, I will issue an order setting forth the terms of an agreement. I will use my authority to see that terms are enforced."

I was startled. My God, he is speaking to the board and union as equals. Again I looked at Lev and Shabat. The full effect of what the judge had said did not seem to register because their expressions appeared blank. Without the court to protect them from having to bargain, I thought, they will not know what to do.

As events were to prove, Judge Cohen meant what he said, and his actions were greatly encouraging to Local 1600 and other teachers' unions in the state. This incident took place in the winter of 1971 after years of struggle and frustration for teachers' leaders who sought to win equal rights under the law. More years would pass, and some teacher leaders, including Swenson, would again be threatened and even jailed in attempts to intimidate them. But never again would court injunctions be as effective in driving teachers back to work without consideration of their rights as citizens. In that sense, the incident marked important progress in the long battle for teachers' rights.

Then, in the fall of 1971, Dan Walker began a successful campaign for governor in which he proclaimed that he believed teachers and other public employees should have the right to strike. In 1973, Governor Walker pardoned Swenson, thereby erasing the record of his 1971 jail term, and also pardoned him again in 1975 for a jail sentence that came during another strike. We had come by a tortuous path, but the barriers to teachers organizing and bargaining collectively were falling away at last.

The Many Obstacles to Teachers' Unions

The evolution of traditional union organization was a slow process among teachers in the United States. The main reason for this was the bias among teachers and school administrators against trade unions, a bias that was incessantly promoted by officials at all levels as well as by the National Education Association (NEA), the Illinois Education Association (IEA), and other so-called professional organizations. This bias against unions in education caused direct threats to teachers from school principals and school-district superintendents.

Teachers often joined the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) knowing they were endangering their jobs and placing their professional reputations in jeopardy. Political officials and others with power over education at the state and national levels were only too happy to cooperate in efforts to discourage organization by teachers of effective unions to represent their own personal and professional interests. The bias against unions among teachers, and especially among women teachers, was a major obstacle to organizing them into effective instruments for collective action. Added to the inherent reluctance to organize and join unions was the fear permeating school faculties of a multitude of devices used by educational managers as punishment for any attempts to organize, join, or assist unions.

The lack of organized strength among teachers allowed standards for teachers' training and teachers' pay and working conditions to remain very low. I started teaching at Roxana High School in Madison County in 1955 for $3,500 a year, about the average starting salary in the state at the time, with no insurance and few other benefits. My base salary became $3,600 in 1966–67 plus $100 more for a year's experience, making it $3,700. In addition to the low pay, there was no formal process for resolving grievances.

Signs of Life

Prior to the late 1950s there was very limited interest outside of Chicago in union organization among Illinois teachers. The goals of the few existing unions were generally limited, even in Chicago, to the resolution of specific grievances or problems involving employees' security and welfare or to the establishment of "better communications" with the school administration or school board in a particular district. There is little evidence early leaders planned to bargain all economic benefits and working conditions for teachers into signed union contracts.

Illinois teachers were, however, pioneers in the movement to establish organizations to represent their personal and professional interests rather than—as was the case with the NEA and IEA—the interests of school administrators and the more general interests of public education. The most significant early efforts by teachers in the United States to organize themselves into unions occurred in Chicago, Illinois ("Changing Education," Journal of the American Federation of Teachers, Summer 1966).

Two prominent leaders of that early movement were Margaret Haley and Catharine Goggin, who formed an elementary school teachers' club in 1892. The group, with Haley as president, took the name Chicago Teachers Federation and became an affiliate of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL). A federation of men teachers, led by Herbert Miller, was organized in 1912 and affiliated with the CFL and the Illinois Federation of Labor (IFL). In 1914, the women high school teachers organized a local federation, also affiliated with the labor movement (Murphy, Blackboard Unions, the AFT & the NEA, 1900–1980, pp. 46–73).

The movement among Chicago teachers had some success dealing with various problems plaguing education and teachers, but there is no evidence the leaders thought of their federations as instruments with which to bargain contracts with the board of education. Rather, those federations served as means for protest against political corruption in the schools, violations of rights, lack of job security, and various other forms of discrimination and repression of teachers. In 1907 Haley led a movement backed by the CFL to force five utility corporations to pay back property taxes. Property taxes were the major source of education funding.

A joint venture of Haley and Miller created the Chicago teachers' pension system—a precursor of the present-day Public School Teachers' Pension and Retirement Fund, Cities Over 500,000, and the Teachers' Retirement System of the State of Illinois.

The teachers' federations and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) also defeated a Chicago School Board plan to get a state law allowing a dual system of education, one system for those who would go on to college and the other for vocational schools for children who, it was believed, were destined to become workers in the industrial system.

In 1915, the Chicago board attempted to impose a "yellow dog" contract by requiring each teacher to sign a statement that he or she did not belong to an organization affiliated with a labor union. The three teachers' unions used various devices to fight the "Loeb rule" by litigation and otherwise, thereby managing to survive the attack.

In February 1916, the board tried arbitrarily to reduce teachers' pay by $7.50 per month retroactive to January. Again, the unions sued and obtained a court order forcing the board to pay back pay.

These victories by the Chicago teachers' federations were important in the development of the teachers' union movement in the beginning but were only actions on specific and limited issues and not the result of bargaining with the board and politicians who controlled the city. In fact, the victories probably contributed to a false sense among some teachers' leaders that their interests could be represented adequately in that way.

But though teachers thought of their federations in the limited role of reacting to the board's unfair and arbitrary actions and not in a role of bargaining for improvements in their salaries and working conditions, they had learned the important lesson that working with the rest of organized labor was a key to success. They had learned the value of labor affiliation. In 1916, the AFL issued a charter to a new national union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which soon had local unions in Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Washington, DC, and Gary, Indiana.

Significantly, in 1917 the new AFT local in Chicago, in conjunction with concerned citizens, initiated a move to establish tenure under law for Chicago's teachers, turning to the state legislature for protection rather than attempting to bargain fair procedures for dismissal with the board.

Parents wanted a law to protect the schools from a patronage system that compromised teachers' job security at the expense of children. The move to establish more fair procedures for dismissal under law was successful, the Chicago Teachers Tenure Act becoming law in 1919 along with other reforms enacted by the legislature.

In retrospect, the law set a precedent, not all good, whereby teachers sought to improve their lot primarily through legislative bills they initiated in the Illinois General Assembly rather than through bargaining with their employer. They still did not see their position as similar to all other workers in that job security was one of the most important matters they needed to bargain with their employer, along with working conditions and economic benefits. Teachers had to learn that the most important laws to them are made where they work, by their school boards and administrators. A tenure act did not improve conditions such that it became more likely they would succeed, or protect them from all kinds of injustices short of dismissal. Teachers' status would improve little until they bargained union contracts.

AFT Agrees Not to Strike

Apparently to mute criticism of their AFL affiliation, AFT leaders accepted a limitation in their new charter to prohibit strikes. Acceptance of such a limitationwasprobablynotduetoanymoralorphilosophicalconsideration but to a practical concern that teachers not suffer from the negative views of trade unions held by school administrators, the city leaders, and many of the general public. It was, no doubt, also an attempt to reassure teachers whom the new union hoped to recruit as members that they would not be asked to participate in bitter struggles such as frequently marked the activities of trade unions of the time. Such a restriction reveals the limited role for the union as perceived by its early leaders. Indeed, there was ample reason why the union leaders were concerned the AFT should be viewed in a positive light.

Although the AFT's charter was issued by the American Federation of Labor and meant that teacher leaders thought of it as a union and similar, at least in some respects, to those of carpenters, machinists, railway workers, and other labor organizations, some leaders avoided the word "union" to deflect negative views of the word.

Failure by early leaders of the AFT to know that the use of strikes should be included among a union's tactical weapons was a great impediment to development of a powerful teachers' union. After I went to work organizing teachers in 1963, I was often in conflict with AFT leaders who opposed militant actions by the local unions that I was leading to obtain collective bargaining rights. It was not until the late 1960s, under the leadership of AFT presidents Charles Cogen and David Selden, that the national union finally adopted a policy unequivocally supporting the strike as a weapon in bargaining.

The opponents of teachers' unions equated strikes with unprofessional conduct and lack of concern for the welfare of children. Most teachers were intimidated by the possibility they might be accused of being "unprofessional," and for that and other reasons, the early teachers' unions were usually ineffectual. A successful model for improving the economic status of teachers and providing job and professional security was not developed in Illinois until the emergence of the IFT as an instrument to promote collective bargaining in a significant way during the 1960s.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from TEACHERS BEYOND THE LAW by Oscar Weil Copyright © 2012 by Oscar Weil. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................xi
Acknowledgments....................xiii
Introduction....................1
Ch. 1: The Long Beginning....................7
Ch. 2: Rebel Teachers in the Southwest....................22
Ch. 3: The Journey Begins....................40
Ch. 4: Bargaining Begins....................57
Ch. 5: The American Federation of Teachers Has No Plan, 1963–64....................67
Ch. 6: Confrontation at Granite City, 1963–64....................85
Ch. 7: Militancy in East St. Louis....................101
Ch. 8: A Time of Transition....................117
Ch. 9: Small Unions Make Contributions....................141
Ch. 10: The Union Takes Form....................156
Ch. 11: Breakthrough in Cook County....................172
Ch. 12: Dues Increase Allows Hiring Field Staff....................203
Ch. 13: The Teacher Rebellion Reaches Chicago, 1966–67....................218
Ch. 14: College Teachers Battle for Rights....................230
Ch. 15: Mayor Daley Settles First Contracts....................250
Ch. 16: Legislative Battle for Collective Bargaining....................262
Ch. 17: Lines Harden at Joliet in Winter 1967....................277
Ch. 18: Rapid Growth Causes Conflict with Chicago Teachers Union....................291
Ch. 19: Creating Rules for Small Unions....................319
Ch. 20: Bargaining for the Poor and for the Rich, 1966–67....................343
Ch. 21: Bargaining Spreads....................362
Ch. 22: Tension Builds between CTU and Smaller Locals....................382
Ch. 23: IFT Is Fractured, but Organizing Continues....................396
Ch. 25: Kankakee School District Becomes a Battlefield, 1968–69....................424
Ch. 26: The Union Grows in Spite of Political Chaos, 1968–69....................449
Ch. 27: IFT 1969 Strike Victories, a Watershed for Teachers....................468
Ch. 28: Some Teachers Are Jailed; Some Are Fired....................495
Ch. 29: East St. Louis Local 1220 Survives Twelve-Week Strike....................516
Ch. 30: Working to Improve the Laws for Education and for Teachers....................535
Ch. 31: Chicago City College Union in Jeopardy....................560
Ch. 32: Success Organizing Professors....................577
Ch. 33: Political Successes for Teachers....................597
Ch. 34: Walker Gives a Giant Boost to Education, Public Employees....................610
Epilogue....................629
Index....................655