In hard times, teacher unions and school boards settle for less
The lessons were stern and clear for the San Jose Unified School District, one of the largest in Northern California. With 32,000 students, San Jose entered the fall term with a $5 million budget deficit and without the services of 154 teachers, who had been laid off during the summer. Ten elementary schools had been shut down to save money, creating shorter classes and crowded classrooms. With the depletion of the state surplus that since 1978 had buffered the effects of Proposition 13, San Jose had to renege on a promise made in January to offer a 6% pay increase to teachers. The teachers, in turn, filed a formal grievance with the school board. But they are still in the classrooms. "At least they didn't strike," says Norbert Strecker, president of the school board. "If this had happened a year ago, they would have." Adds Deputy Superintendent Aaron Seandel: "They know we're broke. The kind of money we need you don't get from bake sales."
Throughout the country, teacher unions are fighting just to keep what they still have in the face of declining enrollments, diminishing tax bases and federal education cutbacks. For their part, school districts everywhere are trying to wring concessions out of teacher unions in the form of pay freezes, benefit reductions and even salary cuts. But with both sides hurting economically, there is little ground for negotiation. In Cleveland, 4,000 teachers who struck for eleven weeks at the start of the 1979-80 school year are now at work without a new contract and have made no strike threats. The Chicago Teachers Union ratified a contract last month that includes salary freezes and the loss of one day's pay. Says the union spokesman, Chuck Burdeen: "Our membership is well-educated; they understand the climate of the times."
Always a last resort, strikes have become an increasingly unattractive option for teachers. There were a record 242 strikes in the 1979-80 school year. The following year there were 191; so far this fall there have been about 65. Only some 20 strikes are still in progress today, and few seem likely to continue for long. A 19-day strike ended in Teaneck, N.J., last week after State Superior Court Judge Sherwin Lester leaned on both sides. He ordered teachers back to work and, when they refused, began commandeering school buildings for use as makeshift jails to confine groups of teachers during the day. When an intransigent board of education failed to produce a quorum for a crucial bargaining session, the judge pressured board members to negotiate with the union. The final three-year settlement for the teachers represents yearly pay increases of from 7.5% to 9.7%.