Massachusetts School District Fined for Striking
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For 11 days, students who attended Newton Public Schools were not at school due to a strike among the teachers. The catch is that the strike is considered illegal due to a Massachusetts law on striking for public school teachers. The Newton Teachers Association owes $50,000 per day of the strikes duration due to the law that public school teachers are not allowed to strike in Massachusetts.
The strike was over failed contract negotiations and created a strike that is unprecedented in Massachusetts for the 21st century.
Nationwide in 2023, there were 405 strikes with a significant increase in the amount of workers that went on strike. There were 407 strikes the year prior but with fewer workers. The amount of workers that went on strike this past year is likely due to the contract deadlines of larger unions in the United States all ending around the same time.
The Newton Public Schools Strike
The Newton Public School strike was 15 days with students being out of school for 11 days. The walkout began on Jan. 19. The strike ended with a tentative agreement for a four-year contract and the school is likely to spend an additional $53 million over four years to cover the requests of the new agreement.
The agreement takes into consideration a cost-of-living increase predicted to be about 13% over the period, increased pay for classroom aides, and 40 days of paid family leave time.
In the end, the teachers union owes $600,000 in fines for the time that the district was on strike. If the strike did not reach a tentative agreement with the district and the teachers at the time they did, a judge threatened to double daily fines to $100,000. Before the Newtown Public School strike, the highest amount of fees that had to be paid for a strike was $110,000 with the Haverhill Teachers Union.
The Newton School Committee decided that to make up for the time lost in the strike, the four days planned for February time-off will not be occurring.
Why Striking is Prohibited
The reason that public employees are prohibited from striking is that it causes citizens to be prevented from the services that typically are provided. With teacher unions striking, there is a risk that children will be left at home without supervision or parents need to take time off work to supervise their children for an extended period.
In school districts, there is a concern that school children falling behind in their academics. Strikes would cause issues due to the idea that the students are considered to be in their “prime learning period” and that students at their age can get a larger amount of learning done in a short amount of time.
School districts are required to have their children for 180 days of school by the time of June 30. If a strike would make the school period extend past June 30 and the school would have to hold the students into July, then the school district must ask the state education department to grant them a waiver to allow students past June.
The Law That Makes Striking Illegal
The General Law of Massachusetts, Part I, Title XXI, Chapter 150E, Section 9A is specifically why striking is not allowed in Massachusetts for public school teachers.
“Section 9A. No public employee or employee organization shall engage in a strike, and no public employee or employee organization shall induce, encourage or condone any strike, work stoppage, slowdown or withholding of services by such public employees.”
Making strikes illegal for certain workers may sound unconstitutional, but 37 states prohibit public sector strikes. Labor unions use striking as a way to bring attention to conditions that they do not see as supportable. Penalties for breaking the striking laws can be fines, termination, or jail time.
The states where teachers striking is allowed are: Alaska, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Wyoming, and Wisconsin.
Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act gives citizens the right to perform in strikes. The Supreme Court after the act decided that non-union workers are also protected in striking with the decision in NLRB v. Washington Aluminum. While there is a right to strike, there are limits to this right with each strike for all citizens.
A strike's legality depends on the specifics of why people are striking: illegal strikes could be dependent on the object that people are striking, the purpose of the strike, the timing of the strike, and the conductor of the strike. These specifications and their legality are decided by the National Labor Relations Board.
In the National Labor Relations Act, there are no specifics on teacher unions striking and the states being the ones to decide if public school strikes are legal or not in the state. The reasoning for the laws prohibiting strikes for teachers has concerned for the student’s education and parental supervision during the strike. There is a mandatory 10-day period for healthcare workers to write to the institution and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service of their strike so there is proper time to prepare. The 10 days were created in consideration of the fact that the services that the hospitals give to their patients are similar to the reasoning for teachers.
The National Labor Relations Act also guarantees that workers cannot be fired for participating in protected and legal striking and picketing. Workers can be lawfully fired from participating in unlawful strikes that are not protected in the law, which would include teachers in states where public school teachers are not legally allowed to strike if that is what the courts decide.
When the striking period ends, the workers are legally required to return to work under the National Labor Relations Act. There are some exceptions to certain types of strikes and the employment status:
“If the reason for the strike was, in whole or in part, to protest one or more unfair labor practices, strikers must be immediately reinstated. If the strike was over economic issues, you are likewise entitled to immediate reinstatement except that if your employer hired permanent replacements, returning strikers are placed on a preferential hiring list. Your right to reinstatement may be lost if you have engaged in violence or other serious misconduct in connection with your strike or picketing activities.”
Massachusetts Considering Loosening the Parameters of the Law
Representatives Mike Connolly and Erika Uyterhoeven introduced “an act uplifting families and securing the right to strike for certain public employees.” If passed, the act would give the right to strike for Labor and Workforce Development employees.
With the act to secure the right to strike for certain public employees, Section 9A would be changed to:
“No public safety employee or public safety employee organization, or any other public employee or public employee organization before 6 months of negotiation over the terms of a collective bargaining agreement under section 9, shall engage in a strike, work stoppage, slowdown or withholding of services by such public employees.”
The latest development for the act was it is scheduled to be heard on Oct. 24, 2023. It currently has been referred to the Joint Committee on Labor and Workforce Development.
What Happens When Teachers Strike
When teachers strike in states with laws such as Section 9A, there is a process that goes into preventing the unions from continuing the strikes.
The school district first must ask the state’s employee relations board if a strike is going to happen. If the board sees that the strike is happening, the board then goes to a judge to ask them to order the teachers back to work. The judge usually decides to order the teachers back to work.
If the judge asks them to stop striking and go back to work and the unions decide to not listen, the judge can consider them contempt of the court order and implement fines. In recent years, fines are what unions will typically face when striking as opposed to jail time or other methods of punishment. There was a case in 1977 where 80 teachers from Franklin ended up being jailed for a two-week strike.
There are no conclusive studies that have determined how strikes affect students and the benefits and costs of strikes. There are some theories that teacher strikes have negative impacts on students, even in the students' futures. For male students, there seems to be a correlation between teacher strikes and “a reduction in educational attainment, an increase in the likelihood of being unemployed, occupational downgrading, and adverse effects on both labor market earnings and hourly wages.” The results are very similar for female students, without the occupational downgrading.
There also is a belief in socioeconomic changes in students who have experienced strikes in schools. Those exposed to teacher strikes typically have less educated partners and lower per capita family income. There is no clear correlation or causation, these are just some findings and beliefs on those who experience teacher strikes in schools. There also is no indication of the length of the strikes that was studied in this research. The findings are just one way to look at the possible futures of students who have experienced strikes in their education system growing up.
“Unfortunately, the strike data that we have collected only provides us with the number of days of strikes, and the number of strikes, per month and province (not the length of each strike). However, even if we cannot identify the duration of each strike, the data allow us to identify the average duration of the strikes that each cohort was exposed to.”