The strike shuttered schools in Oregon’s largest city for nearly a month.
The strike shuttered schools in Oregon’s largest city for nearly a month.
T he teachers’ strike in Portland, Ore., ended when teachers returned to their classrooms on Monday. The strike had shut down Oregon’s largest district, with about 45,000 students, since its beginning on November 1. Students lost eleven scheduled school days, which will be made up through a shortened winter break, the cancellation of scheduled off days in the future, and extending the end of the school year.
Strikes by public-school teachers are already illegal in 37 states. The Portland strike helped to illustrate why every state should prohibit strikes in the entire public sector (they are already prohibited for federal workers) and see to it that those laws are enforced.
The new three-year contract in Portland was ratified by the union and approved by the school board on Tuesday. It represents a middle ground between the district’s final offer and the union’s demands. The district offered a 10.9 percent cost-of-living adjustment over the three-year contract; the union wanted 23 percent; the deal was ultimately settled at 14.4 percent. The union wanted planning time for all teachers to increase to 440 minutes per week; the contract increased planning time for elementary- and middle-school teachers to 410 minutes per week. The union also wanted a hard limit on class sizes, which the contract did not include.
The contract resembles the sort of thing an arbitration board would come up with. Arbitration is frequently used to settle all sorts of contract disputes. When there’s an impasse, professional, independent arbitrators look at the final offers from both sides and hammer out a compromise. That compromise can either be non-binding, serving as a recommendation for the sides to resolve their dispute, or binding, serving as the new contract itself.
Oregon already knows the wisdom of binding arbitration because state law currently requires it if labor contracts expire for prosecutors, emergency-communications workers, juvenile-corrections workers, firefighters, prison guards, parole officers, police officers, or transit workers. Strikes by public employees in those professions are already prohibited. Strikes by teachers should be prohibited, too.
The additional advantage of binding arbitration is that arbitrators could also consider how the union’s demands aligned with overall education funding. As things currently stand, even with the new contract ratified and approved, the district still faces a dilemma: “We . . . got a contract that we cannot afford,” as school-board member Andrew Scott put it.
That means the district will now have to go back to the state and beg for more funding to cover expenses it has already agreed to pay. The chief executive of the state, Democratic governor Tina Kotek, didn’t help the situation. During the negotiations, she exerted some of her influence — to make the contract more expensive.
She remained neutral through most of the process, urging both sides to compromise. She maintained that stance, to the frustration of the Oregonian editorial board, even after it was revealed that the union was wrong about how much money the district had available and the state’s chief financial officer confirmed that the district’s numbers were correct.
The final sticking point in negotiations was the pay raise for next year. The district wanted 4 percent, and the union wanted 4.5 percent, a difference of about $4 million. “Under immense pressure from everyone from Gov. Tina Kotek to increasingly furious parents to seal the deal Sunday, district negotiators agreed to pay the additional $4 million,” the Oregonian reported. Oregon taxpayers would be within their rights to wonder which side Kotek is on.
Public-sector unions will always demand more spending, because they do not face the competitive constraints of the private sector. Private companies must remain competitive to continue to exist and pay their workers. Private-sector unions know that, so they understand there are limits to what they can ask without jeopardizing their members’ own employment. The government, on the other hand, can’t go out of business, and it’s the only provider of public education. So public-sector unions don’t have to think about whether what they’re asking is reasonable, because the state government can always coerce more money from taxpayers or issue more debt to pay for a union’s demands. The only question is whether politicians will agree to do so.
That’s why public-sector unions are heavily involved with state politics. They know that if they get pro-union politicians in office, they can benefit immensely by, for example, having the governor take their side in contract negotiations against a public-school district. The SEIU alone donated more to Kotek in 2022 than the Democratic Party of Oregon did. The American Federation of Teachers, Oregon Education Association, and AFSCME combined for $1,310,606 in contributions.
The money is nice, but public-sector unions really flex their muscles in politics through supplying volunteers to knock on doors, run phone banks, and conduct signature drives. On October 7, 2022, Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) president Angela Bonilla posted on the union’s website, “With only about two weeks until ballots drop, it’s time to support our PAT-PAC endorsed candidates!” The post included a link to sign up for volunteering for Kotek’s campaign and mentioned a canvass for a city-council candidate held in the union’s office.
The very nature of public-sector unions is itself constitutionally suspect, but the least state governments can do is prevent them from bringing public education to a halt. That means prohibiting public-school strikes and forcing sides into binding arbitration if a new contract isn’t agreed to in time. That approach could have resolved this dispute without upending students’ and parents’ lives for a month.