How Teachers Won the Right to Collectively Bargain (Part One of Two)
The Labor History Corner by Fred Glass
By Fred Glass
The conditions for teaching and learning to happen
From the beginning, we did not say to ourselves, “We’re going to get power by going to Sacramento and getting a bill that tells us that we have the right to collective bargaining.” We wanted that, but that was not the source of our authority. The source of our authority was in collective action, and watching the peace movement, and the civil rights movement, we could see the strategies one used.
—Miles Myers, Oakland teacher
Korean War veteran Raoul Teilhet went to work teaching history at Pasadena High School in the late 1950s. When he was hired the principal handed him, along with his employment papers, membership applications for the Pasadena Education Association, California Teachers Association, and National Education Association. As a former member of “real unions,” he surmised this must be a company union, since it was his boss that was signing him up.
Teilhet’s suspicions were not far from the mark. The full picture was more complex, since in the public sector there is no “company.” But the California Teachers Association was not a union. It functioned as a statewide lobbying organization for K-12 public education, and offered an array of services for its members, including a credit union, travel assistance, discount purchase arrangements, and insurance programs. Despite its name, and the presence of teacher advocates within the organization, the CTA was dominated by school administrators, school district superintendents, and elected school board officials. It did not support collective bargaining for teachers. In fact, it had opposed collective bargaining bills for teachers and other school employees every time they had appeared before the Legislature beginning in 1953.
The sponsor of those bills was the California Federation of Teachers, formed during the first wave of public sector union organizing in 1919. But it wasn't until the 1960s that CFT, affiliated with the national American Federation of Teachers, and with the AFL-CIO, gained the ability to mobilize thousands of teachers over pay, working conditions, and academic freedom issues. Sparked by the success of the national AFT, which had won a number of collective bargaining agreements in large cities in east coast states through strikes, and backed by organizing grants from the United Auto Workers, the CFT's idea of classroom unionism began to look attainable to the state's teachers. The CFT waged battles on many fronts—legal, legislative, political, and organizing—on behalf of the goal of collective bargaining for “teacher power.”
No one was more effective in pursuit of this goal than Raoul Teilhet, a transplanted Ohioan on whose father’s living room wall were found the three typical icons of the mid-century coal miner: Jesus Christ, FDR, and John L. Lewis. A gifted public speaker, energetic and fearless organizer, and charismatic union leader, the high school teacher carried the CFT’s message about collective bargaining with messianic fervor to the farthest corners of the state—and not just to K-12 teachers, but community college and university faculty as well.
Teilhet and a growing number of volunteer organizers extended CFT’s tradition of social unionism to active support for the United Farm Workers (Cesar Chavez was a regular speaker at CFT conventions) and to the anti-Vietnam War movement. According to Teilhet, no education policy could make sense without fully funding the classroom, freeing teachers from worries about job security, and understanding the broader social context in which public education occurred.
Luisa Ezquerro’s experiences were typical of the reasons why Teilhet and other CFT organizers connected to growing numbers of teachers. She became a San Francisco teacher in the footsteps of her immigrant mother and aunt, who had taught in Nicaragua. Ezquerro recalled what happened one afternoon in the early 1960s after her principal developed a dislike for her.
I got called in by the principal, this old character. There was a phone booth out in the hall. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out some coins and says, “Here, here’s some coins, why don’t you call around and see where you can get a job.” Well excuse me!.... See, there wasn’t a contract. He had no right to do that, but there wasn’t anything that prevented him from doing it…
Along with the petty insults came violations of basic rights. There was John Muir High School teacher Paul Finot, placed on leave by the Pasadena School Board in 1963 because he refused to shave his beard. The school principal worried publicly about the dire impact his appearance would have on Negro students. (Apparently no one noted the irony that the school’s famous namesake bore a heavy beard.) When asked at a court hearing, where he was represented by CFT, whether his beard wasn’t an “outgrowth of his radicalism,” he replied, “No, it was an outgrowth of my six week fishing trip.” The appeals court, ruling that a beard represented a constitutionally protected freedom of individual expression, restored Finot to his classroom.
Teachers resented paternalistic restrictions imposed by administrators, superintendents, or school boards, not only on academic freedom within the classroom to teach as they saw best, but also freedom of speech outside school. Jack Owens was fired in 1959 for “unprofessional conduct” in Shasta for organizing educational forums, and writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper critical of school district policy. With union support, he was returned to his job in 1962 through a lawsuit.
Events like these reinforced teacher union activists’ belief that the only lasting protection for teacher rights would come with collective bargaining, through contracts that mandated salary schedules based on education and experience instead of administrative whim, grievance procedures to settle individual and group problems peacefully, seniority provisions for fairness and consistency in determining layoffs and transfers, and equitable, transparent rules to evaluate teachers for the purpose of retention and promotion.
A small cadre of AFT members held these values and ideas throughout the post-World War II years, nurturing the seeds of collective bargaining in the minds of colleagues and legislators. Disproportionately veterans, they spent countless volunteer hours after school, attending board meetings, representing teachers in informal hearings, writing and distributing mimeographed newsletters, and occasionally finding themselves looking for new jobs as a result. In the face of hostile school administrators, an entrenched, anti-union teacher association, and a mostly indifferent public, they pursued their chimerical vision.
The CTA sponsored a halfway measure toward collective bargaining in 1965. The Winton Act, AB 1474, was in fact intended to stave off collective bargaining. The Act established the right of school district negotiating councils to “meet and confer” with administration over employment issues. School boards placed representatives of teacher organizations on the councils in proportion to their membership. These negotiations could be used by school boards to inform their decisions, which nonetheless remained final. In his organizing conversations with teachers across the state, Raoul Teilhet provided a metaphor to describe the process: “Meet and confer is what you do with your children. Collective bargaining is what you do with your spouse.”
AFT activists like Ezquerro derisively called the practice “meet and defer” or “collective begging.” Although the Winton Act was intended to stack the deck in favor of the much larger CTA, CFT members utilized its flaws as an argument for full collective bargaining. In some districts the union boycotted the council, and called for elections instead of appointment to the body.
For more on California’s labor history, you can buy Fred Glass’s From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (University of California Press) here.
Fred Glass is the author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (UC Press, 2016), a retired City College of San Francisco Labor Studies instructor, and a former member of the State Committee of California DSA.