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 (CTA) 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 (CFT), 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 (AFT), 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.”
Messianic Fervor
No one was more effective in pursuit of this goal than Raoul Teilhet, a transplanted Ohioan. 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—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 justice 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. John Muir High School teacher Paul Finot was 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.
Events like these reinforced teacher union activists’ belief that the only lasting protection for teachers’ 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.
Quality Education
CFT members also thought it was their duty to improve public education itself, starting with listening to the community. As Oakland teacher Miles Myers put it:
We were trying to create the conditions for teaching to happen, and for learning to happen…. If you think of the African American leaders in the civil rights movement, the young ones, we had them right in Oakland. Bobby Seale’s cousin was a teacher in the Oakland system. We had an awareness of that and the students did too. I remember the Black Student Union at Oakland High School proposing that the books ought to be more integrated, and they were.
Through alliance building, direct action and tenacious defense of teachers' rights, the CFT chartered scores of locals in the late sixties and early seventies, picking up thousands of members each year. Its leaders and activists viewed CFT as a movement organization, much as members of the United Farm Workers did their union. And they viewed collective bargaining as one important means to achieve movement ends, the most important of which was quality education.
They also received crucial support from their sisters and brothers in manufacturing unions. CFT offices and organizing positions were funded by grants from the United Auto Workers, whose leader, Walter Reuther, understood the importance of extending labor’s flanks to the public sector.
As CFT grew at CTA's expense, the Association saw the writing on the wall. In 1971 it kicked out its administrator members and embraced collective bargaining. Soon CTA chapters were going on strike as often as AFT locals. Between 1970 and 1974 CTA chapters and CFT locals engaged in 38 walkouts.
The direct action fever wasn’t limited to K-12. A fiery strike at San Francisco State University by students demanding an expansion of curriculum to previously neglected studies of minority cultures and histories was bolstered when United Professors of California, AFT Local 1352, joined the picket lines. The campus was shut down for months. These activities built pressure on the Legislature to pass a collective bargaining bill in 1973, but it was vetoed by Governor Ronald Reagan.
A “Real NLRA” for Public Employees
In 1975, newly elected Governor Jerry Brown fulfilled a campaign promise and signed SB 160, the Educational Employment Relations Act (EERA). It was carried by a former AFT local president, State Senator Al Rodda, and supported by CTA and, reluctantly, CFT. It also received important backing from the California School Boards Association, which belatedly understood collective bargaining as a way to achieve a more peaceful and less disrupted school environment.
The EERA enabled K-12 and community college employees—certificated and classified—to elect exclusive representatives and engage in collective bargaining, district by district, across the state. SB 160 created a Board with enforcement powers. But it excluded four-year higher education and placed a teacher voice in developing curriculum policies outside the scope of collective bargaining.
Debate within CFT over support of the Rodda Act was fierce. Everyone wanted curriculum on the negotiating table. The United Professors of California-AFT, with thousands of members in the California State University, and University of California systems, wanted higher education in the bill. Ultimately CFT backed the Rodda Act, because it offered more than it left out, and friendly legislators promised to immediately draft a new collective bargaining bill for higher education. The Rodda Act went into effect January 1, 1976.
Despite its limitations, the Educational Employment Relations Act established basic rights for public education employees: especially the right to resolve workplace disputes as equals with their employers through collective bargaining.
A decisive step forward for public employee unionism, SB 160 put in place the means for public education workers to achieve rough parity with their private sector counterparts. And for teacher unionists, it vindicated what had often seemed a quixotic quest in the 1950s and 1960s.
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.