Teachers on the Picket Line: More Than Salary Is at Stake

‘Orange County teachers are consistent with the rest of the state. There is general labor unrest in education throughout California. It’s the result of a lack of money.’

When Peggy Kelleher and fellow Irvine Unified teachers picketed during a one-day strike last February, she remembers, “It bothered every one of us.”

Kelleher, a soft-spoken Kentucky native who teaches first grade at El Toro Marine School in Irvine, said, “Most of us had never done anything like this.”

“Our biggest fear was a lockout,” she said. “As for reaction of friends, it often was more of what they didn’t say to me rather than what they said. But, yes, I think the strike was necessary. We had to make an impact and stand united.”

Kelleher, a teacher for 20 years, eight of them in the Irvine Unified School District, was among hundreds of Orange County teachers who took to the streets during the last school year to demonstrate against their school boards.

The school year in Orange County was marked by labor problems more often associated with factories than classrooms. In addition to the Irvine teachers’ strike, there were job actions in these other districts in the past school year:

- Teachers in Orange Unified set a strike deadline that was one day away when they finally reached a contract agreement with the school board.

- High school teachers in the Huntington Beach-Westminster-Fountain Valley area staged several protests, including picketing and sick-ins. In addition, five Edison High School teachers spent 24 hours a day at the school for 18 days in a “work-in” to protest the stalemate in negotiations. Huntington Beach Union High School District and the teachers’ union still have not agreed on a contract for the school year that ended in June.

- Tustin Unified’s angry teachers marched to board meetings, held mass meetings in schoolyards and issued pamphlets to residents. Tustin teachers and the school board still have not settled on a contract for the recently ended school year.

Were the various demonstrations last year indications that Orange County teachers are becoming more militant than their counterparts elsewhere in the state?

“I don’t think so,” said Michael Kilbourn, special services director for the Orange County Department of Education. “Orange County teachers are consistent with the rest of the state. There is general labor unrest in education throughout California. It’s the result of a lack of money.”

Marilyn Bittle, president of the statewide California Teachers Assn., said, “Orange County is a kind of microcosm of the whole state. We had quite a few crises in Orange County, and we had more throughout the state than we’ve had in previous years.” Many school districts around the state saw teacher unrest in the last school year, and a few one-day strikes.

What is different about Orange County, Bittle said, is that negotiations in several districts--notably Huntington Beach Union High School District and Tustin Unified School District--have been so prolonged.

Lance Jacot, a teachers’ union contract negotiator in Huntington Beach Union High School District, said this year’s job actions were not “a matter of increased militancy. In the recent past,” he said, “we’ve had four strikes in our district, so I don’t think what’s going on now is anything new. We’ve had this situation, at least from my reference point, for a good 10 years.”

While the officials said that the past school year was not “unusually militant,” they agreed that it was less than tranquil.

Adding to the usual contract tension in many districts last year was a new situation, that of negotiating for state allocations for educational reform. The state Legislature in 1983 passed a bill requiring longer school days and longer school years. The new law provides for state money to compensate teachers for the longer hours, but pass-through of the money requires school district and teacher union negotiations.

Dan Saling, executive director of the South Orange County Educators Assn., an umbrella union organization, charged recently that some school boards in Orange County “used the education reform money to try to extract agreements from the teachers.”

Conversely, some school superintendents charged that teacher unions were stalling on enacting the longer school day and longer school year because they were trying to get other contract concessions from school districts in the negotiations.

Proposition 13 Squeeze

Both sides agreed, however, that decreased income resources for education have aggravated bargaining tension. And both sides agreed that the passage of property tax-limiting Proposition 13 in 1978 was the cause of the shrinkage of those resources.

Before Proposition 13, money for the schools came primarily from local property taxes. When Proposition 13 put a lid on the tax, most school districts in Orange County had to rely on funds from Sacramento.

Some education officials have said that the decreased money in local school districts has caused the teacher unions to change their bargaining tactics.

For instance, Kilbourn, of the county Department of Education, has said that union perquisites were major items in contract negotiations during the past school year.

“When a union recognizes that money isn’t available, it works on (contract) language,” Kilbourn said. “You can get wording where you can’t get money, because each district feels it has to give something.”

Unions, Kilbourn said, “are saying it’s for money, but what they’re really after in most cases are agency shop and binding arbitration.” Agency shop means that all teachers in a district must pay union dues or an equivalent fee. Binding arbitration means that a labor dispute can be referred to a neutral third party whose decision is final.

Both binding arbitration and agency shop, Kilbourn said, “are very important” to unions, and are “probably the biggest policies the school districts have trouble with.” Northern California districts, he said, have allowed agency shop in their districts “quite a bit in the past. That part of the state is a little more liberally oriented than Southern California.”

Board Opposes Agency Shop

Kilbourn said there has been more resistance to agency shop in Southern California, especially in Orange County.

Mandatory union membership is a major issue in the Tustin contract negotiations. But Tustin Unified Supt. Maurice Ross said the school board in that district is adamantly opposed to the idea.

“I think the teachers’ union has read our community wrong on this issue,” he said. “Tustin is a conservative, management-oriented district. Assemblyman John Lewis, who represents most of our school district, recently took a poll, asking what residents thought of compulsory union membership. The poll was 96% opposed.”

Bill Ribblett, a staff member with the California Teachers Assn. who has been working with the Tustin Educators Assn., took issue with Ross.

“We’ve offered one contract without either agency shop or binding arbitration, and he (Ross) rejected it,” Ribblett said. He added that the agency shop provision, however, is now back on the negotiating table as one of the teachers’ central demands. “We’ve told the school board that we know they oppose this, but that they should let the teachers vote. We’d abide by a (majority) vote.”

Ribblett also charged that “Ross is trying to bust this union--he’s making statements every chance he can to get people to oppose the union.”

‘We’re the Target’

Ross has repeatedly denied the “union-busting” charge leveled against him in the past school year. He acknowledged that Tustin Unified “is surrounded by school districts that have yielded on agency shop . . . . We’re now the target.”

Ross said that the public is confused about the various charges in the teacher-contract negotiations, mainly “because public agency negotiations are different from the private sector.” As an example, he pointed to the repeated use of the phrase “teachers are still without a contract” in news coverage of the situation.

Said Ross: “That’s just not true, ever, in the case of teachers. We have to give any teacher notice by March 15 every year if we don’t plan to rehire him. Without that notice, he’s automatically got a contract.”

Teachers, for their part, say they sometimes face hostility and harassment because unions are not popular in overwhelmingly conservative Orange County.

In Irvine, Kelleher said, “they’re used to managers and management; they just don’t know how to deal with worker bees.”

Other teachers said that even when they didn’t suffer community criticism for their protests, it seemed that they were in suspended animation as they awaited the outcome of contract negotiations.

Said Lori Juan, a consumer education teacher in Orange Unified’s Canyon High School: “The hardest part, at least for me, was this waiting and wondering what was going on--the uncertainty, the not knowing what was going to happen next.”

Uncertainty for Teachers

Another Orange Unified teacher, Marti Kent, said, “It’s a roller coaster ride. You wonder how far in advance you can plan. You never really can do any planning ahead.”

Kent, a teacher at Anaheim Hills Elementary, said she picketed her school last year “even though I don’t like that sort of thing. I just realized it was necessary.”

Union president Bittle said that the area’s conservatism has been a continuing problem for local teachers’ unions.

Yet many Orange County teachers consider themselves conservatives, just like their non-union neighbors.

For instance, Jerry Tolman, a math teacher at Fountain Valley High and president of the District Educators Assn., the teachers’ union in Huntington Beach Union High School District, said: “I’ve always considered myself a conservative. We’re not looking for a power base, we’re just looking for fairness.

“I know there are some people who’re saying, ‘Look at these crazy teachers, these union radicals,’ but all we want is a fair break.”

ISSUES UNDER NEGOTIATION This chart outlines the issues that have separated teachers and local school districts officials in reaching agreement on current contracts including cost of living, increase in pay due to an extended school year, whether or not disputes should be subject to binding arbitration and whether the district is an agency shop, which requires teachers to join a teachers’ association. A blank indicates that issue is not under discussion.

School district Last Pay Extended Binding Agency Increase Year Pay Arbitration Shop Anaheim City Elementary 7.5% 2.87% Yes No Buena Park 5% 2.9% No No Centralia 5% 2.9% Yes No Cypress 7% 2.2% plus No No Fountain Valley 5.8% 2.9% No No Fullerton Elementary 5.27% 3.5% No No Huntington Beach City Elementary 4.5% 3.5% No No La Habra 4% 3.5% No No Magnolia 5% 2.7% Yes No Ocean View 5% 3.5% No No Savanna 6.9% 3.1% Yes n/a Westmintser 5.2% 3.3% Yes No Yorba Linda 5 No No Anaheim Union High 5% 1.5% Yes No Fullerton High 5.5% 3% adv.* Yes Huntington Beach High unsettled unsettled n/a n/a Brea-Olinda 5.25% 4% No No Capistrano 5.75% 2% No Yes Garden Grove 6% 3% No No Irvine Unified 3% 4.59% Laguna Beach 4% 5% No No Los Alamitos 4.3% 2.7% Yes Yes Newport-Mesa 4% 3.8% No No Orange Unified 4.375% 4% Yes Yes Placentia Unified 5% 2.5% No No Saddleback Valley 5.9% 2%+2% Yes Yes Santa Ana Unified 6% 3.5% Yes No Tustin Unified unsettled unsettled

n/a--not available; *Union and district go before an advisory arbitration board.