PAT Strike Day 3+: Hard Heads
The history of the response to organized labor is a history of violence: Pinkertons bashing in heads and engaging in espionage, pitched battles between strikers, strike breakers, and scabs, murder, intimidation, riots, you name it. Organizing to collectively demand better wages and working conditions, and taking unified action was a radical, transgressive act in 19th and early 20th century industrial society. Resistance to economic exploitation called down extreme retribution.
To be clear, I’m not sitting here thinking the teachers and parents marching outside Portland Public Schools are at risk of getting shanked and shot Matewan-style. But labor history is instructive now because it’s a reminder: employers don’t pay employees out of the goodness of their hearts. Paying people is a cost that the payors will go a long way to avoid. And for some, control is even more important than money. The sheer hatred directed against organizers and strikers in the early days was rage that poor people had the presumption to set terms and conditions, of any kind. To demand a seat at the table, regardless of the terms, was an offense in itself.
For the many classes of employee for whom their labor — their time and their capacity to live and support their families — is their only bargaining chip, sacrificing work today for better pay tomorrow is always a risk. Strike is a game of chicken. Striking employees lose time on the job and pay with no gaurantee its going to work. Historically employers are more likely to have the power and the resources to wait out a strike, starving the other side into submission.
Modern labor practices and regulations are more complicated — and thankfully/hopefully less violent — than they were in the railyards and coal mines of the Gilded Age. (And if you’re watching the HBO show, think about how many children died in factories, and working men were maimed in factories, mines and rail yards to build the mansions and pay for the fancy dresses). And importantly, public employers and employees have very different economic underpinnings to the labor relationship, because the pay comes from public funds and in theory there is no profit flowing off the system to concentrate on the employer side of the equation. (Except for consultants and outside counsel).
These economic structural differences are significant but don’t completely alter the dynamic. Portland Public Schools teachers’ strike began on Wednesday November 1. The school district did not come to the bargaining table until Friday November 3. Portland Association of teachers views this as PPS strategically slow-walking talks to exert pressure on PAT because the longer the strike goes on, the harder it is on the teachers, including but not limited to less public support for the teachers as stress increases for parents.
PPS’s story is that the bargaining professional assisting the talks set the next day for bargaining for Friday 11/3. Now, as someone who has participated in some acrimonious, high stakes negotiations, I know sometimes a break is healthy, and the pro has a lot of say in the schedule. However, I also know that Wednesday and Thursday are 1.6% of the total instructional days my high school senior needs to graduate. (Friday was already scheduled as a planning day). I also know that NO ONE was surprised by this strike. Everyone in town knew at least a week before that a strike was going to start on 11/1, so setting up 11/2 and 11/3 as no talking days looks less like a “cooling off period” than an avoidable lack of urgency. (Note: I have no inside information. I’m an outside observer who happens to understand big dollar negotiations are complicated, but FFS…)
Going into this situation acting like there’s a lack of urgency is a tactic. It’s a tactic that benefits PPS more than PAT. Every single fucking parent with a child (I have three) in PPS has a sense of urgency Right. Now. Kids aren’t in school. Anyone with a kid under the age of 11 or 12 is borderline hosed. Since the default state for this time of year is “kids in school”, “No School November” notwithstanding, the levels of stress are spiking. And the reason kids are not in school is a strike. Pretty soon parents are gonna be big big mad, no matter how much they love and respect their kids teachers.
When I was in law school I took a labor law overview class. One of the main things I remember about that class was the professor showing “American Dream”, a documentary about the mid 1980s strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant in southern Minnesota. The strike was brutal, violent, lasted roughly a full year, and the workers lost. The national United Food and Commercial Workers union left the local striking workers hanging out to dry, Hormel brought in underpaid migrant labor, and the town of Austin, Minnesota was never the same.
The main thing I learned from that was that if it comes down to an absolute waiting game, the employer can not only afford to wait out the employees, they will do it to the detriment of a whole community. Of course a meatpacking plant is very different than a public school system. A national food company can make a choice to deactivate an entire operating site instead of paying its workers $2.00 more an hour. PPS can’t deactivate itself for a year in order to break the back of its labor force. Nor can it simply eliminate itself and move to a different location like a diffuse yet pervasive retail brand responding to unionization by zeroing out the organized stores (Starbucks is especially known for this tactic).
The teachers are literally out on the streets. Also, teachers genuinely want to do their jobs. No one would be a teacher who didn’t want to do it for its own sake. And the teachers are the ones who are being paid an average of $60,000 a year before taxes, in a town where housing costs for a family are $25,000 — $45,000 a year. I am absolutely confident they want to bargain, to bargain immediately, and have a lot at stake.
The District’s position is “you can’t get blood from a stone, so suck it up.” Whether you believe they’re actually stone or not (more on that question another time), they’re obviously sticking to that position and have been for months. At this exact moment, they don’t have to do anything different than they’ve been doing and they are no worse off. Except of course for tens of thousands of Portland parents who are really, really pissed. Parents staying pissed at PPS and being more pissed at PPS than at PAT is what evens the playing field, and hopefully encourages a sense of urgency on the part of PPS.
PAT is hungry for a solution because they are literally more adjacent to being hungry from not working. And remember Guadelupe Guerrero makes THREE HUNDRED THIRTY THOUSAND dollars a year. Nothing about that configuration says “hungry” to me.
Tomorrow, Monday 11/6, is the third lost instructional day (2.5% of the days my senior needs to graduate) and I am deeply unimpressed with any strategy that involves less than a full court press towards resolution. Stay pissed. Because no one has ever paid striking workers what they asked for just because the workers need the money. If that was how this worked, they wouldn’t strike in the first place (duh). And no one would strike if they didn’t both need the money and lack a less painful path.