Two objects come to mind when I think of our family's kitchen back in March 1979: Mousetraps and picket signs.
The mousetraps were hidden away under an old dishwasher that we used for storing telephone books and pens. They snapped once in a while and made for an unpleasant cleanup. The picket signs appeared when my dad went on strike.
He was a community college instructor in Minnesota, where we lived, and that month all the community college faculty in the state walked out. As in Arizona today, the strike was essentially against the state Legislature, and the resolution of that conflict makes me wonder how teachers expect to win the current walkout in Arizona.
What led my dad and his colleagues to picket the state capitol in 1979 was a violation of previous agreements. In arbitration hearings, the community college faculty had bargained for wage increases with the state negotiators in 1975 and 1977, but the state Legislature had never funded the increases.
So on March 20, 1979 they walked off the job. My dad would regularly walk the picket line outside the Capitol, in shifts kept short because of the winter cold. Crucially, they were supported by other unions, both in organizing the strike and in honoring it. The Teamsters helped out, and their members refused to cross the picket line.
This, my dad told me last week, was critical in getting the Legislature to agree to fund most of the pay increases that the instructors had previously negotiated. The strike lasted 14 days, and as time went on, some supplies were running short in the Capitol because Teamsters members would not deliver.
The shorthand version of how the strike ended, probably apocryphal, is that the Capitol was running out of paper.
What I wondered as teachers swarmed Arizona's Capitol Thursday is how they're going to stop the paper deliveries. Not literally, of course โ but what is the leverage the teachers movement has that will make the Legislature accommodate their demands. Those demands, let's recall, are:
1. A 20 percent raise for all teaching and certified staff
2. Competitive, inflation-adjusting wages for classified staff
3. Return per-pupil funding to 2008 levels and reduce class sizes to 23:1
4. No new tax cuts until Arizona reaches the national average in per-pupil spending
5. Yearly raises until Arizona teacher salaries reach the national average
That's a lot to "demand" from this GOP-controlled Legislature and a Republican governor who has promised not to increase taxes and to cut them every year. So, how is the Arizona Education Association (the actual teachers' union) and Arizona Educators United (the ad hoc teachers' movement) going to convince the Legislature to at least meet them part way on these demands?
Closing the schools, of course, is the big lever they've pulled. It is affecting the state in myriad ways and will have a negative impact on our economy. But I'm not convinced the walkout pinches legislators as much as running out of paper, or whatever the 21st century equivalent is. And it's certainly no mousetrap. Those don't snap shut until election day, if then.
