On January 19, 2024, teachers went on strike in the Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts. Before their union came to the decision to strike—with 98 percent of members voting in favor—it spent 10 months negotiating new contracts with the city to no avail. By striking, the teachers hoped to secure pay increases on par with hikes in Newton’s cost of living, especially for classroom aides. They also demanded social workers in every school, describing them as essential to students’ mental well-being, particularly after the pandemic. Furthermore, in fiscal year 2024, the school district’s budget was cut by nearly $4 million, even as the city held nearly $29 million in surplus.
By February 2, the strike ended, with teachers having successfully secured many of their goals. Troublingly, however, the city’s children had missed 11 days of school, and their parents had been forced to scramble to adjust their schedules. Anger over the economic harm of such a lengthy strike has sparked debates in the community on whether teachers, and public sector employees as a whole, should strike at all. While there are strong arguments against public sector strikes, organizing to withhold labor remains one of the few means employees have to reclaim power and advocate for their needs. The right of teachers to strike must be safeguarded.
The strike divided Newton families over who bore the brunt of the blame. Parents groups released an open letter blaming Mayor Ruthanne Fuller’s budget cuts for the strike. In it, they explained, “We worry that [Mayor Fuller] is out of touch with the reality of our public schools. Our trust in her has eroded every time she’s chosen not to prioritize our children.” Others, conversely, blamed the teachers’ union for delaying negotiations. A group of parents filed a class-action lawsuit against the union, claiming that it “chose its illegal strike and chose to bear the costs of contempt of court to keep striking to drive parents to a point of desperation: ‘Pay them whatever they want, just get my kid back in school.’ That was willful, wanton, and wrong.”
Teachers’ strikes are technically illegal in Massachusetts, but teachers in the state often withhold labor anyway in contempt of court. For breaking the law, the Newton union will pay $625,000 in fines to both the city and state—the fine total increased every day the strike went on. In response to the strike, Massachusetts lawmakers have proposed legislation to allow public sector employees, except those working in public safety, to strike after six months of negotiations have passed. This legislation has stalled.
Public sector strikes in the United States were common in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1968, for instance, sanitation workers went on strike in New York, leading to pileups of garbage around the city. In 1975, as many as 55,000 state, county, and municipal employees struck for higher wages. These norms changed in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, a disciplinary action virtually unheard of in years prior. His decision created nationwide hostility toward public sector strikes—hostility that has continued into the present.
There are many legitimate arguments used to justify this enmity. Public sector workers provide essential services, from education to air traffic control to emergency response. Unlike in the private sector, customers cannot switch services easily: A parent cannot move their child to another school as simply as they can start shopping at another grocery store. When teachers strike, students and families suffer. Further, public sector employees have access to unique channels for negotiation, like lobbying for government policies to increase their pay. Other arguments contend that public sector employees have a civic duty to provide services and that such duty should be prioritized over their private interests. From that perspective, striking represents a breach of public trust.
Engaging with these arguments more deeply, however, reveals their fragility. Although a teacher strike hurts the public in the short term, long-term school underfunding hurts it more. Which is worse for a student: Missing school for 11 days or attending a decrepit school with underpaid teachers for 12 years? Teacher strikes ultimately serve, not hurt, the public interest. Additionally, in employer-employee relationships, the employer typically holds the majority of power. Striking remains the most powerful tool unions have to secure victories for their workers, including teachers.
Admittedly, striking can be dangerous in certain portions of the public sector, such as police and fire departments. These workers should arguably never strike and instead use other avenues for self-advocacy. To pull another example from Massachusetts history, in 1919 Boston police officers went on strike, and riots and robberies quickly followed. (Like the air traffic controller strike 62 years later, this strike was busted by another famously pro-business Republican: then-governor Calvin Coolidge.) However, there is a bright line between safety and non-safety workers—teachers and sanitation workers are not the same as police officers and firefighters.
In Newton, striking was certainly the union’s last resort; alternate avenues for negotiation had failed teachers repeatedly. Contract negotiations had taken place behind the scenes for almost a year beforehand, and policies that would have raised school budgets by increasing property taxes had been rejected by voters. Contrary to the idea that teachers had incentives to “hold children’s education hostage” to stall negotiations, the union faced increased fines every day the strike went on. If anything, it was in the school committee’s interest to stall.
So why do so many observers default to blaming the teachers, and not the school committee, for drawing out negotiations? Precedents like Reagan’s strike crackdown have normalized anti-union sentiments, making it easy to paint unions as greedy and indifferent to the public good. These misrepresentations fail to consider the fact that teachers serve the public and therefore care what the public thinks of them. When parents are convinced that teachers don’t have students’ best interests in mind, it impacts their ability to do their jobs well.
Most of all, the illegality of teacher strikes allows opponents to claim the moral high ground. One observer in the Boston Globe argued, “Newton educators are teaching their students that breaking the law and thumbing one’s nose at a judge’s order are OK—if it is in your self-interest.” Never mind that a primary strike demand was to secure mental health support for students and that the union was willing to incur hefty fines to that end. On the contrary, Newton educators are teaching their students the importance of standing up for themselves and others.
What would it look like if employers faced the heat? Let’s flip the argument about civic duty: Even more than their employees, public sector employers like school committees bear the primary responsibility for providing public services. Employers should, by default, be held accountable for failing to successfully negotiate with their employees, as this failure impedes their duty to deliver services to the public.
To shift the burden onto employers, Newton voters must hold their city officials accountable at the voting booth. They can also support teachers by legalizing the right to strike. Ultimately, witnessing the teacher strike will provide students with a better civics lesson than any day in the classroom could.