Hidden Link

April 17, 2024

By Michael Jonas

State leaders have said they have no appetite for changing Massachusetts law to make it legal for public teachers to go on strike, but public opinion is more on the union side. In a new  CommonWealth Beacon/GBH News poll, 50 percent of state residents favor legalizing teachers’ strikes, while 34 percent said strikes should remain illegal, and 16 percent said they were unsure or did not answer (toplines, crosstabs). 

The survey, conducted by the MassINC Polling Group, comes on the heels of strikes in five Massachusetts school districts over the last two years. It is illegal for public sector employees to strike in the state, but that hasn’t stopped a wave of walkouts signaling a more militant posture on the part of teachers’ unions. The longest – and most recent – strike closed schools in Newton for two weeks in late January and early February. 

The poll results point to a strong degree of sympathy for teachers’ efforts to secure better pay and other changes, even if it means shutting down schools to get there. 

“Even though strikes are disruptive and inconvenient for families, the polling suggests people in Massachusetts recognize that the ability to strike is a primary point of leverage that teachers have,” said Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank. 

The push to change state law to legalize teachers’ strikes, which is being led by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, is taking place amid a surge of favorable public opinion toward organized labor. Since the 1930s, Gallup has polled Americans on the broad question of whether they approve or disapprove of unions. The approval rating hit 71 percent in Gallup’s 2022 poll and was 67 percent in 2023, levels not seen since the mid-1960s. 

Layered over that rise in sympathy for unions, said Michael Hartney, an associate professor of political science at Boston College, is the positive view many people hold of educators. “I think teachers are generally one of the professional groups that have a lot of latent trust among the public, maybe up there with physicians,” said Hartney, author of the 2022 book How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education. 

The poll, conducted among 1,002 Massachusetts residents from March 22 to March 29, showed a strong partisan divide on the issue, with 60 percent of Democrats supporting legalizing teachers’ strikes and 26 percent opposed, compared with 42 percent of Republicans who favor legalizing strikes and 44 percent who oppose such a change. There was also stronger support for changing the law among Black respondents (63 percent) and Latino residents (62 percent) than among Whites (48 percent) or Asians (41 percent). 

The widest demographic difference was by age, with 64 percent of those aged 18-29 in favor of making strikes legal compared with only 39 percent of those 60 and older, a 25-point swing. Among those 30 to 44, 55 percent support legalizing strikes and among those 45 to 59, 46 percent do so. 

Part of the explanation for the strong support for legalizing strikes among younger people is that, as a group, they skew more Democratic. But young people have also been hit hard by rising economic inequality, the high cost of housing, and have been part of a new union push, still in its infancy, in sectors ranging from Amazon warehouse workers to Starbucks baristas. 

While they have a much bigger presence in the public sector, unions represent only 10 percent of US workers today, half the rate of 40 years ago. Because of that steady decline, young people are “much less likely to have an uncle, an aunt, a parent – someone they know – who is in a union,” said Kahlenberg. “Union leaders feared that would translate into less sympathy for unions, but the economic conditions on the ground have shifted such that young people are rediscovering the importance of unions,” said Kahlenberg, author of a 2007 biography of Albert Shanker, a major figure in the US teachers’ union movement, who led the New York City teachers’ union and the national American Federal of Teachers from the 1960s to the 1990s. 

Kahlenberg said teachers’ unions have also effectively sought to link their grievances when they strike with issues parents care about, such as smaller class sizes or more guidance counselors. “Obviously, in the short term, it’s not great for kids who are out of schools, but the argument teachers will advance is, the working conditions of teachers are the learning conditions of children,” he said. 

How questions about teachers’ strikes are framed can have a big impact on poll results. 

Just over a year ago, in March 2023, MassINC Polling Group asked about teachers’ strikes in a statewide survey commissioned by Democrats for Education Reform. Using wording similar to the new CommonWealth Beacon/GBH News poll, it explained that some teachers unions have gone on strike recently despite it being illegal under state law. Asked whether they favor legislation that would make it legal for teachers to strike, 45 percent of respondents said yes, while 40 percent said strikes should remain illegal. 

A poll commissioned at the same time by Northwind Strategies, a Boston-based political consulting firm that generally works with left-leaning candidates and causes, found much stronger support for legalizing strikes when Massachusetts residents were asked whether they favor allowing teachers to strike “to fight for higher wages and improved working conditions.” When the question was posed with that language, 67 percent supported legalizing strikes and just 29 percent of respondents were opposed. 

The Democrats for Education Reform poll revealed considerable confusion about basic facts concerning the teacher strike issue. Fully one-third of respondents thought it was already legal for teachers to strike compared with 45 percent who correctly said it was illegal. 

While their unions are pushing legislation that would make it legal for teachers to strike, the  prospects for the bill seem dim. The Democratic troika that sets the agenda on Beacon Hill – Gov. Maura Healey, House Speaker Ron Mariano, and Senate President Karent Spilka – all oppose changing the law.

“I think there’s a pretty clear rationale for not allowing public sector unions to strike, because they play a key role in the provision of public services and interruption of those can be pretty disruptive,” said Marty West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and member of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. 

Paul Reville, a former state education secretary, said despite the fines handed out to striking teacher’s unions, the incentives not to engage in walkouts don’t appear to be strong enough to prevent them, and he thinks there will be more strikes in the future, even without a move to legalize them.

“Teachers have legitimate grievances and legitimate demands to be paid reasonably,” said Reville, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He said a new structure should be developed that “creates disincentives for school committees to drag the process out” in negotiating contracts and “at the same time, puts pressure on unions to bargain in good faith and not consider striking as an option.” Reville said such a system could involve a judge assigning an arbitrator to decide the terms of a new contract if no agreement is reached after a specified period of time. 

“It’s in the public interest to avoid these kinds of strikes,” he said. “So if we create a policy that, in effect, mandates that they come to the table to settle or, if they can’t, turns over that power to an arbitrator, that would be best.”