A seat at the table

Throughout NYSUT’s history, negotiations have reflected the times and evolving priorities. Locals’ initial contracts in the 1970s focused on bedrock issues such as salary improvements, job protection and health insurance. Grievance procedures might be detailed in a second contract and binding arbitration clauses in the third. 

Collective bargaining has come a long way in the decades since public employees gained this essential right in New York state.

Benefits also evolved. For example, United University Professions, representing faculty and professional staff at SUNY, negotiated some firsts for public employees, including flexible spending accounts and exchange of sick days. In the 2000s, family leave provisions were often on the table.

Over the last quarter century, local unions increasingly negotiated professional concerns such as shared decision-making, planning periods and curtailing assignments like lunch duty. When the “test-and-punish” era erupted, collective bargaining proved essential in defending teachers’ livelihoods and students’ well-being from the most egregious consequences of a disastrous state-imposed evaluation process that tied student standardized test scores to teacher ratings.

On behalf of students, locals have negotiated issues of class size and safety and essentials such as counseling, physical education, art, music and library. Student-centered programs proliferated in contracts, such as Sewanhaka FT’s bargaining to achieve an “extra help” period for students and a Saturday program for English language learners negotiated by the Copiague TA. Union leaders at community colleges used negotiations to explore strategies for improving student retention. 

The Ithaca TA, Ithaca Substitutes Association and Education Support Professionals/Ithaca joined forces in 2022 to negotiate better pay and benefits for substitute teachers and school-related professionals who temporarily fill teaching positions. Their collaboration improved compensation for those filling in, and benefitted the community with an innovative, albeit interim fix, to a scarcity of teachers. 

The contrast with what went before is stark. Before 1966, teacher activists typically might attend a local school board meeting to appeal for better pay and working conditions. Often they would be relegated to stand at the back of the room — there was no seat at the table for teachers. Without leverage, their polite requests were often ignored. Teachers were similarly shut out of decisions on educational issues.

Back then, before they could legally bargain — rather than beg — on behalf of members, the local association first had to negotiate that specific right with employers who lacked any incentive to level the playing field. Through the mid-sixties, contracts upstate were achieved piecemeal and with difficulty.

Downstate was another story. Willing to strike despite heavy penalties and with the benefit of numbers, the UFT in 1961 won for New York City teachers the right to bargain collectively; the resulting contracts would inspire teachers statewide. 

New York City in the sixties was such a hotbed of union action that it led to a major win for labor statewide. Provoked to the breaking point by a crippling transit workers’ strike, state leaders enacted the 1966 Public Employees Fair Employment Act, commonly known as the Taylor Law, “to minimize disruption of public services from strikes while safeguarding the rights of public employees.”

The landmark Taylor Law was transformative. It granted all public employees, including teachers, the right to unionize and engage in collective bargaining. No longer did that right depend on the largesse of employers, who were required with the advent of the Taylor Law to bargain “in good faith” with public employee unions.

NYSUT came of age in an era shaped by the Taylor Law. The union built a statewide network of expert labor relations representatives, backed by a renowned legal department, to help organize locals and support them in bargaining. In the decades to follow, NYSUT steadily expanded its strategic support, providing forensic budget analysis, community polling, and help with communications and media campaigns. No longer were employers the only party in negotiations with facts and figures at their fingertips. 

With the power of collective bargaining, NYSUT has helped local unions negotiate thousands of contracts over the last half century — delivering well-deserved improvements in pay and benefits for members and, at the same time, strengthening public education and health care.

While conditions have consistently improved from the days of “collective begging,” union gains are never “won and done.” Political and economic forces reignited debilitating battles that early NYSUT activists believed had been put to rest years ago. In 2011, coordinated big bucks campaigns by anti-union activists led to union rights being gutted in many states. “If it can happen here,” an embattled Wisconsin teacher said then in a message to NYSUT delegates, “it can happen anywhere.” Wisconsin public employees lost the right to bargain collectively and saw 6 percent salary cuts unilaterally imposed by state leaders.

NYSUT’s unprecedented member-to-member outreach in the run-up to the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision highlighted the post-union nightmare in Wisconsin as a cautionary tale. The right to collective bargaining is not, and never was, a given. Through their sacrifices, union pioneers ensured that rights to organize and collectively bargain are enshrined in New York state law.

Through eternal vigilance, we must keep it that way.