By: A Betrayed Educator

It’s hard to think of words more meaningless than what labor lawyers, the NLRB, and union staffers like to call the “mediation process” and “unfair labor practices”. What’s even worse is that the fact these phrases mean nothing in practice is basically an open secret among those already ‘in the know’, even while those same “leaders” and “organizers” continue to try and trick normal everyday workers into following along with them. As someone who came in cynical and suspicious about the whole mediation process, even I was surprised by just how one-sided and fake the whole thing was.

We were three or four sessions deep into our mediation with the district and they had just told us for the millionth time in a row to, in so many words, ‘go fuck ourselves.’ Negotiations had been going on for a year and half now, and people were exhausted. After membership felt betrayed by our last president because he had so quickly capitulated and gave up during our previous contract fight, I and a set of more “militant” teachers had been elected to our local’s executive board. This time around we built committees of normal rank-and-file educators in each building to drive the campaign, held rallies in town, organized stand-outs outside buildings, and started to forge alliances with local parents and students who supported us.

We had played by the standard “militant rank-and-file union” playbook, and looking back, I would say that playbook had doomed us from the start. Our union staffers called this strategy an “escalating campaign”, and Labor Notes will even sell you a book for $15 called Secrets of a Successful Organizer explaining the whole process.

But now, despite our “escalating campaign”, negotiations had stalled, and the question now was whether or not to mobilize the membership to strike or not. Most of the new executive board had started the year off in favor of that plan, but now a few key leaders in some of our buildings had either resigned, moved districts, early retired, or been fired mid-year, and the general feeling was the union was weaker organizationally now than it had been a few months ago in the middle of our “escalation campaign.”

After our last dead-end session, we moved to a separate room now with just our bargaining team, our union organizer, and the LRB lawyer appointed to “mediate” our conflict with our bosses, the district administration. The LRB lawyer laid out the options for how things would continue from here: “mediation fails whenever one side in unwilling to compromise,” she said. “If the district won’t budge, no matter how justified your demands are, unless you want to go to fact-finding, it looks like you’re going to have to accept what they’re offering or start the whole bargaining process all over again.”

“What’s fact-finding?” another teacher on our bargaining team asked. The lawyer replied, “in fact-finding basically we take a few months to study the problems both parties have, and then we’ll send you and the district a suggested resolution to the contract negotiations, but almost no one ever goes to fact-finding because everything is non-binding.”

“What do you mean ‘non-binding’? So even if the district commits unfair labor practice after unfair labor practice, and refuses to compromise with us, to bargain in good faith, the NLRB can’t do anything about it?!” the teacher angrily said. After a pause, the lawyer responded: “The NLRB is not a legal court. Basically the best we can do is issue statements, but we aren’t really allowed to penalize employers.”

There was an angry silence, and then our union organizer spoke: “Just to give my two cents, I think, given all of our options, it makes the most sense to sign and get what we can now. We fought a good fight, and the next contract fight we can come at them even harder and make sure we get everything you all want out, but it looks like that isn’t possible now.”

The room was split. There were a few of us who felt that to give in now was a betrayal of the educators we were elected to lead, and a betrayal of the last year and a half of fighting. We said that the only way out of this was to try and escalate our takes and prepare a strike. Our union-appointed field organizer made it clear they wouldn’t support us on that, because teacher strikes are illegal in our state and he felt our local “didn’t have the resources to make it work.” He made obvious what we all should have known would have happened when push came to shove. The reality was that our district was working-class, messy, and under-funded, and did not bring in the same amount of dues money to the NEA that the districts that had been going on strike the last few years had been. Those wealthy suburban districts had received plenty of NEA strike support, and the NEA also had spent tens of millions of dollars on electoral campaigns and “lobbying” in the meantime as well.

Others, who maybe would have been won to our line earlier on, were so tired and demoralized by the whole process that the only option they could think of was to give up and move on. The pro-concession camp argued that we had moved the district’s position significantly from where they had originally started, which was true, but they had purposefully low-balled us by proposing massive cuts, so we had barely actually gained anything either. All this despite nearly two decades of wage stagnation and contract losses.

The LRB mediator’s sudden admission, after three months, that this whole process was basically set up to screw over workers had demoralized a couple previously energetic and combative teachers. With their implicit surrender to the union organizer and his supporters on the bargaining team, the pro-concession camp won enough people on the team to ensure the district’s last offer would be sent back to the members and sold as “the best we could get.”

We had been elected by our fellow co-workers who were tired of being betrayed, but that was not enough. We had wasted our rebellious energy on seemingly endless rallies, standouts, and practice pickets, that according to our union staffers were supposed to build towards “bigger” “more direct” actions. But then when the time came to put our dues money where their mouth was, all of a sudden a strike was out of the question and we were on our own. All of sudden we were going to have to pay the tens of thousands in fines (in our state it is illegal for public school teachers to strike) that would come with a strike all on our own, from money which we did not have but they did.

Other teachers and I had originally been convinced to go along with mediation as a way to buy for time and allow us space to prepare for the “big actions” that were supposed to come at the end of our escalated contract campaign. I naively thought we were taking advantage of the system, but looking back, I now realize we were actually the ones being softened up and prepared for defeat by the actual ones in charge: the NLRB, the district, and the state union officials assigned to manage our working-class local.