The 1978 Strike

On the first day of school on September 6, 1978, only 36 of Bridgeport’s 1,247 teachers went to work. Despite the fact that striking was illegal for public sector workers in the state of Connecticut, Bridgeport teachers were hardly the first to take this step. In the decade prior, more than fifty teachers’ strikes had kicked off across the state. During this same time, teachers and other public sector workers across the country were walking off the job in illegal strikes, taking part in widespread rank-and-file rebellions that eventually won collective bargaining rights for public workers.

Connecticut teachers struck even knowing their actions could have tremendous legal repercussions. Bridgeport educators, facing poor working conditions including large class sizes, a severe lack of funding, and one of the lowest average wages among teachers in the state, chose to strike in the hopes of securing concessions from the school board. But the city’s response to this strike was extreme — and shaped labor relations with teachers in the state for the next four decades.

After a week of striking, the union officers were the first to be incarcerated on the orders of a State Superior Court judge, with these thirteen teachers “strip-searched and sprayed with a delousing compound” after being brought in. They were also ordered to pay a $350 fine per day, in addition to a fine of $10,000 a day levied on the teachers’ union.

Bernice Freeman, a young teacher still living with her parents, received a letter in the mail telling her that she would be fired and demanding that she appear in court after she spent a few days walking the line. Her parents couldn’t believe that their next-door neighbor, Mayor John Mandanici, would have their daughter arrested. In an interview with CTPost, Freeman recalls the day she was taken to court: “They dragged us down the back of the courthouse handcuffed to take us to the van. I remember crying and one of the teachers, Jack Curry, saying: ‘Don’t let them see you cry.’”

By the end of the strike, nearly 300 teachers would be imprisoned. Camp Hartell, a National Guard camp in Windsor Locks, was converted into a prison camp and filled to capacity with striking educators. Many of them were brought over in school buses. One teacher recalls the experience as being “degrading,” as she was brought before the judge and told “what terrible people we were and what a terrible example we were setting for the children.” Another remembers that he was threatened with “real prison” if he broke the rules at Camp Hartell.

As Camp Hartell began to fill however, the city of Bridgeport was confronted with a new problem; they were running out of space to imprison people. And the arrests had only succeeded in sparking more anger among teachers in Bridgeport and across the state.

The picket lines grew in size, and teachers from other districts expressed their solidarity with the imprisoned teachers by demonstrating outside of Camp Hartell. Some teachers speculate that this is the reason why the school board eventually sought a deal with the union. Others suggest that a contributing factor may have been the fact that the mayor’s daughter, who was herself one of the striking educators, was on the next list of teachers to arrest.

Ultimately, everyone wanted the conflict resolved. Teachers were dissatisfied with their lack of legal avenues for dissent. Union officials argued that the state’s ban on striking actually encouraged strikes, as school boards had no incentive to listen to teachers’ demands. The school board and teachers agreed to have the matter settled through binding arbitration. One year after the strike, Connecticut passed its binding arbitration law.

Union leaders, including the current president of the Bridgeport Education Association (BEA), Gary Peluchette, have framed the passage of this law as a victory for labor rights. They often point to the fact that there hasn’t been a strike conducted by educators in the state of Connecticut during the forty years following the law’s passage. Academic research does confirm that laws protecting the right to compulsory arbitration significantly reduce the probability of public sector strikes.

But this isn’t a good thing. The absence of strikes does not imply better working conditions for teachers or greater teacher satisfaction — much evidence actually points to the contrary.

According to one Bridgeport teacher in an article written in response to the Janus Supreme Court case, Bridgeport teachers remain underpaid even in comparison with their colleagues in other parts of the state, while schools remain underfunded and understaffed. In the rest of the state, only 46 percent of teachers feel that their union reflects their opinions. One retired teacher slammed the Connecticut Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers for not having “half the backbone” of the other state employees’ unions when negotiating pensions.

Many teachers were also dissatisfied when the CEA and AFT chose to endorse Malloy for governor in 2014, after Malloy had chosen the co-founder of a network of charter schools as his education commissioner for his first term in 2010. This decision to endorse Malloy was made by the union board just two weeks after the union’s political committee voted against endorsing any candidate. A disconnect has arisen between rank-and-file union members and union leadership in the state — which may be exacerbated by the implementation of compulsory binding arbitration following the Bridgeport strike.

Arbitration Rights

Union leadership defends these arbitration rights. When compared to states with so-called “right to work” legislation, Connecticut unions are certainly far more successful at maintaining union membership levels. In 2019, Connecticut’s unionization rate sat at 15.9 percent, nearly six points above the national average and nearly triple the rate in right-to-work states. There is also little evidence to suggest that arbitration favors the school board over the teachers, as a study conducted by the Connecticut Education Association (CEA) over a ten-year period found that “final decisions were split nearly evenly between school board and teacher union proposals.” Arbitration was also used sparingly, and the vast majority of teachers’ contract negotiations never reached arbitration committees.

The heart of the problem is that mandatory arbitration attempts to foreclose militant action by teachers and instead privileges forms of unionism that don’t build rank-and-file power. Arbitration best suits a top-down style of unionism, as the union leadership is responsible for the only acceptable means of negotiation with the school board. Often referred to as “business unionism,” this approach rejects transformational, militant union strategies in favor of cozying up to bosses, with differences worked out through negotiation between those bosses and union staff. Beyond paying the dues that fund those union staffers’ salaries, rank-and-file members don’t have much of a role in this model. This is the direction much of the labor movement has gone over the past half-century — with disastrous results.

The flaws of this style of unionism are perhaps best exemplified through how it has shifted perspectives on the purpose of strikes. In an interview about the legacy of the 1978 Bridgeport strike and the impact of the arbitration law, BEA President Gary Peluchette framed the absence of strikes from teachers in Connecticut as a positive, proudly pointing to the fact that “[Connecticut’s] schools have been open and running 40 years [without a strike].” Peluchette’s statement implies that strikes are unnecessarily disruptive — a perspective that rejects the strike as a critical source of power for workers.

Peluchette’s aversion to strikes suggests that negotiation is a superior method that guarantees better results for teachers. This is false. Connecticut’s schools remain overcrowded and severely underfunded. A recent report from the CEA documents sickening conditions in schools, with health concerns such rodent infestations and soaring temperatures recorded in 334 schools across the state. Bridgeport schools were at least able to afford air conditioners, though they could not afford to actually have them installed. Schools in Bridgeport and other cities suffer from declining graduation rates, exacerbated by the state’s large achievement gap between wealthy and poor students and de facto racial segregation.

Connecticut’s arbitration law has failed to combat these issues, many of which are shared by school districts across the country. Under the law as it currently stands, the school board, teachers’ union, and State Department of Education each select a mediator to serve on the arbitration committee. However, only the school board also has the right to reject this first round of arbitration and bring the negotiations to a second round, run entirely by the Department of Education’s mediators, due to a revision made to the original law in 1992. Arbitration is both compulsory and binding, meaning that the school board and union must submit to arbitration when negotiations break down, and the results of the arbitration must be followed by both parties. The law has been heavily revised, and many of those revisions favor the school board in negotiations. Activist Andy Piascik notes that “changes to the law … have weakened the bargaining position of teachers,” all while strikes have remained illegal for teachers in the state.

The 1978 teachers’ strike in Bridgeport fundamentally changed the face of public teacher unionism in Connecticut. It marked the end of radical, democratic organizing by teachers and firmly entrenched a far more moderate form of top-down leadership. Teachers today are still forced to endure cuts by their school board. Rather than signal union strength, the absence of strikes in Connecticut has actually weakened teachers’ unions by severely restricting the methods they can use to achieve their goals and ultimately discouraging rank-and-file teachers from participating in their unions.

Arbitration has legally entrenched this form of unionism, which prefers ineffective mediation to rank-and-file organizing. In Connecticut, this has produced a troubling situation: teachers still face inadequate working conditions and pay, many union members are dissatisfied with their leadership, and strikes have become nonexistent. For the labor movement as a whole, business unionism has decimated union membership and erased the wage and benefit gains it had once been able to secure.

The Role of the Strike

Contrast this with the results of the recent strikes in states like West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Colorado. While business unionism has delivered nothing but concessions and declining union membership, these strikes were remarkably successful in delivering tangible improvements for teachers. Even though some of these strikes failed, they still contributed to a monumental shift in public opinion regarding unions and aided in combating decades-old Republican-led smear campaigns. Most importantly, they provided an opportunity for rank-and-file workers to exercise their power and to build solidarity.

The example set by Chicago teachers in 2012 presents an alternative future for the labor movement, as teachers proved that organizing for strikes can increase participation in union activities and build union strength, while educators in West Virginia and Arizona demonstrated how strikes themselves can serve as vital tools in energizing and radicalizing union members. It was through collective action that mass numbers of teachers in these states directly exercised their own power. The last two years have shown that such struggles are won through what Eric Blanc describes as “the self-activity of countless workers combined with the conscious interventions of experienced organizers.” The best means for change are those that encourage such active participation among the rank and file. Mandatory arbitration cannot achieve this.

If teachers in Connecticut want to make a serious change in their working conditions, combat the state’s racial segregation in the classroom, and build up the strength of their unions, they must look beyond the meager guarantees of arbitration. Strikes may still be illegal in Connecticut, but they are illegal in West Virginia too. Teachers in West Virginia understood the weaknesses of business unionism, and turned to the tool of the strike at the moment when the labor movement needed it most. With the conditions faced by teachers in many Connecticut schools, now may be the time for teachers to turn back to that tool.