When teachers strike, they do so not because they want to be paid more than their peers but because they care deeply for their students and their communities. They know that if their students don’t have to sleep in cars or on the streets, if their teachers can afford to live in the communities where they work and aren’t selling their blood plasma for a living, and if they can hire social workers, classroom aides, and school psychologists, their lives and education will be better.
While teacher strikes are relatively rare, they have become a hallmark of the Red for Ed movement. Educators in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Colorado, among others, have taken to the picket lines and demonstrated that they are willing to sacrifice their pay for the sake of their students’ lives. Moreover, the teachers’ unions that organize these strikes often have a variety of other bargaining tactics in their arsenals.
It is important to understand why these educators feel that the only viable means of achieving their objectives is through a high-intensity, low-probability tactic like a strike. But this success also highlights the risks of reliance on this tactic and a failure to expand unions’ repertoire of direct-action tactics to include other, more low-intensity, less risky strategies. Ultimately, it is essential that we learn more about how to make strikes both more effective and less volatile. This requires understanding the conditions that make teachers willing to take such risks, which will allow us to determine how we can bolster their power and impact.
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