About 45,000 Portland students out of class as union follows lead of UAW and WGA in action over pay and conditions
Roughly 45,000 students have been out of class in the Portland public school district since Wednesday, when the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) kicked off its first-ever strike, enlivening dozens of locations in the city with picket lines.
It’s the latest union action in a growing movement of US workers who are striking as a bargaining tool to secure higher wages and improvements in their working conditions.
After watching the United Auto Workers (UAW) achieve historic gains through striking, as well as UPS employees and the Writers Guild of America – and recent big wins for educator unions in the Los Angeles, Oakland and Fresno school districts – more and more teachers’ unions are feeling emboldened to try to better the situation of their members.
Among Portland teachers’ official demands are pay increases and improvements to school infrastructure, as well as more mental health specialists to support the growing number of kids in need.
“The most important thing I want is solid support for students with learning difficulties and special learning needs,” said Shelley Simonsen, a third-grade teacher and union member with more than 33 years of teaching experience. “I ultimately believe it’s more staff. It’s like going to work as the captain of a ship, but you don’t have any sailors to help you.”
The Portland teachers’ union has been on the verge of striking before, but its representatives say that seeing successful labor strikes elsewhere in the country, as well as a self-proclaimed “pro-union president” in the White House, motivated them to actually call one this November.
It’s definitely a historic moment for our union, but it feels like part of a larger movementJacque Dixon, Portland Association of Teachers“It feels like more than just a moment,” Jacque Dixon, vice-president of the PAT, said. “It’s definitely a historic moment for our union, but it feels like part of a larger movement.”
Dixon pointed to other unions that have recently gone on strike, such as the UAW and that of the local grocery chain New Seasons, for providing inspiration, and highlighted the nurses of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The SEIU, one of the largest unions in the US, recently helped roughly 75,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers negotiate a 21% wage hike after a three-day strike.
“Nurses and teachers have a lot in common in that we are a predominantly female workforce; we’re caretakers traditionally,” Dixon said. “And when we think about pay, and it’s a gendered profession … It makes you wonder – well, have they gotten away with not paying educators and nurses what they deserve for so long because it’s a predominantly female workforce? I do feel we have been taken advantage of for a long time.”
Simonsen, the third-grade teacher, also pointed to healthcare workers as motivation for the bravery required to walk out. “It was definitely inspiring to watch other unions come together and organize … nurses are like us, right? We’re walking away from the people that we care about the most,” Simonsen said.
“Workers, on the whole, are reluctant to strike because it’s actually pretty scary,” said Benjamin O’Donnell, an attorney specializing in labor law. “You see your bills keep coming, but your income stops. Sometimes you don’t get your job back. If you reach a certain point where it’s becoming untenable to do your job, then it starts to seem like striking is the only option left. And if you’re seeing other workers succeed at striking, maybe that makes you feel a bit more empowered – enough to try it.”
Cost-of-living pay increases are a key demand of the Portland teachers, who are asking for a roughly 20% pay rise over three years. The district is offering 10%. Still, it’s not just about the money.
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“The labor movement is not striking for higher pay,” Juscelino Colares, a business law expert and co-director of the Frederick K Cox International Law Center, said. “It is striking to keep up with the post-Covid bout of inflation and the cost of living.”
In addition to salary, much of the dialogue in Portland focuses on changes that will help teachers avoid long-term burnout and serve students better: more hands on deck, smaller class sizes, safer facilities – although most of these things do cost money the district says is not in the budget.
Parents have showed up on the picket lines to express their support and thousands of them have authored letters to the school board to support the teachers.
“I trust the teachers’ assessment of what today’s post-pandemic student needs far more than I do the district,” said Paulette Setzer, a mother of two Portland students. Setzer said she blames the school district for not budgeting with livable wages and reasonable class sizes in mind.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, the Portland public schools superintendent, Guadalupe Guerrero, said: “Funding has not kept pace with the needs of our students, nor our educators … Unlike a private organization, we don’t have record profits we can tap into.”
PAT representatives have argued that the school budget is higher than ever before, and the district is mismanaging its funds.
Neither party has yet been willing to give an estimate as to how long the strike will last.
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