Bill Honig, California's superintendent of public instruction, is one of education's best and brightest. When he originally ran for the office, I went to California to support his opponent, the incumbent Wilson Riles, and shortly after Honig was elected, I met him for the first time. He was bubbling over with ideas, checking to see if I had read some of the articles and books that he found exciting. And, on that first meeting and every one since then, he has always asked, "What are you reading now? Any new approaches?" That tells you something about the open-mindedness and vigor Honig has brought to his job.
But more than that, Honig has been good for education in California and in the entire U.S. because he's been out in front on so many important issues: He's insisted on good textbooks, developed a framework for teaching history and social studies and stood firm on the teaching of evolution. He's pioneered innovative tests and assessments, and he's fought for adequate state funding. So I was shocked and disappointed to find that he is sponsoring legislation (along with Assemblyman Jack O'Connell) that will ban strikes by teachers and school employees and create a new collective bargaining structure culminating in binding arbitration.
What bad timing! Just as Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and even the Soviet Union itself, are moving to adopt Western democratic values and institutions, California is about to take a step backward. Have we forgotten how we cheered Solidarity during its strikes? Or that when Gorbachev negotiated with striking miners - instead of punishing them - we felt assured about his commitment to reform? Surely one of the traits that distinguishes democratic societies from dictatorships of the left and the right is the existence of free trade unions whose workers have the right to withdraw their services as a way of settling differences about wages and conditions of employment.
Of course, the right to strike is not absolute. If a strike endangers public health and safety or creates a national emergency, some other way of settling the dispute may be called for. But except in such extraordinary circumstances, few democratic nations interfere with the bargaining process. This is good not only because it ensures employees' rights but also because collective bargaining, with or without a strike, leads to an agreement that both labor and management have accepted rather than to terms that have been imposed on both by an outside arbitrator or labor court.
Why the move for a strike ban in California? The courts already have power to enjoin a strike when, in the view of the court, the damage caused by the strike will be irreparable. So have there been lots of strikes by teachers and other school employees in the last five years? According to Assemblyman 0' Connell, "Last year a total of 7.2 million student classroom days were lost or disrupted in California due to teacher strikes. These lost days ... cause great disruption in the education of our children ... " The way Assemblyman O'Connell puts these figures, it sounds as though strikes result in students' spending more time on the streets than in school. In fact, there are very few long teacher or school employee strikes -- in California or elsewhere. Last year was unusual in the number of days lost, and almost all of them resulted from one strike, in the Los Angeles schools. But even with this strike, it seems that the time in school and the homework could have been made up. Did anyone try to reschedule lost days?
Superintendent Honig supports a strike ban and the new collective bargaining structure because "The current process is to confrontational, too lengthy and much too expensive. There are some districts where negotiations are carried out in the spirit of cooperation, but in too many cases the process itself encourages prolonged, rancorous bargaining, sometimes ending in strikes - but always damaging good will between teachers and administrators." All this is true, and that's why there are so few teacher strikes.
Bargaining can be long, difficult and even rancorous, but confrontation ends when both sides shake hands -- as they always do. Furthermore, banning strikes will no more eliminate bitterness and acrimony and adversarial relationships in California than banning strikes behind the Iron Curtain all those years created worker satisfaction and high productivity. And arbitration can be as expensive as regular collective bargaining -- as Superintendent Honig would find when he tallied up the bills for legal expenses and economic research that would be part of the arbitration process. It may be that providing an outlet for feelings of dissatisfaction is a better way of developing cooperative relationships over the long run than trying to suppress them.
Collective bargaining and the right to strike are precious rights in democratic societies around the world. As with freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press, there are rare occasions when some limits need to be imposed. But this must never be done lightly. And if Canada, Great Britain, France, Sweden and practically all other democratic countries on the face of the earth manage to survive without a strike ban, California ought to be able to do it, too.