For teachers, a strike is a last resort, a tactic to use when it seems that nothing else will bring management to make a good-faith attempt to bargain. Teachers strike when all other avenues have been exhausted, and nobody welcomes a strike. A strike is disruptive, a strike often tears apart a community, and in thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia, it’s illegal.
But do strikes work? A new working paper seeks to answer that question.
In “The Causes and Consequences of U.S. Teacher Strikes” from the National Bureau of Economic Research, authors Melissa Arnold Lyon (SUNY Albany), Matthew A. Kraft (Brown University), and Matthew P. Steinberg (Accelerate) “revisit the question of how strikes affect wages, working conditions, and productivity in the context of the U.S. K-12 public education sector.”
Their research is unprecedented. Since the 1980s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has only tracked large scale strikes, so these researchers had to assemble their own data base (with seven research assistants) including the review of roughly 90,000 news articles. They collected 772 teacher strikes from 610 districts in 27 states from 2007 to 2023. Those included legal and illegal strikes, coordinated between locals, individual, wildcat (a strike without union authorization), and sick-outs.
The researchers found that strikes happen more frequently in conservative states that are “less friendly” to unions, with three quarters of striking districts located in states in which strikes are illegal. Strikes were also frequent in states will lower relative level of membership in NEA.
Strikes were most often about compensation, and the researchers find that the strikes did produce positive effects, with pay increases following in the post-strike years, regardless of the length of the contract agreement.