Public Education Matters

Various student voices 0:08
Public education matters. Public education matters. Public education matters.

Speaker 1 0:15
This is Public Education Matters brought to you by the Ohio Education Association.

Katie Olmsted 0:26
Welcome back to Public Education Matters. I'm Katie Olmsted, and I'm part of the communications team for the Ohio Education Association and its nearly 120,000 members across the state. Those educators work hard to ensure our students receive the best education possible, and they have the power and influence to do it, in large part, because of the power of their collective bargaining agreements. Public employees' lives were very different before Ohio's collective bargaining law took effect in 1984. A quick history lesson: In 1947 the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that public entities couldn't delegate authority to another entity, essentially banning unions from having any real function under what was known as the Hagerman decision. That same year, the Ferguson Act of 1947 banned public employees from striking and allowed discipline, including termination for anyone who participated in a strike. And participating in an illegal so called wildcat strike could land a public employee in jail, as many Ohio educators knew the hard way right up until Governor Richard Celeste signed Ohio's collective bargaining law in 1983, with the law taking effect the following spring. Bill Lavezzi saw the impact of that law firsthand. The Ohio Education Association-Retired member and former NEOEA Executive Director started teaching English at Warrensville Heights High School in the early 1970s, right around the time that NEA and OEA were really starting to become the organizations they are today. And he served on the local negotiating team before a time when the agreements they were negotiating really held any weight. He also negotiated contracts as a teacher in Aurora City schools, pre- and post- collective bargaining being legally protected in Ohio. Bill sat down with us to share his story. And yes, this story is a little longer than most of the episodes of the season, but I promise it is an interesting one. So sit back, relax and take a listen.

Bill Lavezzi, thank you so much for sitting down with us to share your memories. Let's start at the beginning for you. You started teaching in Ohio in the early 1970s before the collective bargaining law took effect in 1984. Tell me a little bit about what that was like.

Bill Lavezzi 2:58
Well, it was an interesting time. I attended a small Jesuit College in suburban Cleveland called John Carroll University, and one of our leading education professors was Father Owens. Father Owens was well known for his stringent teaching style, but he also said something that I found many other students heard while they were in those same advanced education classes, advanced undergraduate education classes, and that was he said, whatever professional organization you have an opportunity to belong to, whether it's in a public school or, in many cases, a Catholic school, or whether it would be in the NEA or in the aft, you should join the professional organizations. And I've talked to a number of former students of his who remembered that particular line and who took it to heart and became union leaders, partly because of his influence. Like a lot of students at that type of school, I wound up working in a public school. My first job was at the Warrensville Heights High School, which was about four miles south of John Carroll. And I was pleased to have the job and happy to have it. And the notable thing about teaching at that particular school, at least from my perception, was that the teachers were fairly unhappy. And they were unhappy not so much because of the salary that they were being paid, and not so much because of the sick leave or the hospitalization or any of the other typical bargaining issues. They were unhappy to a great degree because they felt that they were not being listened to by the administration, and in fact, many of them felt threatened if they raised a voice about the administration. And so there was a kind of a repressive atmosphere within that particular school district. And I was one of a number of fairly young association leaders in that local who were trying to ease up the sense of participation in the school district and to give more of the teachers in the school district an opportunity to say what they thought needed to be improved and needed to be changed.

Katie Olmsted 5:20
But at that time, just to be clear, under the Hagerman decision, you didn't really have a lot of power. I believe it was 1975, there was the Dayton Classroom Teachers Association Supreme Court decision that reversed part of the Hagerman decision, making some of those collective bargaining agreements more binding. But that was that was in '75. Before that nothing, there was zero power for the unions in Ohio. And post that, there were still a lot of consequences for standing together as a union. You could go to jail.

Bill Lavezzi 5:54
Well, I'll tell you my story about that. So in my I believe I negotiated my first contract in 1975-76 in that school district. So I was, this was my fifth year of teaching, and I did not have a continuing contract. In fact, I think under the rules of that school district, I couldn't have a continuing contract. But I jumped in with both feet and participated on a negotiating team. It's very interesting to contrast the negotiations I participated in later with the negotiations that I participated in earlier. I didn't know about the Dayton decision in 1975. I may have benefited from it, but nobody mentioned it to me. What I knew was this, that we negotiated with a board team and we called it negotiations. The board team did not. They referred to it as professional consultation. We referred to the document that we were working on as a contract. The board team did not. They called it a set of amendments to the board policies. So we were, at least according to their terminology, we were negotiating for the board to enact changes to the board policy that we would agree upon, and among those policies were compensation and leave and supplemental contracts and some of the things that still form part of negotiations today. The first contract I remember seeing was seven pages long, and we negotiated for a long time, and we were negotiating, I think, fairly strongly. We were playing a stronger hand than we really had. I learned a pinochle expression. What is it? Play like you got them and we didn't really had them, but we played like we had them. And so we we were flexing our muscles a little bit during these negotiations. And I can tell you just a couple of incidents from it, so at those negotiations - So this is again, it's probably later in the school - probably '76 - and the board believed that they had submitted what they called a fair and equitable solution to the to the policies, and we didn't believe it was fair and equitable. We were very sure that it wasn't what our members were looking for, and we knew that because some of my negotiators and I'd gone around to the various buildings and talked directly with the members about that, so they asked, they said, we believe this is a fair and equitable solution. If you, if you propose this agreement to your members. We believe your members will accept it. So in my newness to this situation, I went to a meeting of the membership and presented the results of that negotiation to the membership and presented it to them without a recommendation. I didn't know that then, that if you present something without a recommendation, you pretty much made your recommendation. But we really were trying to put this in the hands of the members and let the members remember this is when this was this is 75-76 we we were in, I believe, our first year of having a UniServ consultant. He had not participated at the negotiating table because the board wouldn't allow him there. So we were just, for the first time, using an OEA consultant as a as really, as a consultant. So I went to the meeting and I laid the process out, I thought, fairly, to the members. The members overwhelmingly rejected it. We went back to the negotiating table, and the chief negotiator for the other side said, you spoiled that proposal. You deliberately sabotage that proposal. I heard from some of your members, what you said. And I said, Wait a minute, we're not going to talk about what I told to my members. What I told my members is none of your business, and I'm not going to describe what you said to your members. I am going to tell you that I get presented it fairly, and I believe that that's an honest appraisal of how it was presented. He said I heard from some of your members, and I said, I don't want to hear what you heard from some of my members. That's not going to be part of our discussion. This is me. I'm talking to somebody who's easily old enough to be my parents, and kind of shaking in my boots. And he said I heard one more time, and my entire team got up and walked out the room. We eventually went back into the room. We eventually got a solution, but that was excessively for the time. That was excessively militant action. We did not promise or threaten the strike at that time. We didn't do anything like that. The following year, the following year, Warrensville had a process practice at the time of putting a lot of its hirings into one levy. So they had a lot of school districts would have about, let's say, 1/3 of their levy money coming up one year, 1/3 coming up a couple years later, 1/3 coming up couple years later. Warrensville was in the practice of having most of their money in one levy, and it was coming up in spring of '77 and just before the deadline for non renewing teachers, they non renewed approximately 1/3 of my staff.

Katie Olmsted 5:55
Whoa.

Bill Lavezzi 11:46
We were never able to get an explanation for how it was that they decided who would be non renewed in those days, the school district did not need to give reasons for non renewing, untenured staff that included myself. They didn't have to give us a reason, but we could look at the list, and we could see that of the 1/3 who were going it included almost my entire negotiating team from the year before. I was by this time, the local president, and it included most of my executive committee from that particular year. We were pretty sure that what we were seeing was a reprisal. We threatened to strike. A strike would have been illegal. We did all the things you do to lead up to a strike. We did informational picketing at board meetings. We spoke to the press. We talked to individual members of the Board of Education whenever we could get them to listen to us. We talked to community leaders whenever we could get them to listen to us. And as it happened, we - my president-elect and I - we had a system at that time where the President serves for a year and the President Elect serves for a year after - so my president-elect and I met with the superintendent, and we eventually worked out a solution, and under that solution, we got contracts back, promised back for I think it was 70 of our 72 members. The two of the 72 members who did not get contracts promised as part of that agreement were myself and my president-elect.

Katie Olmsted 13:17
Wow.

Bill Lavezzi 13:18
The promise was that if the levy passed, those 70 would be rehired. We thought that was good enough. We figured we would rely on the good graces of the board and of the superintendent when the summer came around,levy passed, the summer came around, all the other members of my local who had been non renewed, were rehired. But not my president-elect and myself. So there was that was a reprisal. There was nothing you could do about a reprisal in those days. There was no nothing in the law that prevented a reprisal. What we did do, however, we did this with the assistance of the Ohio Education Association and the new legal protection plan that was available because the unification had taken place between locals and NEOEA and which was at that time called NEOTA and OEA and NEA, they were able to provide us with a lawyer, a fairly highly visible lawyer in the Cleveland community, and that lawyer was able to bring a federal lawsuit for infringement of our right of free speech, which my president elect and I were able to settle out of court for a sum of money that was at the time, seemed enough to make it worthwhile. We were not rehired. My president-elect wound up working in another school district. I wound up working in another school district. The other school district knew about my history and hired me anyway, so they didn't hold that against me when they hired me, which I give them a lot of credit for and a lot of respect for.

Katie Olmsted 15:01
And then working in that other school district that was Aurora City schools.

Bill Lavezzi 15:05
yes.

Katie Olmsted 15:06
You were there when collective bargaining became the law of the land and ended up negotiating contracts after that. How was that experience so different?

Bill Lavezzi 15:17
I was in Aurora for less than a full year when we were on strike

Katie Olmsted 15:22
Wow

Bill Lavezzi 15:22
for five weeks. There were a lot of strikes in those days. Brunswick was about that time, Ravenna was about that time. A lot of strikes in northeastern Ohio and various other places. Had some pretty long, pretty bitter strikes.

Katie Olmsted 15:35
What year was this about?

Bill Lavezzi 15:36
This was in spring of 1978.

Katie Olmsted 15:39
Okay, so going on strike could very well mean going to jail.

Bill Lavezzi 15:46
And in Brunswick, it did. Yeah. Some of my colleagues were arrested for various other infractions, but they were not thrown into jail for striking. That did happen in some other places. So we had our strike, our strike was settled, and we went on.And I can't remember exactly what year I negotiated my first contract in Aurora. I think it was after the collective bargaining was law went into effect. So in 70 there were, to the best of my recollection, no reprisals in Aurora, even though it was before the collective bargaining law went into effect. But we started to hear in the late 70s, in the early 80s, about the importance of passing a collective bargaining law and what it would mean. And we were, I remember, going down to Columbus to help lobby legislators to pass a collective bargaining law, and went into effect in 1984 and sometime after that - actually, I think I did bargain contracts before it because of this contrast, because before, before the collective bargaining law was passed - nd I guess that I'm thinking, now, this is Aurora. Now this is so this did. My first few years in Aurora. I was not the chief negotiator. I was not a president, but I was on a negotiating team. And I remember hearing that we had to make sure that we had that we had a clause in the Constitution. I can't remember in the agreement. I can't remember what it's called. We had a clause in the agreement that said that if anything in this contract was in violation of state law, the state law would be, what would be in effect, okay, that would, that would take priority over what we negotiated. This was particularly concerning because at that time, a lot of the contracts would have the same language from state law in their own language regarding, for example, sick leave, personal leave, length of the school day and various other kinds of things, planning period, all those kinds of things. Most of those things were in state law, and we would put them in our contracts, but just so we didn't copy them wrong. And, you know, we would, we would put this language in there that would say that state law would apply. When we started to negotiate contracts after the collective bargaining law, the situation flipped. So the situation flipped in that we now were told that if we negotiated something that infringed upon our rights under state law, we would be stuck with that language. So we had to be very careful. It was a whole different thing. What I understand is that in that time after the passage of the collective bargaining law OEA was busy training UniServ consultants, especially on collective bargaining law in Ohio. We were trying to learn everything we could from the collective bargaining consultant, and we were using the collective bargaining consultants much more because we realized that a mistake would be expensive at that particular time. Another change was that when I when I was president in Warrensville, I had some members who were non members. It was a significant number, probably 20 or a couple dozen who were not my who are not my members. And we weren't happy about that, but didn't really infringe upon our ability to function as a union, part, probably because we never went on strike, so we never actually had to worry about non members crossing our picket line. But after the collective bargaining law, every union had to have very clear terms of who was in the bargaining unit and who was not in the bargaining unit. And I remember some of those discussions within my local that were part of those contract negotiations. So who exactly does your contract cover? You say that you are an organization of, in those days, it was teachers; We didn't have ESPs. But we had librarians, and we had some school services personnel and we had a school nurse, and we had some various other people who were not classroom teachers, and many of them may not have had classroom teacher licenses in those days. We had to identify who exactly was in and who was not in the bargaining unit. So the negotiations became more consequential, I guess I would say. Contracts were now longer because they covered more things. We had to look very carefully at what was in the contract so that we would make sure that we weren't negotiating away some right that was in the in law. So, and I think reprisals pretty much ended. There might have been some pressure applied to some people in my Aurora years before the collective bargaining law, but after the collective bargaining law, they were pretty careful about, in my experience, about exerting anything might be called a reprisal against one of the members of my local, no matter what they were doing, whether they were a building representative or an officer or a president or negotiator or, you know, in any capacity, they they were pretty good about we, our members, were pretty good about observing their rights.

Katie Olmsted 21:00
Now I will say that I was not even born when Ohio got its collective bargaining rights. I was born in 1987. I've never lived a time when Ohio didn't have collective bargaining rights for public employees. If you had to explain to somebody what this actually means, why this is not something we can take for granted in the last little bit of time we have, what would you say?

Bill Lavezzi 21:27
I can easily - it's more easy for me to compare my early time in Warrensville with my time later on in Aurora. And they are two different employers, but I think the first employer used uh, sort of an iron fist to keep its members, keep our members, our member, all of our members were teachers to keep our members under their thumb. We, there was a lot of anxiety about talking, even on school property, on school property, even in private about something that you were concerned about, we took the extreme situation of having our members meet for what we call shop talk parties at a member's house in the evening so that they could talk about work related issues away from the school district. Members believed that the PA system in the school district could be used to eavesdrop on conversations in any classroom in the school district, there was an extreme amount of anxiety, and it probably looked like paranoia, but, you know, there was a saying I heard early on, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. And we felt the administration in particular, was very much out to get us. They were able to characterize the legitimate concerns of classroom teachers when they involved criticism of the administration. They were able to go to the board and characterize those things as disloyalty, disloyalty to the board, disloyalty to the kids in the school district, which, in fact, they weren't, and they were able to use that to make for a bad environment. So I guess there was a bad emotional environment, professional environment in that school district, which I did not see in the next school district I went to. But it improved markedly after the collective bargaining law, because we knew that we had some rights that we could observe. We had to be careful about our bargaining. Had to pay attention to the bargaining. We had to really study our P's and Q's more than we had before. Another change, I will say there was a subtle change that happened, however, in employee relationships, and that was particularly in Aurora, which kind of a country school district, okay, away from the big city. Particularly in Aurora, there was a tendency for the members to feel that, well, you know, if we don't quite get the language right on this particular provision, we'll petition the board to do the right thing. You know, let us say, for example, that a particular teacher needed a particular provision of leave that wasn't included in leave for whatever reason, having do with an illness or a family event of some sort. You know, if we really ask them, they'll do the right thing. And there was a feeling, I think, on our part and on the board's part, that the other side would do the right thing, okay, and even if that was in violation of the strict letter of the contract. After collective bargaining law passed, I think we learned, both of us, very quickly, that we could not rely on the other side to invent the right thing that we needed to put the right thing into the contract itself. And that meant we really had to study what we were doing and pay very careful attention to the to the language. There was language I remember our inheriting that was, in my view, imprecise. Most of my teaching was as an English teacher, so I, I feel like I can read, and some of the language seemed to me to be imprecise. There were sentences that were kind of hard to figure out exactly what they meant, and there was a possibility of a misunderstanding. And I found myself as a negotiator sometimes saying, wouldn't you like to for this sentence to read clearly whatever it's supposed to mean? Wouldn't you like this sentence to be clear to both sides, your side and my side, though, as to what it's going to mean? And sometimes that was a hard, hard sell, because some people on the other side might feel, well, it may be vague, but maybe that vagueness serves one party or the other, and we don't want to give up a bit of vagueness that we may have bought. And you know, implicit in that was we may not want to give up a bit of vagueness that we felt served us, but I was always feeling as a negotiator, that we needed to get the language to be as clear as it could, that vagueness and imprecise language just doesn't serve anybody, and that all came about as a result of the collective bargaining law in '84. I think, also the eventually the position we got agency shop at Aurora, we had very high percentage of our membership that gave us more power. So these things eventually snowballed and developed more power. We had presidents who felt more confident in asserting the rights of their members because of the collective bargaining law. So it started, I guess, with just the contract, and then gradually it developed a whole host of other kinds of things that were more professional, and I don't mean professional educationally and far as you're teaching in the classroom, but professional in terms of your relationship with your employers.

Katie Olmsted 26:51
Bill, thank you so much for sharing your memories of these times and what it all means. That power that grew from this one moment has become such a big thing for so many educators across Ohio.

Bill Lavezzi 27:06
It's an honor to be able to talk with you. Thank you very much.

Katie Olmsted 27:13
That does it for this episode of Public Education Matters, we're going to take a couple weeks off for the holidays, but we'll be right back here with new episodes in the New Year, and I promise we'll try to get it back under the 20 minute mark so many you asked for in the survey we sent out to OEA members a few months ago. We always love to hear your feedback. You can send me an email anytime at educationmatters@ohea.org. We want to make sure this podcast is meaningful and helpful to you as you continue to shape the public education landscape and your students' lives every day, because in Ohio, public education matters.

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