The Answer Isn’t Always In Olympia

When public school teachers go on strike, everybody suffers except the teachers. They still get paid for a full school year of work - though the school year might last into July. It’s parents and kids who take it on the chin, during the strike and during the abbreviated summer.

That’s frustrating. No one’s more frustrated than the parents outraged by last fall’s 37-day teacher strike in Fife’s public schools. It was the longest in Washington state history.

What to do? The Legislature is looking for a solution. The House proposes simply to declare teacher strikes illegal. The Senate, meanwhile, has passed a bill requiring that if a local teacher union and school board cannot come to terms through negotiations, a three-member binding arbitration panel will settle the dispute.

Declaring strikes illegal doesn’t stop strikes. Courts have been declaring teacher strikes illegal for years. Strikes occur, and get settled, anyway.

Binding arbitration, as passed by the Senate, also is a bad idea. School budgets are set by elected state legislators, elected local school boards and voter-approved local property tax levies. In binding arbitration an unelected arbitrator could order a teacher pay raise even if the voters and their elected representatives had chosen to clamp down on school spending. Then, like it or not, school programs would have to be slashed to pay the higher salaries.

Advocates of arbitration claim it has worked for law enforcement. Maybe so, from a union point of view. In Spokane, an arbitrator awarded police a 13 percent pay raise in 1979, throwing the city budget into crisis. Ever since, the city has avoided a hard line toward union pay demands.

The state ought to be cautious about creating that kind of a bargaining climate for local school boards, which face enough difficulty due to their lack of control over revenues. Even when school boards do want to be generous with their local teacher union, the Legislature can make generosity almost impossible.

This problem, like so many others, can’t be solved by passing a law. In Spokane, relations between teacher unions and school districts are good - because local administrators and teachers have worked hard at collaboration. The solution can’t be found, or created, in Olympia. The solution is local: Good administration, solid communication and mutually respectful relations between management and labor. Easier said than done? Yes, but it can be done.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board