Picket lines to defend teachers’ pay

MAHOMET, Ill.--Teachers in the Mahomet-Seymour school district, a small community in rural Illinois, held a two-day strike in mid-August to defend their pay raises and health care benefits.

The Mahomet-Seymour Education Association (MSEA) represents teachers, aides, janitors, bus drivers and other support staff in the Mahomet-Seymour school district. On August 18, members voted 211-25 to strike after the school board's bargaining team left the table and refused to respond to the union's proposal.

The board wanted to decrease the step raises that all employees would earn, but the district has regularly failed to follow through with giving employees their step raises.

The town of Mahomet has a population of approximately 7,000, and the surrounding area of middle-class subdivisions adds a few thousand to the overall population, putting the high school at roughly 800 students.

The board also offered a measly $25 increase in health insurance compensation--up from its previous offer of $5. This amounts to only 14 cents per contract day.

"The $25 offered by the board would bring the coverage to $570," said Brett Hersom, a teacher at the high school. "However, the single plan is $620 and it's approximately $1,560 to cover your family. The net result of the negotiations is that almost every teacher in the district providing family coverage will receive less net income next year than last year, and this would happen even if the board accepted the union's offer."

The school board claims that the economic recession is to blame for the cutbacks it is trying to enforce. But at the same time, the district has a $1.5 million education fund and a $3 million working cash fund that comes from high property taxes in the Mahomet area, where many of the residents live in comfortable housing subdivisions.

Nonetheless, Mahomet also has a sizeable working-class population that lives in the center of town, in apartment buildings throughout town and in trailer parks on the outskirts. Thus, despite what seemed to be everyone's calculation that the majority of the Mahomet citizenry would be against the strike and the union's demands, there was actually considerable community support.

Many people donated money and other items during the strike. Various local businesses and institutions supported the strikers, including the Olive Garden in Champaign, which provided lunch, and the local American Legion, which rented its legion hall at a discount rate so that the strikers could use it as a home base!

Gene Vanderport, a local member of the Socialist Forum and leader in the Illinois Educators Association that is the affiliated statewide union, expressed excitement at the energy of the strikers. "This is clearly an anger level never seen," said Vanderport. "This is a very strong local, and once the union voted overwhelmingly to strike, they went to work immediately in a very spontaneous fashion, yet they were very organized in that everyone immediately pitched in to do whatever tasks needed to be done."

The strike was settled on the afternoon of August 20 with a tentative one-year contract, foreshadowing a possible confrontation next year. The school year has now resumed, but as state and local governments continue to push through budget cuts, it is likely that we haven't seen the end of struggles around education in Illinois or anywhere else.