‘This Is In Our Blood’

How striking West Virginians made history—again.

by

The hills of West Virginia are steeped in a sense of isolation. It’s a place that these days doesn’t normally allow the kind of organizing that happened this year during the strike by teachers and service workers. Yet it did happen, and, in fact, it’s happened here before.

Many of the teachers and school support staff who took part in this strike have ties going back more than 100 years to the unions that were involved in the West Virginia mine wars. They learned what solidarity is about from their cousins, uncles, grandmothers. 

“In a room of 200 teachers and support staff in Mingo County, probably every single one of them has relatives who were in the mine wars,” says Katie Endicott, a high school English teacher in Mingo County. “All of these people had relatives who struck at various mines since then. This is in our blood. To cross the picket line or simply give up would be a slap in the face to our ancestors; they had shown us what was possible.”

The West Virginia strike by teachers and support staff began on February 22 and ended March 6. The walkout, which encompassed all of West Virginia’s fifty-five counties, included about 20,000 teachers and 13,000 school service employees, making it one of the biggest labor actions in the United States in recent years. 

In 2016, West Virginia ranked forty-eighth in the nation in terms of teacher pay, paying just $45,622 in 2016 compared to a national average of $58,353.

 In the end, the strikers were victorious, helping to inspire similar mass strikes by teachers in Colorado, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky, all of which were also to some measure successful. But while the West Virginia strike drew national attention, most news outlets missed several key components of its success.

While the West Virginia strike drew national attention, most news outlets missed several key components of its success.

For one thing, fully a third of the workers involved were not teachers. They were bus drivers, cooks, custodial staff, teacher aides, and much more. In fact, bus drivers made the entire strike possible. 

When the unions representing teachers and support staff were debating going out on strike, bus drivers spoke up. The bus drivers, says Endicott, had laid down the law: “No, you don’t understand. You don’t get to have school if we don’t drive the buses. We’ve already made the choice; it’s cute that you think you can make this call, but we already have.” 

Another underreported factor: The state’s school superintendents endorsed the goals of the teachers and support staff. “There’s already a shortage of teachers in this state,” says Nicole McCormick, a music teacher in Mercer County. “The superintendents can’t really do their jobs when there are so many openings, so it was a natural for them to be on board.” 

And when the teachers struck, all but the substitutes, aides, and some other support staff kept getting their paychecks—basically, those on sal-ary. Superintendents considered them snow days, which they got paid for but would have to make up at the end of the school year. Those who did lose pay were covered by a strike fund that was never depleted. Without that, it would have been much harder to keep some staff out with the teachers, and therefore, much harder to keep teachers out. 

Lastly, the teachers and support staff knew they’d need the support of the people in the communities they serve, and were concerned because two-thirds of kids in West Virginia depend on free or reduced-price school meals. Long before the strike, the teachers arranged donations of food for the kids who wouldn’t be going to school as well as daycare at churches and community centers while the strike was on. 

From the start, there was a secret Facebook group where people connected with the strike talked, posted images and videos, checked the pulse of the rank and file, and spread news quickly. The page had a few thousand members in February, and now numbers more than 24,000. New footage would be uploaded immediately, and sometimes live-streamed, from all over the state. Members in the rest of the state could see that folks in Mingo or Mercer Counties were fired up and ready to go, and it inspired them even more.

“The Facebook group was our means of talking, organizing, expressing our solidarity, and watching what was happening across the state—both good and bad. It had an inherent component of solidarity,” says Brendan Muckian-Bates, a social studies teacher in Wheeling, West Virginia. “It was a large-scale democratization of information, and captured both the anger and the resoluteness, as well as the solidarity of union members across the state.”

Members of the page posted dozens of pictures of teachers and school employees wearing red T-shirts bearing the message #RedforEd. The “Wear Red for Ed” movement, which began as a grassroots effort by parents and teachers to stand up for public education, was also used successfully in teacher actions in such larger cities as Chicago and New York, and spread to the other states where teachers launched strikes. 

 Hundreds posted images of their bank statements a few days before payroll—started by Matt McCormick, a social studies teacher in Mercer County, who had just $1.14 left in his account. The act of sharing this way built solidarity in droves. 

But it was also an opportunity for solidarity in action. “We’d have challenges for other counties, like ‘Be the school to wear the most red tomorrow!’ ” Muckian-Bates recalls.

The strikers were motivated in part by proposed changes to their health insurance. The state wanted to change co-pays from 80/20 to 60/40, which would dramatically increase employee health care costs, while at the same time offering only modest 1 and 2 percent raises. 

In addition, the state wanted to adopt a program called Go365. It would force teachers and support staff to wear devices like Fitbit bracelets or Apple watches, paid for by school employees out of their own pockets, and issue a $500 fine for employees who failed to meet prescribed fitness goals. The cost of joining a gym would not be covered.

The state also talked about doing away with seniority. That would mean that promotions, training, job bidding, and other aspects of teachers’ jobs would be subject to favoritism and bias rather than time on the job and experience.

Jim Justice, the state’s billionaire Republican governor, tried to placate teachers at several meetings, where he said things like, “I love you . . . but I’m not happy with you. You should be appreciative of where you are.” Videos captured of these incidents were posted on the Facebook group.

Endicott recalls an education rally at the state capitol building in Charleston on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “My husband went, with several coworkers, and he came back kind of  crestfallen,” she says. “What happened there was that state legislators called some of them into their offices, and told them, ‘You’re here about the 1 percent raise. But what’s coming is going to be so much worse.’ ”

The goal may have been to get teachers and others to accept the 1 percent raise, but it had the opposite effect: it lit a fire as the news spread to the rest of the state. A livestream discussion conducted by Justin Endicott and his co-worker Stephanie Endicott drew more than 500 simultaneous viewers. He closed the nearly twenty-five-minute live broadcast with, “Unite. Stand up. Send a message, clear across the wavelengths—across the whole state. Make them go into session tomorrow and the first thing coming as they’re getting their coffee, and going down the hallway, they should say, ‘Those teachers are fired up, guys and girls. We need to fix this, and we’ve gotta do something now. NOW.’ ”

Ultimately, after a nine-day walkout, the West Virginia strikers were triumphant, securing a 5 percent raise and successfully pushing back against other proposed changes. 

One defining factor in this success was the state’s labor history.

The hills of West Virginia are rich with histories of unions and working people. The battles waged here include the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike in 1912, the Battle of Matewan in 1920, and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, in which the striking miners wore red bandanas around their necks so they could see clearly who was on their side—the origin of the term “redneck.” It was the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. In the short term, the mine workers’ defeat at the hands of the U.S. Army thinned the ranks of the United Mine Workers of America to just a few thousand, but these numbers grew dramatically in the 1930s during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

That sense of solidarity those battles created remains a key part of the people who live and work in West Virginia today. And, in fact, those southern-tier counties with a history of coal mining and union strength—Wyoming, Mingo, Logan, and McDowell Counties, especially—were the first to go out on strike. Some even wore red bandanas as they marched, just like their ancestors did.

“These were coalfield counties. Boone, too. McDowell, too. My grandfather was a miner from Wyoming County. Because it’s part of our history, the sentiment runs through us,” said Nicole McCormick, who lives in Athens, West Virginia. “The reputation is that residents of West Virginia are stupid, backward. To be able to actually have some power in this strike was very appealing.”

Perhaps most critically, teachers and service workers in West Virginia never stopped listening to each other. There were pivotal times when union leadership proposed ideas and strategies that were ultimately not used—including a proposal to use rolling pickets, in which strikers walk out in a few counties, then rotate to other counties. 

As Katie Endicott tells the story, union leadership favored this tactic, which had a historical precedent. But then one of the teachers stood up and opposed the idea, saying her husband was involved in rolling strikes during the days when the companies broke the mine union.

“You cannot do a rolling strike because it was the very thing that broke the union in coal mines,” Endicott recalls the woman saying. “You are finished if you do rolling strikes.” The group ended up voting against it.

In the strike’s final days, the state government proposed a 4 percent wage increase—less than the 5 percent the strikers were fighting for. But workers in all fifty-five counties held firm and conducted a wildcat strike, saying they were not going back to work until all of their demands were met. The parties came back to the table, and teachers and support staff finally forced the state to meet their demands. The strike was over.

It was a sharp contrast from the West Virginia teachers’ strike of 1990, when some teachers crossed the picket lines and others never went out in the first place. While that strike was also successful, it left deep divisions among members.

As this year’s strike came to a close, and teachers prepared to return to work, members across the state joined together to sing the famed John Denver tune, one of the state’s official songs since 2014: “Country roads, take me home, to the place, I belong—West Virginia!”

Endicott says the crowd she was with began chanting, “West Virginia first, Oklahoma next!” As she recalls it, the energy in the room shifted. “This wasn’t just about us, and we said that multiple times. We were standing up not just for West Virginia, but for the rest of the country.”