Half of Mass. residents support legalizing teachers’ strikes, poll finds

After teachers in Newton made history when they walked off the job for two weeks, the longest teachers’ strike in decades in Massachusetts, a new poll has found a majority of residents in the state support making strikes legal.

Teachers’ strikes in the state are illegal, though that didn’t stop teachers in Newton — and elsewhere — from striking anyway. Teachers in Andover, Malden, Brookline, Woburn and Haverhill all launched strikes of their own in recent years, though none of those strikes lasted as long as Newton’s.

The poll from GBH, CommonWealth Beacon, and the MassINC Polling Group found exactly half — 50% of the more than 1,000 people surveyed — supported making strikes legal. Of those surveyed, 34% opposed making strikes legal.

The poll was conducted from March 21 to March 29, with a margin of error of 3.4%.

Earlier this year, proposals in the state Legislature that would have granted teachers the right to strike legally failed to advance out of committee despite support from the Massachusetts’ Teachers Association, the largest teacher’s union in the state.

The state House and Senate bills, which have failed to move forward in prior legislative sessions, would have allowed public employees to strike after six months of unsuccessful negotiations with their employers, according to State House News Service.

During a hearing last October, union leaders from Massachusetts and beyond told lawmakers the right to strike was a badly needed tool when local bargaining units face what they believe are bad-faith negotiating tactics by school committees.

“It is shameful when a school district refuses to pay a living wage to the educators working with vulnerable and high-needs students,” MTA Vice President Deb McCarthy said at the time. “I met women on the picket lines who were dedicating their lives to students yet were struggling to make ends meet and worrying about having a dignified retirement and felt totally unheard by their school committees or mayors until they went on strike.”

One union leader said it took a strike to bring the School Committee to the bargaining table.

“The school committee’s inaction was hurting everyone – the students, the educators and the community,” Deb Gesualdo, a union leader in Malden, said in 2023. “It wasn’t until we went on strike that the school committee took bargaining seriously.”

The walkout in Newton focused national attention on the suburban Boston school district, and raised larger questions of whether teachers in other Bay State communities might deploy walkouts as a negotiating tool, MassLive previously reported.

“It shows communities that strikes are possible, but it also shows that communities do not appreciate strikes,” Glenn Koocher, the executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, told MassLive.

Still, evidence suggests legalizing strikes could make them more common.

In Pennsylvania, where teachers’ strikes are legal, 138 such walkouts occurred between 1999 and 2018, the most in the nation, according to the Commonwealth Foundation.

In 2012, a Mother Jones tally found there had been 839 teachers strikes across the U.S. over the previous 40 years. Of those, 740 were in Pennsylvania, the magazine reported.

And, Thomas Scott, the co-executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, told GBH strikes could have an adverse impact on learning and school community.

“There are a lot of implications for how it really impacts the culture of relationships, between school committee, administrators, teachers, families, parents and even their relationship with the school,” he told the station. “In some cases, the longer a strike occurs, those damages become even more significant.”

Material from previous MassLive stories was used in this report.