I didn’t have that privilege, either. But I was a latch key kid since starting about age 8.
Actually, I was too starting at around 10 if I am being honest.
Same here, but that was 4+ decades ago, in a small city, and at a time when parents were not as overtly protective of their kids 24/7 as they are now.
There’s also a difference between a 10-year-old kid being on their own for 2 hours after school, until a parent gets home, and an even-younger kid being left on their own all day, because their parent(s) can’t take a day off of work, and the school is closed.
Working parents face the same issue, of course, on in-service days, summer break, etc., but at least those are known dates, and can be planned for ahead of time.
Not an issue that affects me, but IIRC from the news, that’s about how it is in much of Canada too - each school board has a contract with the teacher’s union local - different locals for different school boards. Strikes typically impact one school district. Every so often a provincial government will throw its weight around and impose a settlement on one or all school boards.
^^^I spent entire summers home alone, as well.
But,yeah–it was a different era.
Kudos to your parents. Nonetheless it’s not an insult to say that parents insisted on taking their kids to school during a teacher strike. It’s just a fact.
No, this isn’t accurate. Salaries are typically set by collective bargaining at the provincial level, and the provincial government is always part of the collective bargaining on that issue. If there is a strike over salary, it is province-wide (sometimes rotating, sometimes a full pull-out), as the two articles cited by @Jackmannii indicated, discussing the most recent province-wide strike in Ontario.
Once the negotiations over salary are concluded, there is a second round of negotiations over local matters, and the provincial government isn’t involved in that.
See this recent article in the Star:
It’s the province which has set the initial salary offer with a cap of 1%. The teachers unions will presumably be asking for more. Whatever the salary rates are, they would apply across the province.
Insisted means to demand something forcefully. I take issue with that. It’s a fact that the kids were taken there.
To me insisted is like, “fuck your strike. I’m dropping of my kids anyway” as opposed to “I have to work and I don’t have a choice”
In Missouri teachers are allowed to form/join a union for the purpose of collective bargaining with their school district. Teachers are not allowed to strike. In effect that means if the district and the union can’t agree on terms, the old contract stays in place until everyone is exhausted.
My wife did strike against her district once. The district got an injunction to force the teachers back to work. When the teachers didn’t return, both the union and the district realized a whole bunch of teachers being either fired en masse or arrested and jailed wouldn’t look good for either side, and they settled.
And of course there is a lot of middle ground. Probably some portion on the people who sent theor kids could have kept them home but didn’t think supporting the strike was worth calling in a favor from grandma or asking their boss if they could work from home. Probably others who would have liked to support the strike really had no option. But you don’t know where any individual falls on that spectrum.
I think that people here are missing the point: inconveniencing the parents is the whole point of a strike. The idea is that parents are forced to stay home and lose work, with the hope that they’ll call their mayor or congressman and demand that they give the teachers whatever they want. It doesn’t always work, but that’s the general plan. Whether or not parents support the strike is irrelevant - what matters is how much noise they make to get it to end.
When teachers strike here - it happens once or twice a year - they close the schools. They have to, by law. We have very powerful teachers’ unions.
It doesn’t help around here. When our teachers went on strike a few years ago, our mayor made a point of mentioning that, by law, the city was not allowed to get involved in negotiations between the school district and the teachers. To the extent we could vent our frustration, the only legitimate target were the school board trustees.
OK, thanks. I stand corrected.
As I said, it’s not something that matters to me - no kids, no teachers in the family. I just remember that when I heard about strikes in the news, it only seemed to affect one school board. It must have been some pretty contentious local issues, then…
Has anybody here been the victim of a teachers’ strike? I have.
It was October, 1975; and Toronto’s high school teachers went on strike. Over what, I don’t know. But it meant we had no school. Hooray, right? No, because our school’s PTA set up a pseudo-school in a local church. Parents who were experts in various fields volunteered to “teach” classes, as best they could, even if they had never taught before. Obviously, some classes requiring science labs were nearly impossible, but things like English, French, history, and geography were possible. Somehow, we kept up, and when school resumed in January, 1976, we muddled through.
But we were lucky. We lived in a neighbourhood where parents cared enough to organize such a thing. Not every neighbourhood could do the same thing.
A three-month strike? That’s pretty brutal.
I never had to deal with a teachers’ strike, likely because the first public school that I attended was the University of Wisconsin. I’m fairly certain that the teachers at the parochial grade schools, and Catholic high school, that I attended weren’t unionized (and, in the case of my high school, half of them were clergy, and members of the order which owned and operated the school).
It was. Not because school was closed, but because in our neighbourhood, our parents were on our case to study, study, study, so we didn’t fall behind, and we could pick up where school left off when it started again.
In fairness, not every student in our neighbourhood, or indeed in Toronto, lived in such a neighbourhood or had such parents. And our parents were well-meaning. But as I recall, nothing that took place in classes at that church made much difference when school resumed in January. We simply picked up where we left off in October. We, who had attended classes at the church, and “done our homework,” as it were, looked at our slacker brethren who did not, and asked, “Why did we even @#$&* bother?”
Sure. Springfield Public Schools District 186 went on strike multiple times in my elementary/junior high years. Fortunately I was a Latchkey Kid so I could just stay home.
For a whole lot of public services inconveniencing the people they serve is the method used to get what they want. Libraries always cut weekend and evening hours when their budgets are cut - they never decide to close Tuesdays or delay opening until noon to make up the hours. Public transit workers go on strike and stop driving the buses and trains - although in some other places, they keep driving and stop collecting fares which hurts their employer rather than the customers. I’m not sure that teachers have an alternative that wouldn’t hurt the parents or the students - but even if they did, a strike would be the most effective way to put pressure on whichever entity controls the schools.
True - but that’s because they are the only people that could do anything about it . Complaining to the mayor only works in places where the school district is under mayoral control
Why is that a problem? The trustees are the ones who run the schools and are engaged in the negotiations.