Looking Back: Strike Of 1974

By J.N. Cheney

The Mount Markham and Richfield Springs school districts both dealt with struggles between teachers and the school board in 1975.

The Waterville Central School District faced a strike from non-instructional personnel that predates these struggles by approximately a full year.

According to an article at the time from the Waterville Times, this was the first strike in the history of the district.

As reported on Tuesday March 27, 1974, non-teaching personnel in the Waterville CSD including bus drivers, custodians, secretaries, cafeteria workers, and others went on strike after a nearly unanimous decision.

Of the 63 employees represented by the Local 200, Service Employees International Union AFL- CIO, 51 went on strike.

There were three primary catalysts that led to this event.

The first being that union members were stuck working without a contract since July 1973 as negotiations kept falling into stagnation.

The second being that even arranging meetings with the school board became an overly tedious endeavor.

The third catalyst was that according to a fact-finder report released earlier in the dispute, the average wages for non-teaching personnel in the district were below poverty-level wages.

Even though setting up meetings with the school board proved overly laborious, the wage problem was the most pertinent for the union.

At some point before the strike began, the fact-finder gave the following recommendations to try to help reach a settlement faster:

Workers who earned between $1.65 and $2 an hour would get a 15 percent raise, those who made between $2.01 and $2.50 an hour would get a 12.5 percent raise, those who made between $2.51 and $3 an hour would get a 10 percent increase, those who made $3.01 and $4 would get an 8.5 percent raise, and bus drivers would receive a raise of $200 a year.

The only change not related to the wage problem was a recommended increase in health insurance coverage for dependents from 35 to 50 percent. ...