Teachers Paved Way on Amnesty Question

If the experience of Hawaii public schoolteachers is any indication, Island police officers who participated in an illegal 31⁄2-day sickout this week have little to fear about individual disciplinary action.

Individual teachers were not fined for similar action in 1973 although their union, the Hawaii State Teachers Association, ended up paying a $100,000 fine.

There were two separate periods when teachers walked off their jobs in 1972 and 1973 during negotiations for a new contract.

The first was on Oct. 5, 1972, when 55 percent of the teachers did not report for work despite a Circuit Court temporary restraining order prohibiting such a walkout. The non-working teachers were not paid for that day.

At the time the state Board of Education said the 4,933 teachers who walked off their jobs that day would be suspended for two days without pay as a disciplinary action.

But the school board changed its position after the contract dispute finally was settled and in July 1973 decided not to penalize the teachers.

The second time when teachers stayed off their jobs was in April 1973. The April 2 to 18 strike was the first statewide teachers strike both in Hawaii and in the nation.

… The legality of the strike involved a complicated legal battle over Hawaii’s then new public employment collective bargaining law.

At the time the high court (Hawaii Supreme Court) said, "There is no doubt HSTA acted as the ‘legal trailblazer’ in an uncharted, complicated, new legal field of collective bargaining."

… The teachers who did not work during the strike, part of which happened during spring vacation, were not paid for the time on strike or for the spring vacation.

The contract which finally settled the dispute included a no-reprisal clause. A dispute on the no-reprisal clause also went through the courts, eventually to receive a ruling by the state Supreme Court earlier this year.

The state Supreme Court ruled that the Department of Education acted properly in not giving the striking teachers service credit for the time they were off the job in 1973.