Holck to school-level leaders: Your work is important to HSTA’s success

In a speech to volunteer teacher union leaders from across the state, Hawaii State Teachers Association Executive Director Wilbert Holck Wednesday gave them an important history lesson to recognize HSTA’s 50th anniversary.

“It was a group of teachers very much like you that decided they wanted to form a union, when, in 1968, the Constitutional Convention amended the state constitution to allow public employees the right to collectively bargain their wages, hours, conditions of work,” Holck told hundreds of HSTA’s school-level leaders and staff during the union’s online Summer Leadership Training sessions.

Hawaii voters approved the amendment during the November 1968 elections. Shortly thereafter, in 1970, the legislature passed the Hawaii Public Employment Collective Bargaining Law, Chapter 89, to meet the constitutional mandate, he said. The Hawaii State Teachers Association formally incorporated in January 1971.

“The teacher leaders at the time felt with the passing of the collective bargaining law, it was now time for teacher voices to be heard,” Holck said.

“They didn’t like that their workday ended when their administrator said it ended. They questioned why they had no duty-free lunch. They didn’t like that they had no say over the curriculum or how content was delivered. They couldn’t understand why when a teacher became pregnant, they couldn’t use sick leave for maternity. In fact, many were forced to resign. The notion that they were to never to question their administrator, keep their mouths shut, and do whatever their administrator told them to do was no longer acceptable. Collective bargaining would level the playing field,” Holck added.

Those teacher leaders negotiated HSTA’s first contract in 1971, and “had the strength and courage to fight back when the DOE attempted to renege on many of the provisions they had agreed to at the bargaining table,” he said.

Holck said members of the union and its leaders “made an immense sacrifice when they made the very difficult decision to go on strike in 1973, to fight for themselves, their students, and their profession.”

Since that first contract, Hock noted that successive bargaining teams have negotiated:

• the first academic freedom provision in the nation
• the first personal leave provision for public employees
• the first provision in the state allowing the use of sick leave for maternity purposes which allows teachers to return to work when their doctor allowed it rather than when the HIDOE dictated it.

“During the height of COVID-19, HSTA’s Negotiations Team negotiated a memorandum of understanding that put safety measures in place for teachers and set aside the first nine days of the 2020–21 school year for teacher training and preparation,” Holck said.

The HSTA recently negotiated the 2021–23 contract that keeps your base pay intact for the next two years but because the 21 hours of job-embedded professional development was not funded, teachers will not see the 1.4 percent worth of additional monies that came with it, he added.

Despite the loss of funding for the 21 hours of PD, Holck said, “I strongly believe it was the best deal the HSTA Negotiations Team could get given the state of the economy and the multitude of problems we as a state were facing because of COVID-19.”

In a little over a year, the HSTA will be back at the bargaining table to negotiate the 2023–25 contract.

“Public employees like teachers will not remember that the governor initially proposed a 20-percent pay cut, what they will remember is no pay raise for two years. And though the economy is improving, I believe the state will continue to plead poverty making negotiations for the 2023–25 contract very difficult,” Holck said.

“Over the years, Hawaii’s public employee labor unions have settled for ‘same-same.’ This means that whichever public employee labor union settled their contract first, all the other labor unions could expect to get the same. We cannot accept this paradigm going forward if we expect to address low pay, teacher workload, class size, teacher morale, and the larger issue of the teacher shortage crisis in Hawaii,” he said.

“I will tell you this. In the next round of bargaining every public employee union and their members will be looking to make up the two years without pay increases and more,” Holck added.

“When I became executive director in 2014, I shared with the staff that I wanted HSTA to be the most powerful union in the state that acted on what mattered to teachers. To do so I saw the need to improve our communications, kick start our member services program that had been struggling since the closure of the member benefits corporation, provide more professional development opportunities for teachers, have more of a presence in the Legislature, and realign the work of our UniServ staff to focus on organizing,” Holck said.

“But most importantly, I believed that in order to become the most powerful union in the state, the foundation of HSTA, that is our school-level leaders and the members at their respective schools, needed to believe their voices were being heard by HSTA’s chapter and state leaders, that our leaders were acting on what mattered to them, and they felt supported. When that happened, we could accomplish anything,” he said.

“Thank you for all that you do as an HSTA leader. For some of you, this is a new experience while others have served in a leadership capacity with HSTA for some time. Regardless, the work you do on behalf of teachers is so very important to the success of HSTA,” Holck said.

Holck also acknowledged the work of HSTA’s staff.

“I can’t tell you how hard these folks work and how proud I am of them. They put in many hours more than their required workday. And they do it because, well because, they care about you and our members. We are all extremely fortunate to have these talented and dedicated individuals working alongside us as we navigate our future,” he said.