JTA: From the Archive: When Jewish teachers unionized (the 30's)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.jta.org/2014/08/30/news-opinion/the-telegraph/from-the-archive-when-jewish-teachers-unionized

By Julie Wiener



A Tel Aviv kindergarten class in the 1930s, a time when Jewish teachers in Israel and at North American Jewish schools were organizing labor unions. (Wikimedia Commons)


The National Labor Relations Board recently dismissed a complaint filed against a Philadelphia Jewish day school whose board unilaterally stopped recognizing the longtime teachers union.

In its ruling, which the American Federation of Teachers has said it plans to appeal, the NLRB said it lacked jurisdiction over the matter concerning Perelman Jewish Day School, presumably because it is a private religious institution.

Until the latest blow, Perelman’s 38-year-old teachers union was one of the few still remaining in an American Jewish school — in the past few decades and for varying reasons, several such unions have gone out of business. But in the mid 1930s, with unions flourishing throughout the United States (and in British Mandate Palestine, where Hebrew teachers staged a national strike), labor was on the rise in Jewish schools, especially in New York.

In April 1934, New York’s Central Committee of the Hebrew Teachers’ Union held a meeting intended as a “first step in the process of organizing and uniting Hebrew teachers,” JTA reported.


Read more: http://www.jta.org/2014/08/30/news-opinion/the-telegraph/from-the-archive-when-jewish-teachers-unionized#ixzz3C5fXAfkE

FULL story at link.