President Biden was forced to cancel a speech in Philadelphia on Sunday because of a strike by workers from the nation's largest teachers union. Thousands of representatives To attend the annual meeting of the association.
The National Education Association's employee union began its strike Friday, accusing management of canceling holiday overtime pay for the July 4 holiday and refusing to provide information about $50 million worth of outsourced work that could have been done earlier by NEA employees. The strike has shut down the final three days of the four-day convention, as delegates refused to cross picket lines.
Mr Biden's campaign said he would not do so. “President Biden is a staunch supporter of unions and will not cross the line on picketing,” his campaign said in a statement, adding that the president plans to travel to Pennsylvania over the weekend.
The National Education Association has about 2.5 million members nationwide, not including retired workers, according to a recent government filing. The employee union says it represents more than 350 employees employed at the association's headquarters in Washington.
The employee union, the National Education Association Staff Organization, voted to authorize a strike in April, and its three-year contract expired at the end of May. It held a one-day strike in June. “The NEA has abandoned its union values with its actions at the bargaining table,” the president of the employee union said. Robin McLean“The NEA would prefer to cancel a multimillion-dollar convention than comply with labor law,” it said in a statement.
The NEA said in a statement that it remains “fully committed to a fair bargaining process” and accused the workers’ union of disseminating “misinformation” that “not only misrepresents the facts but also undermines the integrity of our ongoing efforts to respect a fair bargaining process.”
The union said the association offered generous benefits and competitive salaries, and said its current proposal would raise the average salary of staff union members from about $124,000 to about $133,000. The staff union said pay increases had been stagnant for years and that most members would receive a raise of less than 2 percent per year under the proposal.
Strikes by workers from unions are not new. Workers from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union went on strike. One-day walkout In May, a large local of the Service Employees International Union in California went on strike for two weeks In 2022.