RAISING HELL BY RAISING SALARIES

When I became principal of Holy Name High School in 1960, there was no diocesan salary schedule for elementary and high school teachers. Principals could pay whatever their budgets could afford, and most paid their teachers below what one would consider a living wage. This disturbed me because lay teachers had families who were living on subsistence wages. The church preached social justice, but many Catholic educators did not always practice it in their school systems.

Early in the 1960s the Cleveland Public School teachers went on strike for some weeks but finally settled for a starting pay of $5400 with a financial increment for every year a teacher had taught in the system. A generous schedule but of course not a perfect one.

I reasoned that new teachers would not even consider working in a Catholic school if the starting pay was far below the $5400 public schools were offering. But they might consider starting in a Catholic school if we could match the public school starting salary. We could not match the increments public schools offered, but perhaps we could give a teacher an increment of $200 for each year of teaching in a public or Catholic school. Thus a teacher who came to the school with five years of teaching would be hired at $6400.

I had no trouble persuading my advisory board that this was the right thing to do. But how would we break this news to the media? We decided to schedule a news conference at the Cleveland Press. Our PR person, however, leaked this information to the television stations, and that day reporters began calling the high school asking to talk to me. They could not reach me because I was sequestered in the rectory of a friend.

At 5:00 PM I appeared at the press conference, read a statement quoting one of the popes on just wages, answered questions from reporters and concluded the conference. When I returned to the rectory there were several calls from Clarence Elwell, still school superintendent but now a bishop living at the cathedral. I realized that if I returned even one of his calls, he could have and probably would have given me a severe dressing down for what I had done. I was not going to give him that opportunity. So I got in my car, drove to the cathedral, rang the rectory door bell and told the attendant that Bishop Elwell wanted to see me.

Elwell was truly surprised to see me there in person. But he graciously welcomed me and invited me into his living quarters where we had a quiet and civil discussion about the need to have a pay scale based on a living wage. He ended the meeting by telling me not to expect the diocese to subsidize my new pay scale. I told him that my advisory board and I did not expect that.

Subsequently, many diocesan schools formed a teachers organization called CHALTA, which went on strike the next year. Holy Name High School teachers did not strike. After some weeks the strike was settled. The starting salary was $5400.

Posted August 31, 2010

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