“Balancing the Budget on the Back of Education”: Neoliberalism and the 1990 West Virginia Teachers’ Strike

Abstract

“Balancing the Budget on the Back of Education”: Neoliberalism and the 1990 West Virginia Teachers’ Strike William Hal Gorby As a crowd of West Virginia public school teachers rallied at the state capitol during the cold legislative session, teacher Anna Cuppett of Romney, writing in the Charleston Gazette, noted the terrible irony that “West Virginia requires the highest scholastic standard of their teachers but the salary is more than 21 percent below the average salary of the five states that surround West Virginia. In January the teachers were paid out of the school supply fund. . . . Instead of a raise, the state is asking the teachers to take over payments on their insurance.”1 With all the national attention recently paid to the 2018 teachers’ strike in West Virginia, readers may think Cuppett was complaining about the proposed premium increases to the state employees’ insurance provider, the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA). However, her criticism came nearly three decades earlier in February of 1988, after a decade of frustration by teachers and other public employees at the austerity measures enacted by state and county governments.2 “55 Strong,” the 2018 political slogan and movement embraced by the striking state teachers, was built off the Mountain State’s long-standing labor history but was also a response to the state’s continued policy decisions addressing the economic precarity of the past forty years. During the 1980s, West Virginia experienced losses in manufacturing jobs, a decline in coal, and rising deficits. A major drop in tax revenues and federal funding through the 1980s added to the challenges for the state to fund public priorities. By 1989, the Wall Street Journal described West Virginia as a “state of despair.” 3 Seeking new solutions to the state’s economic woes, in 1988, voters elected a wealthy political outsider, Gaston Caperton, to revitalize the state’s economy. Giving him a year to turn the finances around, teachers grew impatient in 1990 when the governor and legislature stressed scarcity. Thus, the more recent 2018 teachers’ strike was not an aberration; it fits into a longer historical continuum [End Page 31] of the state’s educators feeling marginalized while facing austerity budgets and the privatization of public services.4 The 1990 teachers’ strike was a response to neoliberalism, the economic ideology that underlay budget cuts and privatization. Beginning in the late 1970s, politicians began to support policies that favored the free market, cuts to social programs, deregulation of industries, supply-side tax cuts, and efforts to undermine labor unions. Supporters of neoliberal economic reform argued that these changes would stimulate new economic activity while being a more efficient use of capital. Building on the policies enacted by Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States, neoliberalism encouraged deregulation of government agencies, supported the financial service sector to help in the movement of capital, and promoted free trade to lower the costs of consumer goods. While neoliberal policies were typically associated with the Republican Party, scholars have noted the ways such policies were also adopted by Democrats, particularly in the Sunbelt and West. West Virginia mirrors many of these trends. While the state remained in Democratic control, the state’s governors and legislatures of the late 1970s through the 1990s supported policies that boosted the coal industry, pushed back against environmental regulations, and sustained fiscal austerity.5 These types of neoliberal policies were promoted during the administrations of Democratic governors Jay Rockefeller (1977–1985) and Gaston Caperton (1989–1997), who built off a new generation of “New Democrats,” and in the third term of Republican Arch Moore (1985–1989). These administrations encouraged the development of public-private partnerships to stimulate economic growth with minimal state spending, encouraged tax cuts to foster growth (such as the repeal of the food tax in 1979 and the “super tax credits” of 1985), and espoused a faith in technocratic, business-style government reforms.6 These policy choices also led local residents in the coalfields to be concerned that state government agencies, like the Department of Environmental Protection, were meeting the demands of industry more than their concerns about excessive strip mining, damage to roads, blasting at mountaintop removal...