2018 West Virginia teachers' strike

Based on Wikipedia: 2018 West Virginia teachers' strike

The Teachers Who Defied Everyone

In February 2018, something remarkable happened in one of America's poorest states. Twenty thousand teachers and school workers walked off their jobs, shut down every public school in West Virginia, and refused to return for nine days—even after their own union leaders told them to go back to work.

They won.

The 2018 West Virginia teachers' strike wasn't supposed to happen. It was illegal under state law. The teachers' unions hadn't officially sanctioned it. The governor warned them to stop. The attorney general threatened legal consequences. And yet, day after day, teachers showed up not at their schools but at the state capitol, demanding better pay and affordable health insurance.

What makes this strike particularly fascinating isn't just that it succeeded. It's that it sparked a wave of similar actions across the country and demonstrated something that labor historians found electrifying: ordinary workers, not union leadership, drove the entire movement from beginning to end.

Why West Virginia Teachers Were So Angry

To understand the strike, you need to understand just how badly West Virginia treats its teachers financially. At the time, West Virginia ranked 48th out of 50 states in teacher compensation. Only Oklahoma and a handful of other states paid their teachers less.

Now, low pay for teachers is unfortunately common across America. But West Virginia's situation was particularly dire for a reason that gets less attention: health insurance costs were eating teachers alive.

West Virginia public employees get their health coverage through something called the Public Employees Insurance Agency, or PEIA. Think of it as a single health insurance plan that covers all state workers—teachers, road crews, clerks, everyone. The problem was that the state wasn't putting enough money into this system, which meant that employees had to pay more and more out of their own pockets each year.

Here's the cruel math. The state legislature had offered teachers a 2 percent pay raise for 2019, followed by just 1 percent raises in 2020 and 2021. Sounds like something, right? But healthcare costs were rising faster than those raises. Teachers calculated that they would actually take home less money after the "raise" because their insurance premiums and deductibles would increase even more.

Imagine getting a raise and ending up poorer. That's what West Virginia teachers were facing.

The Spark

The anger had been building for years, but it crystallized in early 2018 through an unlikely organizing tool: Facebook.

Teachers across the state started connecting in private Facebook groups, sharing their frustrations, comparing notes on how bad things had gotten. The pressure to do something dramatic was, as one union president put it, "coming from everywhere." This wasn't union leadership crafting a careful strategy. This was rank-and-file teachers—the people actually in classrooms—demanding action.

The two major teachers' unions in the state were the West Virginia branches of the American Federation of Teachers (usually called AFT-WV) and the National Education Association. There was also the West Virginia School Service Personnel Association, representing the cafeteria workers, bus drivers, custodians, and other essential staff who keep schools running.

On February 22, 2018, all three organizations called for a statewide work stoppage. Every single public school district in all 55 West Virginia counties closed. A quarter of a million students had no school to attend.

Illegal, But Unstoppable

Let's be clear about something: this strike was explicitly against the law.

West Virginia, like many states, prohibits public employees from striking. The day before the walkout began, state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey issued a pointed warning. A strike "of any length on any ground is illegal," he declared, and promised that his office would help local school districts enforce the ban.

The teachers walked out anyway.

On the very same day as the attorney general's warning, Governor Jim Justice signed a bill giving teachers their 2 percent raise, apparently hoping this would head off the strike. "We need to keep our kids and teachers in the classroom," Justice said. "We certainly recognize our teachers are underpaid and this is a step in the right direction."

Teachers looked at that 2 percent, thought about their rising insurance costs, and said no.

The next morning, February 22nd, schools across the state sat empty. And in Charleston, the state capital, an estimated five thousand people gathered at the West Virginia State Capitol building, their chants echoing off the golden dome.

When Workers Reject Their Own Leaders

Here's where the story gets really interesting.

After nearly a week of the strike, union leaders and Governor Justice announced they had reached a deal on February 27th. The agreement promised a 5 percent pay raise—much better than the original 2 percent. Union leadership called on teachers to return to their classrooms on Thursday, March 1st, after what they termed a "cooling off" period.

Teachers said no.

Late on February 28th, county after county announced that schools would remain closed. Workers were refusing to go back, regardless of what their union leaders had negotiated. In labor terminology, this is called a wildcat strike—a work stoppage that continues against the wishes of union leadership.

Wildcat strikes are rare in modern America. Unions typically maintain tight control over when and whether their members walk off the job. But in West Virginia, the rank and file had taken charge. The union leaders could announce whatever deal they wanted; if teachers didn't believe it was good enough, they simply weren't showing up.

The reason for their skepticism became clear on March 3rd, when the West Virginia Senate rejected the 5 percent raise that the House of Delegates had approved. Instead, senators proposed only 4 percent. The strike extended into its eighth working day.

A Billionaire Governor Versus His Former Supporters

The political dynamics of this strike were deliciously complicated.

Governor Jim Justice is a coal billionaire—one of the wealthiest people in West Virginia. He had won election in 2016 running as a Democrat, and the teachers' unions had endorsed him. The AFT-WV, the West Virginia Education Association, and other labor groups had supported his campaign, believing he would look out for working people.

Then, just months after taking office, Justice switched to the Republican Party.

Now here he was, telling teachers they were hurting children by refusing to work, insisting there wasn't enough money to meet their demands. "I'm telling you when we should do more is when we know we can do more," Justice said on February 23rd. "Today we think we can do more, but we don't know."

Teachers found this unconvincing coming from a billionaire.

Meanwhile, union officials actively sought support from Democratic politicians, inviting them to speak at rallies during the strike. The partisan lines were clear, even though the strike itself transcended ordinary politics. This wasn't really about Democrats versus Republicans. It was about workers demanding dignity from a state that had taken them for granted.

Victory—And Its Limits

On March 7th, after nine school days of striking, West Virginia teachers finally went back to work.

They had won their 5 percent raise. The Senate had backed down and agreed to the House's position after negotiations in a conference committee. Twenty thousand workers had defied the law, defied their own union leadership, and forced one of America's poorest states to find more money for public education.

But the victory was incomplete.

The raise addressed immediate salary concerns, but the strike did not secure any long-term guarantees about health insurance costs. The PEIA funding problem remained unsolved. Teachers had won a battle, but the war over healthcare costs would continue.

There's an important lesson here about what strikes can and cannot accomplish. A strike is a powerful tool—perhaps the most powerful tool workers have—but it's a blunt instrument. You walk out, you apply pressure, you win concessions, and then you go back to work. The structural problems that created the crisis in the first place often remain, waiting to cause the next crisis.

The Spark That Lit Other Fires

The West Virginia strike might have been a local story except for what happened next.

Teachers in Oklahoma watched what had happened in West Virginia with intense interest. Oklahoma ranked even worse than West Virginia for teacher pay—49th in the nation. If West Virginia teachers could win through direct action, why couldn't they?

Within weeks of the West Virginia victory, Oklahoma teachers were organizing their own walkout. Then teachers in Arizona. Then Colorado. The 2018 West Virginia strike kicked off what journalists began calling the "Red for Ed" movement, a wave of teacher protests and strikes that swept through multiple states over the following months and years.

Kentucky teachers held protests. North Carolina teachers coordinated walkouts. The movement spread because West Virginia had proven something that many workers had forgotten: collective action works. When enough people refuse to work, things change.

Even workers in other industries took notice. On March 4th, just as the West Virginia teachers' strike was entering its final days, 1,400 workers at Frontier Communications in West Virginia went on strike. They cited rising healthcare costs and specifically mentioned the teachers' strike as an inspiration.

The Radical Fringe

One of the more colorful footnotes to the strike involves the Industrial Workers of the World, usually called the IWW or "Wobblies."

The IWW is a radical labor union with a storied history. Founded in 1905, it played a major role in early 20th-century labor struggles before being suppressed during and after World War I. Today it's a much smaller organization, but it still exists and still advocates for worker power.

During the West Virginia strike, the IWW issued a press release demanding that teachers hold out for even more—including a tax on natural gas production to fund state education. Several IWW members reportedly played active roles in the strike, serving as building representatives and helping coordinate the action.

This detail matters because it illustrates the ideological diversity within the strike. You had mainstream union members who just wanted a fair raise. You had workers who had lost faith in their union leadership. And you had radicals who saw the strike as an opportunity to push for fundamental changes in how West Virginia funded public services. All of them walked the picket lines together.

What Made West Virginia Different

Labor scholars have spent considerable time analyzing why this particular strike succeeded when so many others fizzle.

One factor: West Virginia already had a severe teacher shortage. Many teaching positions sat unfilled because the pay was so low that qualified candidates simply wouldn't take the jobs. This gave strikers unusual leverage. The state couldn't easily replace them with substitute teachers or new hires because there weren't enough available.

Another factor: the strike was genuinely grassroots. Because ordinary teachers drove the action rather than union leadership, there was no single point of failure. Union leaders couldn't call off the strike because they hadn't really called it in the first place. The workers themselves had to decide when to stop, and they didn't stop until they were satisfied.

A third factor: solidarity across job classifications. This wasn't just a teachers' strike. Bus drivers walked out. Cafeteria workers walked out. Custodians walked out. Everyone who worked in a public school stood together, which meant the state couldn't keep schools running by having administrators fill in for absent teachers.

Finally, there was the sheer scope of the action. Every county. Every school district. All at once. There's a saying in labor organizing: you can ignore a few workers on a picket line, but you can't ignore an entire workforce. West Virginia teachers made themselves impossible to ignore.

The Longer View

The 2018 West Virginia teachers' strike was the first statewide teachers' strike in West Virginia since 1990. That's nearly three decades of relative labor peace, followed by an explosion of worker anger that spread across state lines and inspired millions of workers to think differently about their own power.

It's worth asking why 2018, and why West Virginia. Part of the answer is simply that conditions had deteriorated to the breaking point. Teachers had absorbed years of stagnant wages and rising costs, and the 2018 legislative session pushed them over the edge. But conditions alone don't create movements. People do.

The Facebook groups where teachers organized remind us that new technologies can enable old forms of collective action. Workers have always gathered to share grievances and plan responses; social media just made it faster and more widespread. A teacher in a rural county could coordinate with teachers in Charleston in real time, creating a sense of shared purpose that would have been much harder to build a generation earlier.

The strike also demonstrated something important about worker power in the 21st century. Many commentators had written off strikes as an outdated tactic, a relic of the industrial era. West Virginia teachers proved that withdrawing labor remains the most effective tool workers have. Employers can ignore petitions, dismiss lobbying efforts, and wait out protests. They cannot operate without workers.

The Questions That Remain

Did the strike fundamentally change education in West Virginia? The honest answer is: somewhat, but not entirely.

Teachers got their 5 percent raise. That was real money in real paychecks. But West Virginia still ranks near the bottom nationally for teacher compensation. The state still struggles to attract and retain teachers. The underlying fiscal challenges that made the crisis possible haven't disappeared.

Perhaps more importantly, the strike changed how teachers across America think about themselves and their power. The Red for Ed movement it inspired achieved mixed results—some states saw significant wins, others saw token concessions—but it established that teachers were willing to fight. That matters for future negotiations, even when no strike occurs.

The wildcat nature of the strike also raised uncomfortable questions for traditional labor unions. If rank-and-file workers can organize themselves through social media and ignore their union leadership, what exactly is the role of unions? Some saw this as a crisis for organized labor; others saw it as a renaissance, a return to labor's more radical roots.

What's certain is that for nine days in early 2018, some of the lowest-paid public employees in America stopped everything, defied everyone who told them to quit, and walked away with a victory. That's the kind of story that changes how people think about what's possible.