Coda
Greg Bean
There was plenty of hokey
in the Monmouth pokey
As far as I’m concerned, the two biggest problems with the courtroom hearings in Freehold Borough that ended with the jailing of striking Middletown Township Education Association (MTEA) members by the score last week were:
1. Superior Court Judge Clarkson S. Fisher called those participating in the illegal strike before him alphabetically. If he hadn’t had to start at the A’s, he could have thrown loudmouthed MTEA President Diane K. Swaim in the pokey first and saved lots of people from having to listen to or read her infuriating babble all week. Now it looks like we may not get the satisfaction of granting Swaim her stated wish of going to jail with her colleagues and seeing her in a perp walk.
2. Until they put a second judge on the case, the process was agonizingly slow. Too bad that right after clapping Swaim in irons, they couldn’t have put all the rest of the MTEA members in jail the first day, so they all could have had the rest of the week, and more if necessary, to think about what greedy, insensitive babies they’ve been acting like throughout this entire debacle.
It’s not that I have a problem with teachers, or anyone who demands an honest wage for an honest day’s work. And I’m glad for students’ sake the teachers were scheduled to be back in class Monday and stay there through arbitration. I have a big problem with anyone, teachers included, whose selfishness blinds them or makes them insensitive to the realities of the world they live in.
In Middletown, those realities are harsh.
The community lost more residents to the World Trade Center attack, more than three dozen, and more people lost jobs as a result, than any other community in New Jersey. This in a community already reeling from a dramatic downturn in the national economy and massive layoffs at companies like Lucent.
Middletown is an economically challenged community that resoundingly defeated its last educational budget, forcing $1.1 million in cuts to the 2001-02 tab — which means the money to fund the MTEA’s demands simply does not exist without cutting programs or jobs.
It is a community where most of the taxpayers who pay these teachers’ salaries will get raises this year more in line with the national cost of living increase, between 2 and 3 percent, if they get raises at all in an economy where many companies have instituted wage freezes.
There are very few Middletown tax-payers who will be guaranteed a 3.8 percent raise this year, or 16 percent over the four-year life of the Board of Education’s proposed contract. In light of that reality, the 4.5-percent raises for teachers for each of the four years and 7 percent for secretaries over the next three years, demanded by the MTEA was ludicrous, particularly in a district where the average teacher salary is already $56,654 — the highest average in Monmouth County.
Middletown is a community where most of the taxpayers who work in private industry already pay a sizeable percentage of their annual insurance costs and have done so for a long time.
Those of us in private industry well know that the cost of health insurance for us and our families is rising rapidly, sometimes as much as 10 percent a year. Even so, most of us feel grateful to have coverage and for the lion’s share paid by our employers.
To those of us whose personal contribution to comparable family health coverage often exceeds $3,000 per year (plus co-pays), the sliding scale for employee contributions proposed by the school board sounded generous to a fault, and we simply cannot understand why this has become the major sticking point for the MTEA.
When we heard that teachers were going to jail because they refused to pay even the maximum annual employee health insurance contribution of $853 a year under the board’s proposal — about a fourth of what most of us are paying now — it made us incredibly and understandably angry.
It is a community where this ill-timed strike and the union’s unreasonable demands threatened the passage of a much-needed $10.5 million schools referendum, scheduled for a vote on Dec. 11, the day before this column will see print. I don’t have the results yet, but my prediction is that the referendum failed. If it did, the blame should lie squarely at the feet of the MTEA.
No wonder this strike and the MTEA’s demands generated such little support among the parents and taxpayers of Middletown. No wonder there were so many local and area residents who gave a silent cheer when the first of the striking MTEA members were led out of Fisher’s chambers in handcuffs.
Despite Swaim’s incredible attempts to shroud striking MTEA members in the cloak of martyrdom, this was, and is, simply a dispute about money.
It’s a dispute brought to a head by people who willingly chose their professions and clearly understood beforehand that there were certain restrictions — one being that courts have held it is illegal for public employees to strike.
It’s a dispute in which many MTEA members disregarded that restriction and broke the law, an offense for which many were rightly jailed and should have been fired.
Perhaps Swaim was right about one thing when she said last week that this fight will destroy the Middletown school district and proclaimed, "I declare it D.O.A."
If that is true, perhaps now Swaim and her ilk should do the right thing and resign, find work in another district that will appreciate them more.
I’m sure they’ll have no trouble. No doubt districts all over the nation will be lining up to hire these whiny crybabies, whose most recent residence was the Monmouth County jail.
Then again, maybe not.
Greg Bean is the executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers, which publishes the News Transcript.