You can read part one of this series here and part two here.
By 1976, most Delawareans could be forgiven when looking back at the last eight years and not being totally satisfied. Ever since the uprisings and occupation in 1968, the city of Wilmington and Delaware more broadly had experienced a series of overlapping crises from budget crunches to racial unrest to teachers’ strikes. Just months after the Wilmington Federation of Teachers strike ended, the Farmers Bank, where the state stored most of its treasury, caused a political crisis when it nearly closed under financial pressures.
The WFT contract in 1975 had seemed like a temporary victory for the teachers, but they would now face their greatest threat yet. In 1971, five Black parents, supported by the ACLU, successfully requested that the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware reopen Evans v. Buchanan. This case was originally filed by Brenda Evans, a parent down in Clayton, but it was now being applied to declare that the Wilmington schools were still legally segregated. The desegregation case from 1971 was entering its final stage in the coming years, and the people who would be responsible for carrying it out were not going to be friends of the workers.
With times still tough, Delaware voters had once again chosen change in 1976. Mayor Thomas Maloney made his run for senate but, lacking an AFL-CIO endorsement due to his anti-union activities, he lost handily to incumbent Sen. Bill Roth. Down in Dover, Sherman Tribbitt became the fourth consecutive Delaware governor to serve one term. Who replaced him? Well, when things aren’t going well in Delaware, who better to turn to than a du Pont?
The Austerity Governor
Pierre “Pete” S. du Pont IV had briefly worked within his family’s company, but when a state House seat opened up in Brandywine Hundred in 1968, he ran an uncontested race and won. In 1970, when Roth left the House to run for a Senate seat, du Pont pounced at the opportunity and won again, becoming Delaware’s sole representative in Congress. Then, in the 1976 governor’s race, he trounced Sherman Tribbitt 56% to 42%.
Coming into office in 1977, Pete du Pont saw three interlocked challenges that needed to be fix: The endless fiscal crises which had plagued the state, a lack of trust in government, and the impression that Delaware was anti-business. That final point may seem absurd today, but the passage of the Coastal Zone Act, the aborted attempt to pass a tax on Getty Oil, and other last-minute tax increases to address budget crises had soured the business community on Delaware’s economy. And those businesses were increasingly getting organized.
Du Pont quickly moved to overhaul the state’s budget process. He created the Delaware Economic and Finance Advisory Council (DEFAC) which would take the power of budget estimates away from the legislature and centralize it within the executive branch, working alongside a newly created Office of Management and Budget that rapidly expanded in size. Next, du Pont implemented a hiring freeze and a suspension of cost-of-living increases for state employees, while promising pay raises for the out-of-state members of his cabinet.
The new measures were sharply contested by unions and the General Assembly, with the legislature passing their own version of the budget that du Pont vetoed. The political fight ended up coming to a surprisingly cordial conclusion when it turned out DEFAC had underestimated the amount of revenue that would be raised, allowing the gaps in the budget to be filled.
However, a statement had been made on the economic side. Cost of living increases for public-sector employees had still been slashed, and the new governor was committed to a new form of fiscal conservatism dedicated to lowering costs rather than increasing revenue, almost always at the expense of state employees and social programs.
With the immediate budget crisis resolved, du Pont turned his attention to some broader reforms. Around the time that du Pont took office, Alexander Giacco and Irving Shapiro, presidents of Hercules and DuPont, respectively, went on a crusade against the state’s economic policy, especially taking aim at its income tax. At the time, Delaware had a top tax bracket of $100,000, and income over that amount was taxed at 19.8% in the mid-1970s. For well-paid corporate executives, this was an untenable position, and they saw it as indicative of the state’s larger anti-business attitudes.
Most Delawareans didn’t make anywhere near $100,000, but Hercules and DuPont were the state’s largest employers, and they were now threatening to move operations out-of-state while also keeping other businesses from moving in. Seeking to avoid this, du Pont pushed for legislative action. After cutting spending, he felt that he could now also cut taxes. Over the following two years, he would slash the top tax rate from 19.8% to 13.5%. At the same time, he threw his support behind a constitutional amendment which would require a three-fifths vote by the legislature to raise any new taxes or fees. The business community was satisfied, but these new laws would create their own problems when the need for new spending arose.
Desegregation Comes to Wilmington
Meanwhile, another political hot potato was working its way through the federal court. In November 1975, just weeks after the Wilmington teachers’ strike ended, the Supreme Court issued a ruling upholding the decision that Wilmington’s schools were segregated and must be integrated. Some form of county-wide district now seemed inevitable.
It was the outcome that everyone expected and many people feared and opponents were ready for. In February of 1975, many anti-busing white suburbanites had come together to form the Positive Action Committee, an explicitly anti-liberal organization that would loudly pressure the state’s government over the following years.
In Wilmington, responses to the possibility of desegregation and a unified county-wide school board were much more mixed. The Wilmington School District had supported the effort since 1972, but the Black community was once again divided on a key education issue. Many Black leaders and parents feared that busing their children into the suburbs to be among culturally incompetent and potentially hostile white teachers and classmates would actually harm them. However, the Wilmington NAACP eventually joined the desegregation suit once James Sills became president of the chapter in 1974, and the Home and School Council helped organize the Parent Educational Resource Center under the leadership of Jea Street to make the transition smoothly.
On the teachers side, Warnick and the WFT had been preparing since even before the 1975 strike with the creation of the New Castle County Federation of Teachers. However, the mixed results of their strike and the slow progress of the desegregation process seemed to squash any momentum they might have had. Throughout 1976 and 1977, a variety of different government officials and community groups tried to create a potpourri of solutions to desegregation that could satiate the anti-busing crowd while holding up to the court’s standard, but every single one of their plans was rejected. Eventually it all came down to one federal judge.
On Jan. 9, 1978, Judge Murray Schwartz made his final decision. Desegregation would begin in the upcoming school year, and it would take the form of a new unified New Castle County School District. County students, mostly white, would have to attend three consecutive years in city schools, while city students, mostly Black, would be bused out to the suburbs for nine years. Beyond that, the specifics were now to be decided by a new five-person New Castle County School Board.
One of the most pressing things that the new Board would have to decide is who would be the bargaining agent for their staff. An election was set for Thursday, Feb. 16 to decide who would represent the district’s 4,200 teachers, nurses, and counselors. Smaller votes would be held for aides, secretaries, and bus drivers, but teachers were the ultimate prize. After a decade of fighting, the Delaware Federation of Teachers, the new statewide version of the WFT, and the Delaware State Education Association would now have the opportunity to go head to head in a final showdown.
Both unions were focused on a key point facing the desegregated school district: whether or not teachers’ salaries would be “leveled up”. By 1978, Wilmington teachers were still getting paid between $2,700 to $4,434 more than county teachers, around $13,000-$22,000 in today’s money. Now that all the teachers were working under the same system, they wanted to all be paid that higher amount. However, Judge Schwartz had set a new cap on property taxes as a part of his order that was lower than Wilmington’s, and Governor du Pont was in the process of passing a constitutional amendment limiting new taxes at the state level. This fight, much like the fight in 1975, would be against an explicitly hostile government that was unwilling to raise taxes in order to pay teachers better.
Before the fight over salaries could begin, the fight over who would represent the teachers had to be settled. From the start, it was clear that DFT was the underdog. DSEA had always had more members in the suburbs, and a straight tally of membership in the county as a whole would have marked them as the easy victors. But the DFT had been in this situation before. In 1968, they had won an election to represent Wilmington teachers despite having few members, and in the years since they had negotiated one of the best teachers contracts in the country. If the county teachers wanted to all have Wilmington’s contract, then why not elect the union that had negotiated it?
Unfortunately for DFT, it was no longer 1968. On Feb. 16, DSEA received an overwhelming victory as teachers voted 2825-1263 to elect the association as their sole bargaining agent. The race had never been close. On top of the clear membership advantage, DSEA had spent between $15,000-$20,000 on their campaign, while DFT had only spent “several thousand,” according to reports. The federation cried foul, claiming they had not been given proper access to suburban schools to talk to teachers, but it didn’t matter. Despite claiming a condolence prize, winning representation of aides and secretaries in new elections held in June, the Delaware Federation of Teachers would never again represent teachers in the state of Delaware.
Leveling Up
DSEA didn’t have long to rest on its laurels. The union had made a lot of big promises to become the sole bargaining agent for all New Castle County teachers, and they were facing long odds to actually meet those goals. To level all the teachers up to Wilmington salaries, they would have to get the county and state to spend $22 million that they said they did not have. This would more than likely require tax increases from a county government that legally was now not allowed to raise taxes and a state government that was in the process of passing a constitutional amendment to handicap its ability to raise revenue.
Negotiations began shortly after the election of DSEA as the sole bargaining unit for New Castle County teachers in the midst of a broader wave of planning over how desegregation would finally be implemented. Unsurprisingly, the union and board were not able to make much progress. The whole time, DFT snipped at them. In May, they flyered teachers lambasting the proposed deals that DSEA had made. In September, when teachers agreed to go back to school on their previous contract in order to ensure a smooth start to desegregation, James Warnick, now president of the New Castle County Federation of Teachers, sniped in the press, “Teachers should not be expected to work without a contract.”
While teachers did return to work, negotiations continued on. However, about a month later, negotiations once again reached a standstill. While many items had been settled, the board and union were still divided on issues like how teachers were to be transferred, how long the contract would last, and how much control they would have over their workload. At the top of the list, of course, was leveling up. The union was no longer asking for the salaries to be leveled up that year, but they still wanted it the following year. The district, on the other hand, was offering salaries to finally be equalized, but only at the end of the three-year contract.
This proposal was not enough for the teachers. On Sunday, Oct. 15, hundreds of teachers piled into a converted storefront and voted in favor of a strike. Michael Epler, head of the New Castle County Education Association, railed against the district to his members: “you have indicated your willingness to be treated as citizens, not slaves, not worms to be stepped on by the board.”
Later that day, 500 other teachers, mostly still affiliated with DFT despite DSEA’s victory, piled into another building to make the opposite decision. These mostly Wilmington-based teachers had nothing to gain from the strike, given that they were already paid the high salaries that other teachers were trying to obtain. They were also still loyal to the DFT, and saw this purely as a DSEA operation. In protest, they voted 371-165 to not support the strike.
On Monday, Oct. 16, a now-familiar sight once again played out as picket lines descended on New Castle County’s schools. Around 80% of teachers walked out and student attendance plummeted to around 35%. Most of the teachers who arrived at work were members of DFT, though James Warnick himself did not cross the picket line. Within days, the well-rehearsed crackdown arrived as well, though less harshly than before. On Wednesday, Chancellor William Marvel of the Chancery Court ordered the teachers back to work, but the order was milder than the immediate action seen in 1975. It was just a temporary restraining order which had no fine, and Marvel turned down the board’s requests to take more harsh and immediate action as the governor and attorney general also held back.
Understanding the financial constraints they were working against, DSEA scoured the county’s budget, finding $3.5 million of spare money just from other parts of the education budget that they believed could be used to level up teachers’ salaries. The county countered, saying it was only $1.6 million and it was needed to fill a budget deficit, not pay teachers more. When he finally spoke on the strike, Governor du Pont made a similar claim: “We’ve made a large pay raise available to them, and I think we’ve done more than our fair share for them.”
At this point, the pressure ramped up. On Wednesday, Oct. 25, with his temporary restraining order expired, Chancellor Marvel now set a contempt of court fine of $30,000 if teachers didn’t return to work by the following Monday, with an additional $6,000 fine for every day the strike continued past that. However, as negotiations stalled, the strike continued past the deadline and the fines began, to be paid with union dues.
While the county-wide 1978 strike was hitting similar chords to the strike of 1975, one key difference was the level of community support. From the early days of the strike, parents were already heavily split, but as the strike wore on into November, Governor du Pont intervened. When the union and board requested that he call a special session of the General Assembly to help raise the extra $3.2 million needed to raise the gap they were negotiating, he refused, instead sending a letter to the striking teachers telling them to “face the facts” and accept a compromised deal.
Behind the scenes, du Pont worked to rally parent groups from the Positive Action Committee to Citizens’ Alliance for Public Education to convince them that the teachers’ demands were simply not possible. He helped them put together a “parents’ plan”, released on Saturday, Nov. 11, to end the strike essentially on the board’s existing terms. The following week, the district threatened to start firing teachers. Finally, on Friday, Nov. 16., du Pont said that unless the strike ended by the following week, he would refuse to use the money saved by not paying striking workers to help reach a settlement. As another nail in the coffin, the AFL-CIO refused to consider the same sympathy strike for the non-affiliated DSEA that they had extended to the DFT back in 1975.
Ultimately, it was all too much to continue. On Sunday, Nov. 19, New Castle County teachers overwhelmingly supported a new contract offered by the board. The contract was essentially just a mildly-updated version of the board’s offer from weeks before: salaries would modestly increase but fell well short of the leveling-up that was promised back in February. The suburban teachers would reach the Wilmington pay scale in 1981, but the Wilmington teachers’ salaries would be frozen until then. Reprisals against striking teachers were avoided, but future protections against involuntary transfers between schools were not written off. Delaware’s last teacher strike was now over, but it was unclear what they had really won.
The Neoliberal State
DSEA’s underwhelming contract was little consolation for the leadership of the Delaware Federation of Teachers. Just weeks after the strike ended, DFT lost another representation election to DSEA 153-117, this time being rejected by teachers in New Castle County’s Vocational-Technical School District. The following year, the aides and paraprofessionals represented by DFT agreed to contracts that slashed wages in order to prevent mass layoffs, and yet many were still fired just months later.
Nevertheless, DFT members in New Castle County were still behind James Warnick. When the president of the statewide DFT challenged Warnick in 1980, Warnick narrowly defeated him 169-156. In a pattern that seemed to loom over the federation’s entire existence, the election was very explicitly Black vs white, and enough teachers still believed in the union’s ability to serve as a voice for Black teachers for Warnick to win the day.
Meanwhile, the prospects of redistricting sprung once again. Boundaries for four new districts, today known as Brandywine, Christina, Colonial, and Red Clay, were introduced near the end of 1980, to be made official for the following school year. No real attempt was made to shake the teachers loose from DSEA in the new districts, even as city teachers were now scattered into the surrounding districts, but non-teacher elections once again secured aides for DFT. Administrators once again feared the strikes that had been seen three and six years before, but nothing like that was to come. The new DSEA affiliates in each district engaged in contested and drawn-out negotiations, once again led by Perry Goldlust, with the final contract being signed in November 1982, but they never walked out en masse. After fourteen years of persistent conflict, it seemed things had finally settled down.
As these negotiations were going on, Governor du Pont had turned his attention more explicitly to the issue of teacher unions. After locking down the state’s finances and averting a big salary increase, du Pont and his administration wanted to rationalize the state’s labor relations. The last decade had seen at least three major teachers’ strikes, along with walkouts by public sanitation and hospital workers. It was bad for business.
After floating a proposal in 1979, the administration revealed its opening bargain for a new system of public employee labor management in June 1980. The bill created a three-person Public Employment Relations Board to oversee bargaining, as well as set clearer timetables for fact finding and bargaining, but most importantly it added new even more weapons against public employee strikes: expanding the definition of what was considered a strike, requiring immediate injunctions, increasing the fines, and even stripping unions of the right to a membership dues tax deduction if their members engaged in strikes.
By now, the main two unions involved in the negotiations were DSEA and AFSCME, which represented most unionized non-teacher government workers. They had been working on a more friendly piece of legislation, and were horrified by the massive overhaul, but they were forced to play ball.
Over the following two years, the unions and administration negotiated for a new version of the bill, eventually resulting in House Bill 557, which passed in 1982. The new legislation was less onerous than the original du Pont version, avoiding some of the harsher penalties for striking, but it still codified the tactics that the districts had used against teachers since 1975, using the Chancery Court to heap fines upon the unions. In the midst of their post-redistricting negotiations, DSEA publicly welcomed the bill, which set clearer boundaries and timelines when it came to the neverending negotiations with the new districts.
But the bill served as a sort of Taft-Hartley Act for state workers: bringing labor peace on the back of new restrictions on the rights of unions, the criminalization of militancy, and the creation of a new set of “unfair labor practices” on the union side. Beaten down by failed strikes and led by a significantly less militant union, the teachers accepted the new norm. That is still the law in place over forty years later, and the teachers have never striked in that time.
With the teachers whipped into shape, du Pont engaged in what would become two of the defining moves of his administration. In 1981, he created the Delaware Economic Development Office (DEDO), which would cater to the needs of businesses: identifying promising out-of-state businesses and trying to incentivize them to move to Delaware, and keeping in touch with local businesses and doing whatever they could to give them what they wanted. This was not the removal of government from the marketplace, but rather updating its role from that of a regulator to that of a concierge service.
The same year, du Pont ushered through the Financial Center Development Act. The legislation had been negotiated directly alongside several New York banks, who were tired of high interest rates and corporate taxes in their home state. The FCDA replaced the existing franchise tax rate with a regressive scale that actually decreased taxation levels for larger banks, eliminated any restrictions on interest rates, and allowed banks to charge any fees that they wanted.
The draconian aspects of this law drew widespread national anger, most notably from Ralph Nader. But in Delaware, du Pont held a press conference on Jan. 14, 1981 and passed on an ultimatum from the banks: Legislators must pass the bill by Feb. 4 or none of them would bring their jobs to Delaware. The legislature compiled and passed the Financial Center Development Act on Feb. 3. The bill ended up being wildly successful as dozens of banks moved operations to Delaware, bringing tens of thousands of jobs over the following years. They remain a crucial part of our economy today.
The crushing of the teachers strikes and the rise of DEDO and the FCDA marked a crucial turning point in Delaware’s history. They squared the circle of du Pont’s fiscal conservatism. Tax cuts could stand alongside a healthy government as long as that lost income tax revenue was made up for with bank revenue and franchise taxes. The dream of the 1960s, a multi-racial social democracy driven by powerful unions and radical community groups, was dead. In its place was the dream of the 1980s: A neoliberal state dedicated to sidelining labor and catering to business, supported by a public that was bought in through corporate prosperity and low taxes.
Afterward
For the most part, the status quo created in Delaware in the late 1970s and early 1980s remains to this day. When people speak of the “Delaware Way”, whether they refer to the congenial political climate, the corporate-friendly policies, or the strict budgeting, they speak to a way of doing politics that started with Pete du Pont and has continued with every administration since then.
This Delaware Way brought about a lesser equality than what had been dreamed of in the 1960s before compounding crises undermined those efforts. The schools were integrated, but it was at the expense of the culture and sovereignty of the students, parents, and teachers in the city. A new system for collective bargaining was created, but it was done in a way that undermined the militancy that made Wilmington teachers some of the best-paid in the country. The fiscal mismanagement of Delaware’s budget was solved, but in a way that benefited the most wealthy.
That status quo worked for a lot of people for a long time, but the last two decades have begun to put more strain on the idea that the Delaware Way works for everyone. In 2014, nearly 50 years after its occupation, Wilmington was infamously labeled Murder Town USA in Newsweek, highlighting the systemic violence that has lingered for decades in Delaware’s largest city, seemingly untouched by the corporate prosperity surrounding it.
Wilmington’s schools, students, and teachers have also continued to struggle. Efforts from the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission to the Reading Consortium have sought to address some of the city’s underlying problems, and an ACLU lawsuit helped bring new money into the school system, but test scores still lag behind. Many of the reforms offered by the successors to du Pont, from charter schools to increased testing, have done little to actually improve education. Teacher pay, once the golden standard in Wilmington, is now uncompetitive compared to neighboring states, though that is beginning to slowly change.
With all the talk of teachers’ pay and redistricting in the news lately, it is starting to feel like the 1970s all over again. DSEA still serves as the sole bargaining agent for teachers across the state, for better or for worse, and though it has become increasingly diverse compared to its makeup fifty years ago, it still has not expressed the militancy that the Wilmington Federation of Teachers used to achieve some of the best teachers’ pay in the country in 1975.
What ended up happening to the Federation of Teachers? Today, it exists simply as AFT Local 762, representing around 120 classroom and bus aides in the Brandywine School District. The organization that was first founded in 1943 today continues its legacy by supporting local referendums and funding book giveaways to local students.
Whether or not a revived militancy could solve Wilmington’s education woes remains to be seen. Delaware didn’t join in on the wave of teachers’ strikes that began with the Chicago Teachers’ Union in 2012 and became national in 2017-2018 with the #RedForEd strikes. But those strikes have shown that there is still potential in militant teachers organizing to make fundamental, needed changes to our education system.
However, that change will not be able to happen without a deeper commitment to real and true funding. The neoliberal state created by Governor du Pont in his administration has made it difficult to raise taxes in a meaningful way, but a recent report declares that Delaware needs to invest an additional $500 million to $1.1 billion in our schools each year to achieve the results that we want to see. It will fall on the new governor, and the new legislative leadership, to determine if the goals set forth in this report become a reality.
The rise of neoliberalism and the Delaware Way was a very real and justifiable response to the crises of the 1970s: out-of-control inflation, shrinking public budgets, and political deadlock that threatened to bankrupt the state. However, the conditions of the past do not dictate our future. Just as those problems were addressed in the 1970s and 1980s, our current leaders have the opportunity to set a new course on the issues of health care costs, underfunded schools, fleeing corporations, and economic stagnation. They will just have to answer the question: who are they solving it for?