Charles Canniff summoned the era before teacher unions had collective bargaining powers as he accepted this year’s Ben Rust Award, the highest recognition given by the Federation.

Canniff, who founded the Newport-Mesa Federation of Teachers, Local 1794, recalled the days when a state law called the Winton Act set the stage for labor management relations for teachers.

Under that law, any agreements were reduced to a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, which was then adopted as board policy. The board, if it saw fit, could unilaterally amend the MOU. Canniff said the process was called “meet-and-confer” but the teachers dubbed it “meet-and-defer.”

He recalled the first grievance where he represented teachers. Canniff said it was a clear violation of contract under the MOU, a slam dunk, but, as he left the “office of the highly paid Education Association director, the director said, ‘By the way, we have to represent the principal, too.’”

Canniff joined others in 1969 to bring Raoul Teilhet, “this guy affiliated with the AFL-CIO, into rich Orange County. We put out a flyer for the event and 60 people showed up to hear him.” Twenty-two of them signed the first charter for the nascent AFT local.

He recalls that the Newport-Mesa district superintendent in those days had a huge harpoon mounted on the wall behind his desk so Canniff and other local organizers started a newsletter called The Harpoon. “We got together in a bar on Fridays and wrote articles about problems teachers were having. It even had a union bug on it, and, in Orange County, that was difficult. People liked it so we kept doing it.”

Discontent with the meet-and-confer approach grew, and by 1975 state Senator Albert Rodda, himself a former CFT local president, introduced SB 160 (also called the Rodda Act), the bill that finally brought collective bargaining to teachers and classified employees, like workers in other unions already had.

By then CFT had recruited Canniff to work on staff and help organize locals all over California and beyond. In an organizing campaign in Hawaii, he said they worked to exhaustion and beyond building support for a jurisdictional vote. When they were ready to collapse one organizer said, “There will be a vote count on May 3 and, if we lose that election by one vote, will you be able to look yourself in the face if you could have worked a little harder?”

Another of his first duties as a staffer came at CFT Convention. “One brother rose to the microphone and said, ‘Do we know that this is Black Eagle lettuce we are eating?’” From the podium, CFT President Raoul Teilhet requested Canniff to go down to the hotel refrigerators and check the lettuce boxes for the Black Eagle emblem of the United Farm Workers. “Our causes were sometimes bigger than our own issues,” he said.

In the early 1980s, Canniff co-founded the western incarnation of the now-popular Union Leadership Institute. “My major memory,” he recalled, “was seeing Jerry Brown and Mary Bergan talking the hell out of politics. And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s our governor and that’s one of our people talking to him.’”

Canniff also told the story of getting ready to argue a grievance and being coached, “Just tell them their action was arbitrary, discriminatory and capricious.” He said it worked because the administration didn’t know what it meant. “Remember those words,” he concluded, and the crowd at the award luncheon chimed in, “Arbitrary, Discriminatory and Capricious!”