Collection: When Teachers Mobilize

In 2019, there were 25 major work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers and lasting at least one shift, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Between 2010 and 2019 there were a total of 154 work stoppages, averaging 15 stoppages a year.

In 2019, the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions—the union membership rate—was 10.3 percent, down by 0.2 percentage point from 2018, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

In 1907, Grace Strachan, a school principal and leader of New York’s Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT), explained the significance of the organized teachers’ campaign. “I don’t think any of us are working simply for our own interests,” she offered.

This article examines both the Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG) contract campaigns that have emerged among teachers unions in the years since the Great Recession and the #RedforEd strikes and mobilizations of 2018.

In 1977, a bill to better enforce the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) sailed quickly through the House of Representatives. Facing a Senate filibuster, its proponents weakened the proposal—making it, according to historian Jefferson Cowie, “lean, moderate, and basically unchallenging to the corporate order.”

“Culture becomes not a haven of ideas or a fixed state of experience but a social imaginary erupting out of a storied cultural real.” (Stewart 1996, 63-4)

I remember the day when my father, a West Virginia University professor, accompanied some of his students to Charleston for Undergraduate Research Day at the Capitol in February 2018.

If the 1960’s were known as the era of vigorous student militancy in most sectors of American education, the 1970’s may well go down in history as the decade of the angry teacher.

Not long ago, in the pages of this journal, I argued a number of propositions about the current state of historical research in the area of teacher unionism. One of those propositions was that a full explanation of the history of teacher union activity in the U.S.A. quite likely would require a three-pronged analysis involving the local, state, and national arenas.

In 2007, the National Education Association celebrated its 150th year. Over this time, NEA has been a driving force in education at all levels.

The ongoing Red for Ed movement in Arizona sparks an interesting discussion on its place as a social movement. This thesis examines the movement in close detail, particularly in regard to how it fits within the social movement literature’s insider/outsider framework.

While studies of the New York City Teachers Union (TU) generally attribute its eventual demise to the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s, this article situates the TU in the history of New York City teachers associations more generally.

When Teachers Mobilize Oral Histories