In July 2020, 25,000 people died from COVID-19. Deaths that month rose by 20% with the biggest increases found in Florida, California and Texas. School districts used that month to plan for re-opening, including Florida and Texas who had all but confirmed that they would be back in-person by the fall. California was murkily undecided.
When I graduated from my teacher credential program that summer, I had no idea what school was going to look like. I moved to Oakland having been to the city twice before and saw my school for the first time weeks after accepting a position teaching transitional kindergarten. There was the uncertainty of starting a new job in a new place, and then there was the compounded confusion brought by a global pandemic. If we went back in person, what safety apparel would I need to wear, what would the classroom have, and what would happen if we got sick? If we started virtually, how much live instruction would I do, how would I modify curricula, and how were families expected to get online?
I had no idea how to answer these questions, but I knew that there was a higher power finding the answers for me. In my emails and in the news, I watched my union push and fight and push some more and fight some more, refusing to return to work until cases were low, technology was guaranteed, planning time was extended, and screen time was limited. On August 12, an agreement was reached with the bulk of the demands met. School would begin virtually twelve days later.
Teachers unions are the first and eighth largest labor organisations in the United States. The National Education Association has over three million members and a budget of over $300 million, much of which is generated from union dues and much of which is spent on lobbying and other political activities. Even in a post-Reagan landscape where labor has been all but defanged across a range of industries, teachers unions remain powerful in large part due to their financial clout and manpower, enabling them to demand better working conditions at the bargaining table, and endorse supportive candidates on the ballot box.
Nevertheless, the role of organised labor in our understanding of schools and education is oft absent from the discourse. Take, for example, how rarely in depictions of teachers in popular media are there scenes that include contract negotiations or labor disputes, despite unions playing central roles in the lives of teachers, shaping the conditions that we work in and advocating on our behalf so that we can focus on our work. One is more likely to see teachers unions depicted in headlines as disrupting students’ education through strikes or fighting reforms said to improve schools or make them more accountable.
How should we conceptualise the role of unions and organised labor when we think of education? Why is it that teachers unions, still, continue to hold power and influence particularly on a local level, and why is there a lag in translating that on a larger federal level? How do unions shape our schools and the experiences that students are having in these schools? How do they shape our world, beyond the four walls and what lessons are there to be learned?
Distance learning was, on its best days, really and truly bizarre. My first year of teaching consisted of me waking up at 8 to log on at 8:30 and then logging back off at 12, with a 30-minute break in-between. We would have our Morning Meetings where I would jump around my bedroom singing “Old McDonald Had a Farm” and I would watch tiny four-year-olds in gallery mode do the same, as their sleepy families hovered around in the background. I would have them write their names on whiteboards and then hold them up so that I could take grainy screenshots on my Mac to use as formative assessments to see how they were doing. I would pin my screen and hold up a picture of dots to have them practice counting and subitizing and later on, addition. There were moments of stress and frustration and joy and happiness as I focused on my kids and their families and trying to get them through the school year at least a little bit prepared for kindergarten.
Settling in to my first post-college job, I watched workers across industries in the throes of a pandemic resist against systems of oppression and unchecked capitalism that forced them to pee in buckets, go without protective gear, and watch idly by as their incomes stayed the same as their CEOs raked in pandemic-related riches. Under these conditions, workers had little to lose, and as companies struggled to retain and hire employees, suddenly there appeared opportunities to flex some leverage. Unionisation rates rose from 2019 to 2020, there were highly-publicised efforts to establish first-time unions at Amazon, Starbucks, and REI, and in 2021, thousands of graduate students, coalminers, hospital workers, fast-food employees, and carpenters and more held strikes and walk-outs at their places of work. Despite union participation being at a 40-year all-time low in the United States, many still believed in the power of collective organising for better, taking any and all incremental wins as wins nonetheless.
As a millennial born in 1995, labor had mostly been a political issue on the periphery, as the neoliberalism of my childhood — and adulthood — privileged private employers by weakening the power of unions, in many ways completely eliminating the topic completely. But that was before COVID. All of a sudden, I was not only seeing the resurgence of labor organising in the private sector and the gains achieved by unions in the public sector, I was experiencing in my own career how the work that the teachers union was doing, regardless of how involved or aware I was, was shaping the ease of my job, allowing me to focus on my students and their education. It was not until we got closer to the spring semester that I suddenly became an avid follower of the discussions between the district and my union. Talk about reopening was back again.
In many ways, an education is, at its core, a labor agreement. Whether it is a certificated teacher, a tutor, or a parent, one party is putting forth their time and energy, with parameters that need to be clearly stated and agreed upon. It is a consequence of narratives dually valorizing and delegitimising the work of teaching where a portrait emerges of teachers as being selfless and expected to do whatever it takes under whatever conditions to teach. After all, the Western Judeo-Christian traditions underlying much of our modern society, including our education systems, are predicated on a teacher literally dying for his students.
Teachers unions disrupt that. They remind us that teachers are not superheroes, but professionals, who deserve and are guaranteed rights and protections in order to carry out our duties. They are embedded in their local communities and carry enough financial power and membership strength to make an impact in blocking certain changes and supporting specific candidates and causes. However, their power is nowhere near the size or gravitas of other politically salient actors and groups they come across, such as private interests opening their own schools or lobbyists blocking legislation potentially limiting firearms that enter schools.
Teachers unions remain important, if anything, for the every day impact they have on an education. They help determine how many students are in a classroom, how quality teachers are recruited and retained through competitive compensation, and even how many minutes of instruction will make up a school day. Critics of teachers unions often claim that they place their own needs before those of students, for example, blocking reforms that would call for more accountability around teacher and student performance. Teachers unions often respond by arguing that those who spend the most time interfacing with students and their families, and making less than they should whilst doing so, have proven time and time again that they are always putting students first. That the conditions that teachers fight for are in the interests of students, families, and communities, because we know how ultimately, that our fates are intertwined.
On March 30, 2021, more than a year after schools had initially closed, I was back in the classroom. The spring semester would be taking place in hybrid mode, with instruction continuing primarily online and an in-person option being provided for families if they chose to take it. As students from my class met each other for the first time, eight months into the school year, they did so in classrooms equipped with air purifiers and air filters, masks and shields, hand sanitizers and gloves, all provided by the school district through state and federal funding and pushed for by the union.
But even a month into in-person instruction, only about a third of students in my class and in the district opted to return. As the union had argued, the push to reconvene business as usual was not coming from all families, and in many respects, it was coming from more privileged communities. 25% of students who qualified for free or reduced lunch participated in in-person instruction whilst 40% of students who did not came back too, in a district where 72% all students were eligible for free or reduced lunch. Even with a safe return, it was too soon for some families, which the district, vilified for arguing as much, had said the whole time.
What you have with unions is the assertion that workers not only should have a say, but are entitled to one. That those whose labor comprises part of the means of production should not be idle, grateful cogs, but active participants in their workplaces and in the industries that they know best, not just for themselves but for their sectors too. What would it take to strengthen this power where it already exists, supporting those going on strike and union-backed candidates during election seasons? How can we rebuild the labor unions of the past, by reading up on what it all means and how they have made our modern world today? How do we move forward in showing an appreciation of the workers sitting at the table so our students can sit at their desks, blissfully and rightfully unaware of all that it took to get them there in the first place?