Social Reproductive Workers Strike Back: Social Reproduction Feminism and Teachers’ Work

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: The Work of Teachers, Teacher Organizations, and Unions (Table 12)

Abstract

This study examined the recent upsurge in teacher strike activity in the United States through a social reproduction feminist lens. An analysis of strike data between 2000 and 2022 demonstrated that the proportion of social reproductive workers compared to non-social reproductive workers on strike fully inverted in the past two decades. Whereas non-social reproductive workers formed the majority of strikers from 2000 through 2011, with the exception of 2001, social reproductive workers made up the majority in all but two years since. I argue that the contradictory relationship between production and reproduction under capitalism intensified amid the neoliberal era and created conditions for an opening in consciousness—or a critical correspondence (Fritzell, 1987; Robertson, 2002)—among these workers.

Author

• Riley Collins, University of California - Santa Cruz