"We're On the Front Lines": Two Decades of Teacher Organizing in New Orleans

• In Event: Crafting, Leaving, and Organizing: Understanding Teachers’ Work in Precarious Times

Abstract

This study draws on interviews, board meeting minutes, legal records, and district and union communications to examine how New Orleans teachers have organized in response to the corporate assault on UTNO in the two decades since Hurricane Katrina. It finds that teachers’ primary motivations for unionization—job security and voice over teaching and learning conditions—are embedded within the conditions of their charter landscape and the city’s history, which has jointly catalyzed and thwarted union campaigns. Teachers expressed a sense of being “on the front lines” with few legal or institutional protections. Thus, the success of teachers’ organizing campaigns have relied on building mass solidarity in the absence of formal safeguards.

Author

• Riley Collins, University of California - Santa Cruz