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Our Time to Speak is Now: Electoral Tactics in Defending Teachers’ Collective Bargaining Rights

Mon, August 18, 8:30 to 10:10am, TBA

Abstract

Although state and corporate efforts to weaken unions are nothing new, recently these efforts have shifted to target public employees’ unions, which now include the majority of organized workers. Public school teachers in many states have been targeted by legislation that weakens or removes their collective bargaining rights, tenure, and other benefits. In this paper, I discuss electoral tactics, such as veto referenda or recall campaigns, as one approach to opposing such legislative threats. Methods of placing legislation on the ballot or bringing a vote on whether an elected official should stay in office exist in 34 states, yet teachers’ unions rarely used them in efforts against legislation threatening collective bargaining or tenure rights. I use qualitative comparative analysis to determine the causal conditions under which teachers’ unions did not use electoral tactics in states where they had the legal ability to do so.

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