Salaried Professionals, Unite? The Emergence of Teacher Unionism in the US

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 6: Unionization, Collective Bargaining, and Worker Organization

Abstract

While all relying on different theoretical frameworks, theorists of the “middle class” agree on the basic fact that its political and ideological orientations differ markedly from the (manual/manufacturing) working class. This makes it relevant to ask, why and how does a group of employees come to adopt collective bargaining and striking after previously organizing in a professional association? As a way of better understanding the varying character in terms of organization and mobilization of the non-manual working class, this paper analyzes the transformation of the National Education Association (NEA) through which the teacher organization came closer to being a union in the 1970s. The association moved from favoring lobbying state legislatures and relying on local decision-making processes to secure more funds (for schools and teachers’ salaries) while remaining uninterested in strikes and collective bargaining to precisely practicing these tactics. To answer this, the paper relies on a qualitative analysis of archival materials that sheds light on the process of labor tactics adoption. The paper shows how resistance to the more common labor tactics came from the treatment of teachers as part of a broader education profession with boards of education and administrative positions. Fragmentation resulted from an emerging tension between teachers and boards/administrators on the issue of funding after prior modes of appropriation (state legislature lobbying and local-level processes) became ineffective by the early 1960s. Moreover, this would allow teacher union organizing (led by the American Federation of Teachers [AFT]) to gain traction. These findings suggest that teachers’ transformation was far from automatic but rather a process in which identities of professionalism and employment status were debated, tested out, and reformulated. It also points to an important transition away from the prior model through which teachers’ labor was secured in the immediate postwar period; it suggests potential connections between the emerging tensions within the welfare state model and the fall of the professional association model among teachers.

Author

• Alonzo Ackerman, University of California-Berkeley