Seven Challenges for Teacher Union Renewal

• In Event: Global Teacher Organizing and Union Resistance to Neoliberal Education Reforms

Abstract

Purpose: This paper arises from the experiences of teacher unions as they respond to the challenges facing teachers in different national contexts: Chile, Kenya, New Zealand, Poland, Scotland, Turkey, and the United States. Recent educational reforms have altered teachers’ work and professional identity by changing the contexts in which teaching occurs. Teacher unions have a key role in defending their members from attacks on their working conditions and professional autonomy while promoting teachers’ professional status and professional learning. However, unions are themselves under threat as they face an erosion of their involvement in policy debates and consultations, challenges to collective bargaining rights and direct attacks on their ability to exist.

Perspectives: It is essential to consider how unions can build capacity to deal with the issues that confront them by drawing on the collective strength of unions’ grassroots members. Union renewal must proactively take account of changing political conditions (Carter et al., 2010). Fundamentally, there is a focus on drawing the union’s membership into engagement and participation as part of a deeper process of democratisation (Fairbrother, 1996, 2000, 2015).

Research methods: Interviews were conducted with union staff, teachers, and observers in each case study country -- a total of 205 participants across the 7 cases. Documentary evidence was gathered; media sources, scholarly literature about educational policy activity in each location.

Results/conclusions: The paper identifies seven challenges for teacher union renewal that arise out of comparative analysis of the seven country cases, using data from the cases as illustrations:

• Organising around ideas: reframing the ‘private good, public bad’ narrative; redefining the space in which problems are defined and policy solutions are developed
• Connecting the industrial and professional: recognising that teachers’ concerns are both simultaneously
• Working both with, and against, government and employers: seeking to make progress through constructive engagement where possible, but mobilising resistance when necessary
• Building at the base: working to strengthen connections within the union organisation by developing vibrant union cultures at the grassroots, including workplace level
• Building democratic engagement: through formal and informal union structures and by finding multiple ways to involve members with diverse interests
• Connecting the profession both horizontally and vertically in order to speak for the whole profession
• Creating wider alliances with the broader union movement, civil society groups, parents and students, to mobilise the support necessary to win public policy campaigns

Significance: The paper’s intention is to give those working with and within unions a set of issues that can provide the basis for wider discussion and debate. There is much that others can learn from the paper but, ultimately, it is for the members of each union to assess what will work for them, where and when.

Authors

• Nina Bascia, University of Toronto - OISE

• Howard Stevenson, The University of Nottingham