This article examines both the Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG) contract campaigns that have emerged among teachers unions in the years since the Great Recession and the #RedforEd strikes and mobilizations of 2018. It finds that although these efforts emerged in very different contexts and with quite different levels of planning and organization, they nonetheless evolved in similar directions. Both BCG campaigns and the #RedforEd mobilizations framed their efforts in broad terms as defenses of the common good; both were grounded in and dependent upon strong community alliances; and both achieved a significant increase in teacher militancy in large part because of these factors. Taken together, the BCG campaigns and #RedforEd mobilizations help illustrate our need to rethink collective bargaining in ways that allow us to confront the structural inequalities that are steadily undermining both our schools and our democracy.
DruckerPeter F.1969. The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society. New York: Harper & Row.
12.
GreenhouseSteven. 2019. Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Labor Movement. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
13.
HaleyMargaret. 1904. “Why Teachers Should Organize.” National Educational Association of the United States, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the 43 rd Annual Meeting. Winnona, Minn.: National Education Association.
14.
HaleyMargaret. 1982. Battleground: The Autobiography of Margaret A. Haley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
MurphyMarjorie. 1981. “Taxation and Social Conflict: Teacher Unionism and Public School Finance in Chicago, 1898-1914.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society74:242-60.
28.
MurphyMarjorie. 1990. Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
PooAi-jen. 2015. The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America. New York: The New Press.
31.
RavitchDiane. 2014. The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. New York: Vintage Books.
32.
RickerMary Cathryn. 2015. “Teacher-Community Unionism: A Lesson from St. Paul.” Dissent63 (3): 72-77.
33.
SanesMillaSchmittJohn. 2014. Regulation of Public Sector Collective Bargaining in the States. Washington, DC: Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, March. http://cepr.net/documents/state-public-cb-2014-03.pdf.
34.
SheltonJon. 2017. Teacher Strike: Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
35.
ShoganRobert. 2006. The Battle of Blair Mountain. New York: Basic Books.
SneidermanMarilynMcCartinJoseph A.2018. “Bargaining for the Common Good: An Emerging Tool for Re-Building Worker Power.” In No One Size Fits All: Worker Organization, Policy, and Movement for a New Economic Age, edited by FineJaniceBurnhamLindaGriffithKatiJiMinsunNarroVictorPittsSteven, 189-203. Urbana: Labor and Employment Relations Series, University of Press.
39.
UetrichtMicah. 2014. Strike for America: Chicago Teachers against Austerity. New York: Verso.
