Strike lessons from Massachusetts teachers

Peter Allen-Lamphere: Why don’t you start just by telling our readers a little bit about yourself, how you came to teaching, and what brought you into teacher unionism, and how you ended up as President of your local?

Matt Bach: Sure. I’ve been a teacher for 24 years. I am a history teacher, mostly 11th and 12th grade. Being a person who is interested, excited, and living every day as a history person, you can’t not know about the labor movement. Paradoxically, my union was being run by a do-nothing leadership, at best, at worst, [a leadership] very corrupt and in bed with management. And this was very frustrating for a core group of us in Andover, where I work

The way that we sort of found an entry into that [reforming our union] was through being part of the caucus, Educators for a Democratic Union, which was operating at the state level. And you know, EDU was able to successfully get leadership at the state level with the election of Barbara Madeloni [in 2014], who came to my local when she was campaigning and introduced me to EDU. And so some of us got involved in EDU at the state level of union politics, and then went back into our local after learning how to organize and operate. We took advantage of some real, deeply felt dissatisfaction with the union leadership, and as an insurgent candidate, I was able to defeat the president.

In the process of that, I learned a very valuable lesson: when you do this sort of thing, always run with a slate, because if you don’t run with a slate, even with the power of the local presidency (which has a lot of power, sometimes too much power), you’re going to have people around you who are making deals with management to undermine you. And that was really my first year as president. It was just a real struggle with the people who were still holding on.

P A-L: Interesting. When did you get elected? It took you a while to consolidate a team of people that you could work with as president?

MB: I was elected in 2019. It took about a year, and the way that it happened was good. Management responded in such a negative way to my being elected that they had a scorched-earth response, and one of the first things that I did was provide organizing support to an elementary school. We have ten schools in Andover, five elementary schools, and this one was dealing with a very erratic and abusive principal, so we started a bully principal removal campaign at that school. Management and the superintendent responded by putting everybody on notice that there was a hostile work environment that was being created by the union. They did fifty Weingarten meetings [potential disciplinary meetings for which union members are allowed by law to request union representation] for the fifty people who are on staff there. These members were just being questioned, up and down, and interrogated to try to root out the group of people who were activists trying to change their working conditions.

That sort of reaction, which was so severe, just gave us something to rally around, and it really defined who was going to be, you know, on the side of the members and who was going to be on the side of management. So within a year’s time, we did develop a slate to get out the old guard people, and then the pandemic hit. It just changed everybody’s perception about what they wanted their union to be.

P A-L: That sounds like what a process! Let’s talk a little bit about the strike. Obviously, taking an illegal strike action is a really brave thing to do, especially for rule-following people like teachers. I can imagine that you must have had a really challenging collective discussion in your local. Tell us the story of how Andover decided to go out on strike, and what happened?

MB: It really started again with the pandemic, because in 2020, when we were returning to school, nobody knew what was going on with the pandemic, or what type of environment they were going to be subjecting themselves to. We were trying to negotiate with district management on the conditions of return, but also things like HVAC remediation and PPE, and they refused to do any sort of negotiations.

This was the fall of 2020, and it led to the point where we were having Zoom meetings with five to six hundred members who were desperately concerned for themselves and their colleagues [some of whom] were recovering from [serious illnesses such as] cancer. We took a vote that we were not going to enter the buildings on the first day of school, that we were going to work outside. And we called this a work safety action. We did not call it a strike. We were being a little clever. ”

But we were totally misleading ourselves; we were living in a fantasy, but it was crucial that members saw this for what it was, because the Labor Board immediately responded. They immediately declared it was an illegal strike. The governor at the time, Charlie Baker, said, “Yes, this is a strike. We’re demanding that these people go back to work.” Everybody lost a day’s pay, and we did go back to work. We did get some HVAC remediation, the district did respond on that issue, but then later on, we filed a huge grievance, and members were really angry and aggressive, and they got their pay back as well.

But what these events did was lend a consciousness to our membership. Andover is an affluent community, and the teachers identify as part of the professional class. They believe in civil society and making the right arguments and giving the right evidence that will solve any sort of problem. That [faith] was broken for the majority of the membership; they understood now the power relationship between management, the state, the legal system, and themselves as workers. So they were kind of like born again or, just made aware, like in the movie The Matrix, a lot of the members talked about taking the red pill that day.

In any event, we settled an agreement that year that was not great. It was a crummy sort of settlement. People were tired. They were exhausted. They were still worried about the pandemic. They didn’t know what was going to happen.

Three years later, we were going back into negotiations in the spring of 2023, and from the start of that negotiation, we knew that we had to break the pattern of bad settlements in Andover, and we knew, at least the core of us on the bargaining team, knew that it was probably going to lead to a strike. So we started negotiations in February and March, and the key component to building up to the strike, which occurred in November, the following fall (our contract expired in August), was having silent reps. This means having democratized bargaining, having people there in large quantities, observing each session as part of the bargaining team. They caucus with us. They would vote on things, but in the session, they would be silent.

As we got closer and closer to the actual action in the fall, [member attendance at the bargaining sessions] was up to like 100-200 people at every session. When I said at the [UCORE] conference that indignation was the best inoculation, people sitting through those sessions and seeing the abusive mentality of the school committee and management, it was just festering and bubbling up and fermenting in them: a desire to do something. Or, in some cases, people said, “We’re either doing something or I’m leaving. I’m not coming back to this anymore.” And there’s a lot of talk about escalating to a strike. You do your rally downtown, some sign-holding, you do work-to-rule, and all that is necessary to build people up. But I think a lot of people were like, I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to go right to a real action that’s going to mean something. So we did some of it [these escalating actions] as performative.

We did a rolling work-to-rule in the fall, where one building per week did work-to-rule. But I’m sure you know work-to-rule is actually more of an inconvenience for the teachers. Traditionally, it would be that you work within the contract, so you don’t do anything above and beyond. Maybe you don’t write recommendations, or you don’t participate actively in a faculty meeting. You leave as a group together at the end of the day. You go in as a group together at the beginning of the day. So you’re only doing the contractual time. You’re not doing clubs for free or anything extra-contractual. All the volunteerism that we do is gone. What that has done in the past is create this environment where people are sneaking into the building to get copies before the picket [because it’s near impossible to do the job in the time allotted]. So we just said, we’re going to do this one building, one day a week, and what it’s really for is, number one, to put the community on notice that something is happening here. They don’t know whether we’re actually doing [a full-blown] work-to-rule [campaign] or they just hear it and they say, “Oh, teachers are up in arms.” And it was preparing our members to think about what it meant to do an action together and talk to each other and hold a sign, and begin having the one-on-one conversations that we needed to have to rate people’s readiness to go on strike.

Two hundred people volunteered to be silent reps. We had to do some active recruiting to make sure that we had people there. But at one session, we had about two hundred people, and they were in the adjoining auditorium, and we went into the school committee and said, “We have 200 people here that want to watch. You guys should come into the auditorium and we’ll bargain there on the stage, right?” They refused.

So then we said, “Well, what about closed circuit?” We can put it on a Zoom camera, and we can broadcast it for the overflow in the auditorium. They refused that as well. We came in with 50 people, and then we gave our most recent proposal, and then we said, now we need to caucus before you respond. So we left, and then we went back to the auditorium, and we got 50 new people and brought 50 new people in, and the school committee was immediately so pissed off. And what it did was it made them more and more agitated. It made the members excited. We would go back into the auditorium and say, “We’re doing this, we need 50 more people.” And people are running down the rows, pushing each other out of the way to be part of it.

At that point, I said to my vice president, “They’re going to offer just enough to get the moderates in our membership to accept it [the contract deal], and that’ll be it. There will be no strike.”

They never did that. They never budged. They were so close they could have snuffed out the whole thing. They refused to acknowledge what was about to hit them like a freight train

We ended up going out [on strike] over five days

P A-L: The settlement that came out had really significant raises for service-related professionals. That’s very important in New York, where they have poverty wages, as I’m sure they do in Massachusetts. It’s really been a galvanizing issue for our members, both teachers and paraprofessionals. How did you guys bargain that, and what were the political dynamics around that demand?

MB: Our Vice President called that the tip of the spear. We made that the face of our campaign. They are called instructional assistants in Andover, at the top level, [they were earning] maybe close to $30,000 a year. So it was a living wage campaign for them that we really focused on anytime we faced the media. We talked about how these are the people who are giving services to our most in need, students who have the greatest learning challenges, people who get the brunt of dysregulated students at the elementary level, and are sometimes even physically attacked.

These are the people who you’re not giving a living wage to. And we also combined our bargaining team into one team. These are separate units within the local, but we decided early on that we were going to attend every session together, even when the school committee refused to acknowledge that. They would have separate sessions still for Unit A and Unit B, but it would be very repetitive. We’d say, “Okay, you can do that, but we’re going to talk about the same things we talked about last Wednesday in this session”. And so it was a real thing we did—I wouldn’t say symbolic—we had to remind our membership that we were all in this together, and that we were not settling money for the teachers until we got this living wage for our instructional assistants. And traditionally, it had been the other way around, that whatever the teachers got, then management would do the assistance contract next. And so, like, if you know, like a good raise for teachers, three or 4%, that doesn’t mean anything for lower-paid workers.

P A-L: Right. New York has a pattern bargaining, legal precedents that mean it’s very hard to win different percentage raises for lower-paid employees. People have been looking for a way to break that.

Can you place the strike a little bit more in the context of the strike wave that’s been going on in Massachusetts, and you’ve talked a little bit about the role of EDU, but what has the caucus played in that wave?

MB: It’s been a central role, because all of our locals [that went out on strike] somehow have [EDU involvement]. Most of the strike wave was, first of all, concentrated in the Northeast metro area of Boston. The first district that went out in October 2019 was Dedham. And the president there was a long-time EDU member. The next was Brookline, then Haverhill-Malden and Woburn, and then Andover, and then Newton, and then, most recently, Beverly, Marblehead, and Gloucester. Some of those locals didn’t have EDU people or caucus people in them, but what they benefited from was that EDU had taken control of leadership positions in the state affiliate, and by doing that, provided the type of organizing support that is necessary for locals to get strike-ready.

There’s no way that the state affiliate can get a local to go on strike. That’s not the way it happens. But what they can do is provide you with the type of support, not just limited to strikes, but any type of campaign, whether it’s changing the members on your school committee, getting rid of a mayor, or doing a tax override. The type of organizing support those campaigns require didn’t exist in MTA prior to EDU getting involved. There were no workers called organizers in the state affiliate, and EDU made it a philosophical and programmatic change to get organizing support.

P A-L: So you’re running for president of MTA. Can we talk a little bit about the dynamic of being a militant progressive caucus inside a union, and also holding leadership at the same time? How has your caucus managed to keep your leadership accountable, and how do you expect to be held accountable if you win the presidency? Not a lot of caucuses have been able to successfully walk that tightrope.

MB: The first thing we do is we have an endorsement process, like a primary. That is very democratic. The first few times we did it, it was a little bit less democratic, in the sense that it was kind of like a small group of people who were still sort of pushing who they thought was strategically the best person in the caucus to win. This time around, it was really a contested election, and the one person I was running against is currently the vice president of the state affiliate. So it was tense for a lot of people, because it was a growing pain in the caucus, that we were now actually interrogating who should be a leader. We were interrogating whether we were becoming an old guard system where we had an ascension model, where the next person in line becomes the nominee. And that changed.

As far as accountability goes, we haven’t been 100% in terms of having a solution to that issue. We were talking about it at UCORE. We’re trying to figure out: do we have the president and the vice president meet with the caucus before every board meeting to get marching orders? How do we keep leadership tight on our principles and doing the things that we want them to be doing, rather than having meetings where the leadership comes to the caucus and says, “This is what we’re doing, and we need you guys to support,” because that can happen too.

So I expect to have the caucus provide me with a platform, and that’s the first step that we did. We had a retreat, and we had about 80 people in the caucus attend in June and methodically go through a platform for myself and the vice president nominee that we are going to be tied to. When we’re running and campaigning, and people say, “What’s your platform?” I’m going to say, “Well, my platform is the EDU platform, which was generated by all these members. So I don’t have the clearest answer for you, but it’s something that we’re working on.

P A-L: Yes, it’s an evolving process. Lastly, we know that state repression has accelerated with the most recent strikes. The fines have been more punishing, bankrupting a number of locals. And there have been these lawsuits against individual local presidents. What’s the medium to long-term strategic vision around the anti-strike laws in Massachusetts? How does the Trump administration change that or intersect with it in terms of the bigger political picture?

MB: Well, first of all, we do have right-to-strike legislation that is being heard. Realistically, will it pass? I don’t know. I don’t think it could currently, with the political makeup that we have, although some cities, like the city of Somerville, their city council voted to endorse it and had a resolution in favor of the right to strike.

The problem that I potentially see with any type of legislative solution is: what are the poison pills that will come with it? Will it be, ‘yes, you have the right to strike, but you can only do it after 12 months of bargaining, and then there’s going to be binding arbitration you’ll have to do?’ And then what do the members really have the hope for in terms of going out? They’ll be right back in the position where they’re saying, “Well, the laws are written fairly, and if we just make the right arguments and do the right thing, we’ll get the good settlement,” and so you take away that real sense of power that members felt when they did the strike. They were doing something illegal, but they felt a sense of real power.

In terms of the fines, we have one local who was on strike for 19 days, and they have like $800,000 in fines, and they don’t have any money, so we’re really in an experimental phase. What are they going to do? Like, you said, with Trump, you know, we might begin to see things like decertification attempts on unions, and really, then the question—or the answer to the question—is no different than it was before. We continue to operate as a union, whether it’s legal or not. And we continue to find ways to collect dues outside of the employer collecting them for us, and we find ways to operate as a union, the way that organizers did for most of the labor movement in the late 19th or early 20th century, when it was no way legal to operate as a union.

On responding to Trump, I keep saying this to folks in the caucus: we can’t respond to Trump unless we’re able to respond to our boss. We have to organize and fight the boss if we want to be able to fight these larger battles. So the first step is always the same step.

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