Trade union collaboration on issues of social justice connects workers to each other and to their wider communities and is therefore considered a strategy of union renewal. Prior to their amalgamation on 1 January 2023, Lärarförbundet (Swedish Teachers' Union) and Lärarnas Riksförbund (National Union of Teachers in Sweden) collaborated…

Purpose: Teachers unions in the United States are increasingly taking up issues of equity and justice. While there is a growing and robust body of scholarship on leading for equity, unions are rarely included as sources of education leadership. This creates an opportunity to not only consider unions in these equity efforts, but also re-shape our…

In light of growing difficulties for schools to attract teachers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and the continued discussions surrounding the unionization of education, this paper examines the effect of collective bargaining (CB) laws on the salary of teachers with a STEM degree. To isolate the effect of…

Although charter schools are frequently afforded flexibility from many state laws that govern traditional public schools, a growing number of charter school teachers have now unionized and introduced collective bargaining to the charter sector. Using data from a detailed content analysis of teacher CBAs from California, we compare the…

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic prompted changes to the terms and conditions of teachers' employment (e.g. working conditions), leading school districts to renegotiate collective bargaining agreements with teachers' unions. However, limited research has examined how these negotiations occur in times of crisis. This study aims to analyze how school…

Teacher unions are working in challenging times. Building power is important for teacher unions to resist neoliberal reforms that have aimed to restructure school education and weaken collective organisation. Yet we have few understandings of the democratisation project that teacher unions have engaged in to build and renew internal power in this…

Purpose: The unanticipated changes in state legislation in Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, and Wisconsin in 2011-12 significantly restricted or entirely prohibited the collective bargaining rights of teachers. Considering these institutional changes as a natural experiment, we examine the causal impact of weakening teacher unionization on…

I examine whether the impact of the Great Recession on school district spending, the allocation of resources, and student achievement varied depending on the strength of state's teachers' unions. Employing a diff-in-diff-in-diff identification strategy, I find that school districts in states with strong teachers' unions experienced significantly…

The purpose of the paper is to understand why academics' main association and trade union in England (University and College Union-UCU) is not stronger in its representation capacity, deepening knowledge regarding its role in the wider higher education sector. UCU operates in an adversarial context, claiming itself to be academics' main voice.…

In the "Janus v. AFCSME" (2018) decision, the U.S. Supreme Court mandated that all public sector workers, including teachers, operate in a Right to Work (RTW) framework. In the years since, teachers' unions have not experienced the mass exodus that some predicted, but should we expect them to? Using an original, historical data set…

The study focus mainly on the cognizance of collective bargaining and its benefits in relation to teacher's welfare and working condition in public secondary school in Delta State, Nigeria. Two research questions were asked and answered in regard to the extent of awareness of Delta State public secondary school teachers of the principle of…

The United States is rare among nations in its highly decentralized process for negotiating collective bargaining agreements with local teachers' unions. To determine whether partisanship can predict these highly localized decisions, I construct an original database of Pennsylvania collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) merged with publicly…

This article explores the relationship between unionization and academic freedom protections for sessional faculty in Ontario universities. Specifically, we compare university policies and contract provisions with a view to determining whether unionized sessionals hired on a per-course basis have stronger academic freedom protections than their…

As children grow and develop, child care workers play a vital role in fostering learning and providing support in a safe and nurturing environment. High-quality child care jobs, where workers are valued and respected, benefit both workers and the children and families they serve. Unfortunately, the United States has historically undervalued the…

Labour strife in the education sector in Ontario has repeatedly highlighted the precariousness of certain types of teaching and learning that are delivered under the catch-all designation extracurricular. This paper reviews education legislation in Ontario over the past 40 years that has impacted teachers' right to strike; examines how teacher…