When the COVID-19 pandemic plunged the economy back into recession in early 2020, it laid bare a fragile and profoundly inequitable labor market. The economic expansion that reigned from 2009 through 2019 brought historically low unemployment and inflation but failed to reduce income inequality or arrest the decline in the number of high-quality,…

Many often identified the Catholic Church with the cause of labor and worker's rights in the United States. However that was not the common situation encountered by laborers throughout most of the nineteenth century. The proclamation of the social encyclicals: Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) and Pope Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno (1931)…

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…

Early childhood (EC) educator qualifications shape the quality of education/care provided to children. Although past research demonstrates that EC educator qualifications are lower than recommended by research, little is known about how qualification attainment differs at the state level where policy change primarily occurs. Using…

State policies regarding workers' education and the education and training of adults and communities have been hugely influenced by the political and ideological perspectives and approaches that have informed such policies from the onset of the post-apartheid period. These approaches have had pervasively negative effects on especially workers'…

Although the "Janus v. AFCSME" (2018) decision fundamentally changed the institutional context for U.S. teachers' unions by placing all public school teachers in a "Right to Work" (RTW) framework, little research exists to conceptualize the effects of such policies that hinder unionization. To fill this gap, I exploit the…

This article focuses on the relation between new public management (NPM) reforms and changing patterns of industrial relations (IRs) and social dialogue in the Italian education system. Drawing on data from the research project 'Social dialogue and industrial relations in education: The challenges of multi-level governance and privatisation in…

In this article, we analyse a recent industry-driven initiative in Sweden for the organisation and operation of Vocational Education and Training. In the context of a statist and school-based system for VET, this is an initiative which seems to be an example of an anomaly in the present system. The initiative is called the Technical College scheme…

Political parties in the U.S. are composed of networks of interest groups, according to the extended party network theory. Scholars have focused on national extended party networks. We use the case of education interest groups to explore how policy environments shape party networks on the state level. Using 145,000 campaign contributions from 2000…

Today, more than 60 percent of teachers in the United States work under a union contract. The rights of teachers to unionize and bargain together have expanded dramatically since the late 1950s, when states began passing "duty-to-bargain" (DTB) laws that required school districts to negotiate with teachers unions in good faith. Recently,…

Teacher federations are often criticized as "roadblocks" to educational change. It is arguable, however, that their advocacy work has been paramount in securing safer return to school conditions across Canadian Educational jurisdictions. Utilizing Carter et al. (2010) framework of union responses to changing policy environments, this…

This paper studies teacher attrition in Wisconsin following Act 10, a policy change which severely weakened teachers' unions and capped wage growth for teachers. I document a sharp increase in turnover after the Act was passed, driven almost entirely by the exit of older teachers, who faced strong incentives to retire before the end of…

For the past decade, I have been observing, researching and reporting on a group of Scottish further education lecturers and schoolteachers, who, through their trade union activities, have had a significant impact on their colleagues' engagement with post-compulsory education and professional development. They are members of the Educational…

The Michigan legislature recently enacted a teacher evaluation law which requires school districts to incorporate student achievement data into evaluation systems and mandated that evaluations be used to make high-stakes personnel decisions. Though administrators have considerable discretion to design and implement their evaluation systems, the…

While the South African Constitution enshrines both children's right to a basic education and teachers' right to strike, conflict between these two often occurs when the way in which teachers' unions conduct strike actions detracts from learners' education. This article identifies the parties affected by industrial action in the school context,…