Between 2022 and 2023, labor union and strike activity on college campuses increased to represent over 35,000 new workers, with many of these workers being graduate students (Herbert, 2023). As strike activity has continued into 2024 and beyond, it is necessary to understand how institutions responded to strikes to consider how their response may…

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…

We study the effects of the unionization of faculty at Canadian universities from 1970-2022 using an event-study design. Using administrative data which covers the full universe of faculty salaries, we find strong evidence that unionization leads to both average salary gains and compression of the distribution of salaries. Our estimates indicate…

A growing number of climate activists and scholars argue that an effective climate movement needs the involvement of the trade union movement, to be able to push forward the radical social transformations required to address the global climate crisis. If workers are to be able to play this kind of role in a global climate movement, a sustained and…

Public service reforms often provoke political backlash. Can they also yield political benefits for the politicians who champion them? We study a Wisconsin law that weakened teachers' unions and liberalized pay, prompting mass protests. Exploiting its staggered implementation across school districts, we find that the reform cut union revenues,…

Teachers' work is inherently political at both the interpersonal and structural levels. Yet, now, many teachers are under state-sanctioned and local pressure to be apolitical. Moreover, many teachers are citing feelings of political attack as a significant driver in their decisions to stay or leave the teaching profession, even as the US faces…

The article investigates the Estrado Network, which has united academics, trade unionists, and teachers in resistance against neoliberal globalisation while fostering educational alternatives for over twenty years. We utilise Bhabha's 'third space' concept to examine the network's role in the 'hybridization of various discourses and perspectives.…

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 an earlier essay in the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I examined many of the major arguments for social justice teacher unionism. This combines both more traditional union concerns over wages, working conditions, professional autonomy, and respect with a much more concerted focus by unions on social justice issues in schools,…

For too many educators, the idea of a morally centered school may seem like a fantasy--or be so novel a concept that it is hard to grasp. In this article, the authors describe such schools, which truly serve students' best interests by following a set of shared professional values, and how educators and their unions can help create them. The four…

Amid the global neoliberal assault on public education, teachers and their unions are called upon to resist detrimental educational reforms. Employing photo-elicitation focus groups, this paper explored ten Saskatchewan teacher activists' perceptions of their political resistance to neoliberalism both within their union and beyond. Utilizing a…

After George Floyd was murdered by police, teachers, alongside the leaders of their unions and professional associations, confronted urgent calls to address racism in their communities, schools, and classrooms, just as they were concluding an academic year rendered chaotic by COVID-19. This article leverages four waves of semistructured interviews…

In 2019, Poland experienced a massive teachers' strike that lasted three weeks. Although the strike had a great impact on many teachers, in the end, this three-week action failed to obtain any of its demands. Using the concepts of workers' associational power and union legitimacy, I argue that one of the reasons for the loss was a crisis of…

Between 2011 and 2015, at the dawn of the global financial crisis, Spain went through severe austerity measures that led to social unrest and to the emergence of new expressions of collective action. In the educational field, teachers' unions and grassroots movements organised against the neoliberal and neoconservative policies promoted by the…

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…