And A Teacher Shall Lead the Way
Image courtesy of Alan Ginsberg
In his book about public sector unions, Strike Back (2014), labor lawyer Joe Burns notes that the upsurge of public union activity in the 1960s and ’70s began, in part, “with the organizing efforts of a handful of teachers in New York City” (p29). At the beginning of the 1960s their salaries were so low that “a New York Times editorial asked why anyone would want to be a teacher when they could make more money working at a unionized car wash” (p29). Their activism – including strikes – during those decades yielded great gains both in the terms and conditions of their work as well as their compensation.
Fast forward to Wisconsin in the spring of 2011 and again teachers are key leaders among public sector workers – this time in an effort to resist Governor Scott Walker’s gutting of collective bargaining rights and cuts to the compensation of public employees.
The Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) – the union of graduate teaching “assistants”* at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Madison Teachers, Inc quickly sprung into early bold action that galvanized and inspired the Uprising.
Certainly, many other groups and individuals played important and dramatic roles in the Uprising, including students from a number of high schools (I’ll write more about that in another post). But the TAA and MTI were quick off the mark, with TAs organizing and facilitating the many hundreds of citizens who showed up to testify against the bill and MTI staging an early “sickout” (later joined by the state teachers’ union, WEAC).
We recently interviewed the executive director of MTI, John Matthews, for this film. At 75, Matthews appears still energetic and enthusiastic about leading the strong and cohesive union he helped to build beginning in 1968. That’s right – Matthews has been leading MTI for nearly half a century! Seventy-one years old during the Uprising, Matthews was often seen out in the streets and on the capitol square during that bitterly cold February. (See photo above).
Matthews has strong opinions about the value of unions, the Uprising, and where we go from here. Obviously, we’re keeping the best bits for the film! But we can share this quote. Talking about the “Right to Work” legislation passed this year, which he described as the private sector equivalent to Act 10 in 2011 for public sector workers, he noted:
We hoped for a big rally. And the private sector people were there. But the public sector people weren’t there. We’ve got to lock together. The only way we’re going to prevail is locking together… And when unions do well, all workers do well.
*I put quotes around “assistants” because the graduate students are rarely “assisting” anyone in teaching a class. They’re usually doing all the work themselves – and for poverty wages.
