Haley, Margaret

Born in Illinois, Margaret Haley (1861–1939) fought for educational reform, especially teacher unionization and women's rights. Influenced by her Irish immigrant parents, including her father's active involvement in several labor organizations, she began to teach even before she graduated from school. She foreshadowed her future career when she told her school superintendent that she wanted a $5.00 raise or she would quit. She did not get the raise. She quit, yet she said in her autobiography that she hadn't wanted to fight—only to achieve the result.

John Dewey influenced her beliefs about active learning in conducive settings, yet she felt that elementary teachers, mainly female, were treated as factory hands. She had to teach classes of 50 to 60 students in the destitute Chicago stockyards, with a rigid curriculum imposed by school leaders. High school teachers, mainly men, worked under different guidelines and received higher pay.

She became a full-time union official in the Chicago Teachers Federation (CTF), fighting for higher salaries, pensions, tenure, and better school conditions. She successfully led her first action on behalf of the union. The CTF filed suit against the Chicago Board of Education, which had reneged on a pay raise for elementary teachers. The case revealed that the city's corporations did not pay a fair share of taxes, depriving the city of school funds. The case forced corporations to pay taxes and the board to follow through with promised raises.

The CTF joined the Chicago Federation of Labor, positively affecting the pension issue. Subsequently, the National Federation of Teachers appointed Haley president. She used that position to influence the National Educational Association (NEA), then dominated by male college presidents and administrators, to address elementary teachers' needs. She formed the National Women's Trade Union League with other women suffragists such as Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, Jane Addams, and Mary McDowell.

Haley strongly influenced unionism at the NEA meeting in St. Louis in 1904. As the first female ever to speak from the podium, in “Why Teachers Should Organize,” she described obstacles to effective teaching: inadequate salaries, insecurity regarding tenure and pensions, overwork and crowded classrooms, and lack of recognition of the teacher as a professional due to pressure for an industrial model of schooling. She foreshadowed continuing issues in collective bargaining yet strongly promoted ongoing professional development. She promoted a connection between professional development and working conditions, saying that the most favorable self-development occurs when one knows the better path and is free to choose it.

She led successful campaigns in Illinois for pensions and tenure and helped organize the American Federation of Teachers in 1916. From 1925 to 1931 she published the Margaret Haley Bulletin and continued work with female contemporaries, nicknamed by media as “Lady Labor Sluggers,” until her death.