Unionization of Teachers

The unionization of teachers is a phenomenon that began haltingly in the 1890s and continued throughout the 20th century, to the point that a large majority of public school teachers are now members of a teachers' union and are employed according to a collective bargaining contract negotiated by their union. The unionization of teachers was not accompanied by collective bargaining regarding their working conditions until the post–World War II period when, initially in large cities in the North and Midwest, teachers joined unions that won bargaining agreements from their respective school boards.

Prior to the development of bargaining, however, teacher unions were embraced by some teachers, mainly in larger cities where numbers of teachers employed meant a certain impersonality in their employment. In order to ameliorate employment problems, whether an unsatisfactory salary situation, a lack of employment protection, or insufficient financial support for their schools, teachers began to join unions in the hope that those unions could win concessions from school boards, school administrators, and/or state legislatures that legally were responsible for public schools in their states. Most notably, in Chicago in the late 1890s, elementary teachers joined the Chicago Teachers' Federation, led by its noted leaders Margaret Haley and Catherine Goggin, initially to protect their pension rights and status, as well as to enhance their meager salaries. Haley and Goggin became famous for their investigations into the tax situations of Chicago's major utility corporations, which had managed to avoid payment of their franchise fees and tax levies. They sued the city and the corporations and, in 1904, won a legal victory that made the leaders and their federation nationally famous as a reform-minded group that refused to allow tax evasion by their city's major corporations.

Chicago, New York, and other major cities, even some in the anti-union South such as Atlanta, all had teacher unions as a part of their educational landscape in the early 20th century. While these groups varied in their orientation from a near radical socialism in New York to an almost rigid defense of a traditional agenda of protection of salaries and benefits in Atlanta, all the groups had a variety of social, political, and educational positions represented within their membership, whatever position was taken by the individual union. Teacher unions prospered in the immediate post–World War I years, benefiting from prolabor policies of wartime governments, which feared employment disruption. They languished in the probusiness environment of the 1920s, characterized by the rise of American capitalism and the rise in power of employers buoyed by political fears of radicalism and suspicion of organized labor as incipient, if not avowed, proponents of that radicalism.

The Great Depression of the 1930s changed the situation of the previous decade, and the crisis of capitalism in the Depression resulted in a resurgence of teacher unionism, again concentrated in the nation's largest cities. Teacher unions became [Page 902]the target of communists before the Depression in New York City, and elsewhere during the Depression. Communists sought to join and to influence teacher unions toward social and political activism at the same time that their members also often sought democratic political reforms and progressive educational improvements in public schools. The noted national union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), fought communists in their New York local in the 1930s and expelled them from the AFT in the early 1940s under the leadership of the noted educational scholar and activist George S. Counts.

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