Worker Rights

  • "TEACHER STRIKE!" Book Discussion & Reception

    A wave of teacher strikes in the 1960s and 1970s roiled urban communities. Jon Shelton illuminates how this tumultuous era helped shatter the liberal-labor coalition and opened the door to the neoliberal challenge at the heart of urban education today.

  • AFT: One Hundred Years of Social Justice Teacher Unionism

    Our panelists will examine a number of different figures and moments in the history of the AFT from a variety of different perspectives.

  • The Challenge of Precarious Labor

    To address this challenge, this conference will bring together an international body of thinkers, analysts and activists.

  • New Visions of Collective Bargaining in American Education

    Our panel will investigate some of the most promising efforts on that front around the country, as teacher unions find new ways to negotiate contracts for educational innovation and improvement and build new partnerships with community around that work.

  • Teaching Voting Rights

    Using the C3 framework developed for teaching social studies and civics with the Common Core, this workshop will investigate the use of inquiry lessons to teach the theme of voting rights.

  • Strategies for African-American Economic Emancipation

    A panel sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute at the Fighting Inequality Conference at Georgetown University.

  • Organizing the Workers of Walmart: From Bentonville to Beijing

    Speakers will discuss campaigns to organize the workers of Walmart, in the United States and in China. They include Han Dongfang, Nelson Lichtenstein, Ph.D., Yi Duan, and Emily Stewart.

  • In Defense of the Public Square

    A robust and vibrant public square is an essential foundation of democracy. It is the place where the important public issues of the day are subject to free and open debate, and our ideas of what is in the public interest take shape.

  • Is There A Pension Crisis?

    Elected officials seeking to diminish the pensions of public sector employees have argued that they are responding to a fiscal crisis. Is this crisis real or contrived?

  • American Labor Movement at a Crossroads: New Thinking, New Organizing, New Strategies

    This conference examines new thinking and new initiatives in labor organizing, viewing them critically in the light of ongoing union imperatives of cultivating member activism and involvement, fostering democratic self-governance and building the collective power of working people.

  • Finding Their Voices/Professionals and Workforce Representation

    A significant percentage of unorganized professionals would like to be represented in their workplaces by a union or some other type of “employee organization.” This conclusion, drawn from two Shanker Institute-sponsored studies, comes in spite of the fact that many professionals hold a stereotypical view of unions as overly confrontational.

  • Professional Workers, Unions, and Associations: Affinities and Antipathies

    This paper, by Richard Hurd, director of labor studies at Cornell University, explores the changing nature of professional work, examines the attitudes of pr

  • Keeping Public Education Together

    In the essay, Al talks about his lifelong dedication to "gaining collective bargaining rights for teachers and using the collective bargaining process to improve teachers’ salaries and working conditions." He also makes it clear that the teacher union movement always had an equally important aim: making schools work better for kids. His tireless efforts, during the past 15 years or so, on behalf of high standards of conduct and achievement and against the fads and follies that threaten to destroy public education were not an "about face" but a logical extension of his trade unionism.
     
    The essay closes with Al’s reflections on the reasons for his long fight to preserve and strengthen public education.

  • Adding Rooms to the 'House of Labor '

    The AFL-CIO is often called the House of Labor.

  • Building a Broader Union

    Albert Shanker could see common threads among professional workers of every stripe.

  • Collective Bargaining and Digitalization: A Global Survey of Union Use of Collective Bargaining to Increase Worker Control over Digitalization

    A special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Vol. 34, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2022) featured essays on the topic of the Future of Work which were solicited by the American Federation of Teachers for a conference on the subject it jointly hosted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Albert Shanker Institute. In the eighth of these essays, guest authors Eckhard Voss and Daniel Bertossa discuss the future of collective bargaining in the face of increasing digitalization.

    In “Collective Bargaining and Digitalization: A Global Survey of Union Use of Collective Bargaining to Increase Worker Control over Digitalization,” WMP consultant Eckhard Voss and PSI expert Daniel Bertossa discuss what the future of collective bargaining looks like in the face of increasing levels of digitalization. Through an in-depth evaluation of seven key areas affected by digitalization, the authors discuss the deficits in collective bargaining, before approaching the herculean task of confronting them.

  • A.I.’s Impact on Jobs, Skills and the Future of Work: the UNESCO Perspective on Key Policy Issues and the Ethical Debate

    A special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Vol. 34, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2022) featured essays on the topic of the Future of Work which were solicited by the American Federation of Teachers for a conference on the subject it jointly hosted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Albert Shanker Institute on July 13, 2022. This is the first of these essays.1>

    In “A.I.’s Impact on Jobs, Skills and the Future of Work: the UNESCO Perspective on Key Policy Issues and the Ethical Debate,” Gabriela Ramos, Assistant Director-General at UNESCO, discusses how artificial intelligence does not necessarily need to be a boogeyman. If AI is developed with people in mind, then the inclusive possibilities of AI are infinite. Ramos discusses these possibilities, and the path to get there, while focusing on the key issues of gender and discrimination.

  • NEJPP Editor's Introduction to the Future of Work Series

    A special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Vol. 34, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2022) featured essays on the topic of the Future of Work which were solicited by the American Federation of Teachers for a conference on the subject it jointly hosted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Albert Shanker Institute on July 13, 2022. Each week for the next nine weeks the Shanker Blog will feature one of these essays. This is the introduction to the series by NEJPP's founding editor, Padraig O'Malley.

  • Renewed, Recharged, Ready for the Fight

    This keynote Speech was delivered by guest author Norman Hill, President Emeritus, A. Philip Randolph Institute at the 2022 APRI Annual Conference in Baltimore, MD (edited). Normal Hill was also the staff director for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 

    As I approach 90 years young, it is especially gratifying to do so here in Baltimore. You know me as president emeritus of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which I was privileged to help organize and lead for 37 years, from 1967 to 2004. I traveled the country to 200 APRI chapters we founded to mobilize Black trade unionists, to organize voter registration and participation campaigns, to build the essential coalition of labor and the Civil Rights movement, and to pursue the struggle for racial and economic justice.

  • Labor Day Message

    Happy Labor Day!

    The famous adage to call for solidarity, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” is most often used by labor unions in times of struggle, like a dangerous or unfair practice by the boss or during strike. These times of struggle have been occurring across the country. My own home state of Minnesota saw the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Education Support Professionals strike last spring for improvements to better meet the needs of students and strengthen their professions and the Minnesota Nurses Association Is on the verge of a strike 15,000 MNA members strong for better patient care. These unions, and those the AFL-CIO identify on their national strike map, have seen injuries on the job, from physical injuries that may come from unsafe staffing in a hospital to damage large class sizes, teacher shortages, and disrespectful pay for paraprofessionals do to teaching and learning. Unions, like these, see that “an injury to one is an injury to all” wraps up both patient and nurse, or educator, student, and family—the kind of common good bargaining the Shanker Institute continues to support.

  • Reflecting on What DACA Has Meant to Me

    As June marks the 10th anniversary of DACA, Guest author Karen Reyes, a special education teacher and DACA recipient, recounts her personal experience.

    June 15, 2012 is a day I will always remember. It was the day that President Obama announced DACA. I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing—because it was a day that provided some relief. I would be able to put my education degree to good use; I would be able to get a license and drive; I would be able to live without the overwhelming fear of deportation.

    Two weeks ago marked the 10th anniversary of this program and I’ve been thinking a lot about it.

  • Let’s Celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week by Acknowledging and Repairing A VERY Broken System

    Each May, as the school year winds down, districts across the country will soon celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week. In previous years, receiving doughnuts, gift cards, and T-shirts was a nice way to end the school year. One could even laugh at the less than stellar tokens of appreciation, like the mini box of raisins with a sticker that exclaimed “thank you for ‘raisin’ student achievement.” But, amid COVID-19 and a host of new challenges that are facing educators, this year’s Teacher Appreciation Week may function as a going away party for many teachers who will soon leave the profession.

    That unfortunate reality of rising teacher burnout has serious consequences across the education system and requires greater attention to reverse this alarming trend. To put a number on this problem, a recent report found that 55% of teachers will leave the profession sooner than they had planned, and a staggering 90% are suffering from burnout (Kamenetz, 2022). I am one of these statistics. After years of suffering from burnout, I finally hit my breaking point — a persistent eye twitch induced by stress — and left the profession. After walking out of my classroom, I raced straight ahead to do as much research as possible on teacher burnout because I love the profession, and I know we must improve it for educators. 

  • Sidney Hillman’s Legacy: Honoring a Free Press, Advancing Workers’ Rights

    Guest author Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, a former op-ed columnist for The Washington Post, a longtime judge of the Hillman Awards and a Shanker Institute Board Member, reminds us on Press Freedom Day that a free press and a powerful workers’ movement are two necessary components of a vibrant democracy.

    This evening in New York, a number of journalists, union activists and kindred progressives will come together for the annual presentation of the Sidney Hillman Prizes, which for the past 72 years have been awarded to journalists who, as the Hillman Foundation puts it, “pursue investigative reporting and deep storytelling in service of the common good.” The Foundation bestows its awards in a number of categories: book, newspaper, magazine, broadcast and web, and this year, received more than 500 entries from which the judges chose the winners.

    Unlike virtually every other journalism award contest, there’s no fee for submitting an entry. There is, in fact, a long tradition of Hillman exceptionalism, beginning with the fact that the awards and the foundation were created by a union. Sidney Hillman was the longtime president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the co-founder (with John L. Lewis) of the CIO, a lifelong champion of social unionism (to which the union’s construction of housing for New York’s clothing workers attests), and the labor leader who was closest to Franklin Roosevelt. When he died in 1946, the union began considering how best they could honor him. What they came up with was a foundation that would award journalism “in service of the common good,” a foundation that the union and its successors funded well into the current century.

  • Will Inflation Break the News? A Press Freedom Question

    NATIONAL PRESS FREEDOM DAY

    Next Tuesday, May 3, is National Press Freedom Day. I thought of that, and what a free press should mean, when I read Will Inflation Break the News? by David Dayen in the American Prospect. In this piece Mr. Dayen points out that, while inflation is causing people to cancel their subscriptions to streaming services, there is a more disturbing story behind The Great Cancellation, as it has (of course) been called. Over time, as more and more professional news publications find themselves behind a paywall, we’ve made access to our free press more exclusive and more vulnerable to the same economic factors that cause us to rethink paying for Disney+. More paywalls being constructed around professional journalism means more constricted access to that celebrated free press we cherish. At first glance, as Mr. Dayen points out, professional journalists can move to Substack to create their own revenue streams that support them to stay in the profession they love. Like the inflation question, does gigifying a free press save it? Is more high-quality journalism behind a paywall representative of a free press, especially as growing social media sites welcome unregulated and sometimes dangerous ideas?

    As you read David Dayen’s piece below, reposted here with permission of The American Prospect, ask yourself what a free press means to you and should mean to all of us. He offers solutions at the end, ideas to save a truly free press. He tempers it by admitting he may be biased as a career journalist himself. I don’t share his bias. I am a classroom teacher by training. In my teacher leadership career I have felt the sting of feeling mis-quoted, the ire at not being called for a response, and even the embarrassment of not being relevant to a story I felt was central to my work. Notwithstanding my vainest moments with the press, I agree that a thriving free press is vital to a thriving democracy. Both deserve our efforts to save them.

    Mary Cathryn Ricker