Who would have thought that teachers, who often don’t consider themselves workers, would provide the most widespread, most sustained global resistance to capitalism’s anti-labor assault? From Chicago to Mexico to the UK, teachers unions are engaging in militant, head-to-head battles with ruling elites who are remaking education as a market and taking ideological control of what is taught. Why are teachers unions so prominently in the news? Why are they being attacked? And what should we be expecting from them this Labor Day?

Union density and span is one reason. Public school teachers comprise the largest segment of public sector workers, and over half of all unionized public employees in the US are teachers. In 2010, governments employed 3.2 million public school teachers, about 70 percent in unions, either the National Education Association (NEA) or the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). No other occupation in the US can claim this union density and this national presence – not the building trades, not auto, not steel, not health care, not federal workers either.

But teachers unions defy the Left’s orthodoxies about working class struggle — that mental picture of a (male) production worker. Teaching is “women’s work” and union members are overwhelmingly female. Teachers don’t produce anything. Whether teachers realize or not, they engage in what sociologist Raewyn Connell describes as socially transformative labor, educating the next generation and shaping society. But teachers unions are now key to labor’s survival and revival because teachers unions have what other unions (and the rest of the working class) lack: an organization based on members who do essentially the same work, in almost every community, in the US and throughout the world.