Minneapolis Educators Are Showing a Way Forward for Labor
The Minneapolis educators’ union won a historic contract just over a week ago. The victory was the product of years of rank-and-file reform efforts as well as workplace and community organizing that bridged occupational and racial divides.
The Minneapolis educators’ union, which won important contract gains just over a week ago, have built popular support for their cause by standing up for the good of public education. (Kerem Yucel / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Under the second Trump administration, unions are under assault from many directions — from a dysfunctional National Labor Relations Board, to new attacks on public sector collective bargaining rights, to the cancellation of massive union construction projects, to the repression of immigrant workers. Yet while many unions have hunkered down to ride out the wave of reaction, some are quickly recognizing that the new landscape requires new thinking, new doctrine, and better practice.
The deal just struck by the Minneapolis Federation of Educators (MFE) is a case in point. On Saturday, November 8, the MFE reached a tentative agreement with Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) on a new two-year contract. A week prior, the union had taken and passed a strike vote that would have seen them start striking on Monday, November 10; the strike was averted. The story of these negotiations is an object lesson in how to bargain from a position of strength even in a hostile political and legal climate.
The win was built not on advocating for the interests of just one group of workers but on expanding the table to include the concerns of numerous constituencies. Some might see this as an example of “bargaining for the common good,” and the MFE did do that in some ways. But even that framework misses how the MFE’s current strength is rooted in various conflicts and mobilizations in Minneapolis, not just those of teachers.
Breaking the Mold
Notably, the MFE stepped away from the two most common alleged panaceas for labor’s weakness. The first is a reliance on a paint-by-numbers approach to organizing workplaces, which has been pushed by what I will call “organizing entrepreneurs.” Using paid workshops that promise solutions to the difficulties of winning organizations and contracts, these entrepreneurs have successfully spread an organizing doctrine far and wide to workers who didn’t have one. This has produced activity where there wasn’t any and secured some organizing victories.
Nonetheless, the number of newly organized workers continues to decline, and the focus on organizing tactics seems to have come at the expense of a strategy for rebuilding the labor movement or even winning more complicated campaigns. Of course, the latter is a tall order and there has been quite a lot of innovation. (The Center for Work and Democracy, which I direct, has published a report on promising innovations in the labor movement, Beyond the NLRB: Contemporary Strategies and Practices for Labor Movement Renewal.) Yet decline has continued.
The second is dependence on the Democratic Party, even though the party is dominated by the wealthy and corporate interests rather than workers and Democratic elected officials have long failed to deliver any legislation that could improve the long-term prospects of labor. In an age of kleptocracy, reliance on electoral politics alone is not a strategy for rebuilding working-class power.
The MFE took a different approach to winning their contract this year, one that they have been developing since 2020.
First, they recognized the way that tax cuts and privatization have changed the dynamics of the relationship between the public sector and the unions that represent public employees. Unions often struggle to define themselves as standing for the public interest rather than a “special interest,” as Ronald Reagan characterized them. But when public officials shrink spending on public goods, or privatize them, or use them as a vehicle for improving their résumés or a vehicle for rewarding their friends and supporters, it is hard to claim that they are acting in the best interests of their communities.
Moreover, kids and parents see the reality of underinvestment every day in increasing class sizes, poor teacher retention, and school closures. They also see teachers who spend their own money on school supplies, develop welcoming learning environments, and invest their own time and expertise in their kids’ successes. Of course, teachers are regularly villainized by those who see public goods as an affront to their market-fundamentalist ideology, but the fact is that schools, when they are funded, are more than educational institutions — they are civic anchors in their communities. Unfortunately, schools aren’t always funded well, and they often lack the kind of leadership that enables them to adapt to the changing needs of their students.
The MFE’s contract victory this year is the culmination of a long-simmering process of building power and solidarity. Just as important have been the moves that enabled the MFE to position itself as an authoritative voice on Minneapolis schools as well as a collective bargaining representative of the district’s employees.
As with so many teacher victories, the root of the transformation of a union that was on its back was a rank-and-file caucus, Rank-and-File Educators Advocating for Change (REACH), which began organizing around 2015. This effort mobilized the membership of the union and secured some victories in what were thereafter competitive elections for union leadership.
Another key moment was the George Floyd uprising, which was very much a “Which side are you on?” moment for organized labor in the Twin Cities, one that led to a few leaders being shown the door by their members. Actions like the mobilization to oust the National Guard from the East Side Freedom Library and the intensification of organizing that included young and old, racial justice advocates and trade unionists, and which bridged racial divisions, were seeded in that moment.
Union members demanded more of their leadership, and in some unions leadership was transformed. In the wake of the uprising, the unions in the Cities developed what Sarah Jaffe has called the “Minneapolis Model” of labor collaboration. Unions are increasingly coordinating around fights to build power for workers generally.
Greta Callahan, a veteran of charter schools and public schools, was elected president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers in 2020, and she wanted a union that advocated more aggressively for teachers, students, and public schools. She also positioned the union on the side of racial inclusion and equity, including by negotiating contract language that privileged teachers of color in the case of layoffs to correct for their relative vulnerability and increased likelihood to leave the profession.
Callahan also recruited Marcia Howard to be her vice president. Howard was a charismatic and well-known teacher at Theodore Roosevelt High School, where she taught English literature to a multiracial and culturally diverse student body that reflected the Southside’s complicated demographics. She had been peripherally involved in the union and done “grunt work” for the REACH caucus but was not a leader of it.
Howard also lived about seventy yards from where George Floyd was lynched on May 25, 2020. Darnella Frazier, the young woman who filmed his lynching, had, along with her siblings, been students of Howard at Roosevelt. As the uprising settled into a long-term protest occupation, Howard became one of the most visible figures in George Floyd Square, and she gained a prominent profile in the union and the city.
The Square was connected to different communities and constituencies of support through the different black women who led the protest. In the case of Howard, the protest was connected to the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, led by Callahan; to the national teachers’ unions, which provided support at some key moments; and to the schools themselves, the latter of which became abundantly clear in the days of the Derek Chauvin Trial when Roosevelt High students and teachers marched into George Floyd Square chanting “We love you. . . Ms Howard!”
Offering a Vision
With Callahan and Howard at the helm of the union, the teachers struck in 2022. Importantly, they struck not only for their own pay and benefits but also for those of the education support professionals (ESPs), the lower-paid, less-credentialed educational support staff. The strike produced gains across the board, but the most sizable gains went to the ESPs, who secured a 30 percent raise over the life of the contract.
The decision to stake the strike on huge gains for the ESPs forged an alliance between the teachers and ESPs that has continued to be an important source of strength for both unions. It also produced a real alliance between Marcia Howard, who succeeded Callahan as president of the teachers’ chapter, and Catina Taylor, who led the ESPs. In the wake of the strike victory and under Taylor’s leadership, dues-paying membership in the ESP chapter went from 30 percent to 80 percent.
The Minnesota Federation of Teachers is now known as the Minnesota Federation of Educators, the name change erasing the class and credentialed distinction between the ESPs and teachers. This was not easy. Building the solidarity between the two different units required “many honest conversations about caste and class,” according to Howard.
The unified fight to reposition the ESPs as a valued part of a coalition of educational professionals was notable, but merely the first step in the transformation of MFE into a union that wields power for the benefit of all of its various members and on behalf of public schools generally.
The district, however, was positioning the MFE’s strike and demands as fiscally irresponsible. But between the last contract and this one, that old saw was turned on its head by Howard, Taylor, and the MFE. The union had learned that the district often had more resources than it claimed it had in contract negotiations. They also dug further into the finances of the district and had more conversations about its vision for investing in Minneapolis public schools. What they discovered was that district officials were receiving awards for sound fiscal management while acting to shrink resources going into the schools. The district had a solid bond rating, but this was because it keeps a reserve significantly higher than peer districts.
Moreover, the share of district resources going to administration has been growing steadily compared to the amount spent on schools themselves. Vendor contracts were weirdly expensive compared to peer districts; charter schools receive funds from the district despite a record of consistent failure, and even this record has only been secured through old-fashioned race-baiting (by appealing to parents who want to remove their children from more diverse public-school populations, for instance, or by making specious promises that charters can better meet the needs of traditionally underserved students of color). This year, when the district claimed poverty, the union could point out that a lot of that was due to the district’s poor decisions, not a fundamental lack of resources. This time, according to Howard, “our math was better.”
While the district practiced disinvestment from the school system it was charged with, the union articulated a vision for making Minneapolis public schools the “destination district” it had once been. The MFE’s report, Which Path to a Destination District? Cut, Close, Shrink or Invest, Attract, Expand?, directly challenged the district’s lack of leadership and revealed the “imagination gap,” as Howard called it, between the district and the union.
Howard, a prominent voice advocating for the interests of black and working-class people in the 2020 uprising and in the 2022 strike, and for reinvesting in public schools, has connected the George Floyd rebellion to a fight against urban austerity shored up by lawless policing and has collaborated with other Twin Cities unions that want to exercise their power more effectively.
Howard and Taylor went into these negotiations with a strategy for victory that was rooted in a prior decade of organizing and mobilization. Supported by impressive workplace and community organizing, Howard, Taylor, veterans of REACH, and “contract action teams” supporting this contract fight have had the credibility to shore up the union’s flanks, with other unions and workers in the city’s schools on one hand and with parents and students on the other.
Entering this contract fight, the union was supported by Minneapolis Families for Public Schools, an association of parents who want more investment in public schools, which was a visible presence at rallies and at school board meetings. As the strike deadline loomed, the Star-Tribune, normally a mouthpiece for Jacob Frey’s mayoral administration, old-money families, and the city’s real estate developers, published a story on the front page that lamented the fact that parents weren’t coming out against the teachers, despite fresh memories of the 2022 strike. The next day, the director of the School Board was in negotiations, and a contract was hammered out that worked to further bolster the union’s coalition.
In the new contract, adult educators, a frequently overlooked part of MFE’s membership, were given pay parity with schoolteachers. Further transformative gains were won for Taylor’s ESP chapter, especially around vacation accrual. The banner hanging in the MFE’s union hall reads “Three contracts, two chapters, one union,” and the organizing and contract reflected that philosophy. The wage gains for the teachers were modest (but significantly higher than the district’s initial offer) at 2 percent and 2 percent over the next two years. The teachers have also experienced a 20 percent pay bump over the last three contracts, compared to 17 percent over the previous twenty years.
Above all, though, the union won enforceable class sizes, a central point of contention in bargaining. The last was a huge win for everyone in Minneapolis public schools and further cemented the MFE as a voice for Minneapolis residents in general, and an authoritative voice on public education, rather than simply a professional advocacy organization.
Strikes are dramatic, but sometimes the more impressive victory is the organizing that boxes in your opponent so that you don’t need to strike. The late Jim Drake, an organizer who worked with Cesar Chavez and later with the Industrial Areas Foundation, used to say that good organizing puts up walls on three sides around your opponent, “and the last direction is a deadfall.” By standing for a valuable public good rather than simply their share of the pie, MFE has shown one avenue for winning on behalf of families and communities as well as themselves. They have done so by resolutely defending a public good that contributes to community well-being. They are able to do this because the union is organizing and negotiating with the goal of building power for the long term.
The fact that this victory was ultimately rooted in those relationships and communities themselves, rather than the lessons of a training handbook or some contrived reorganization of school administration, is an important lesson. The fact that it has enabled MFE to help anchor a revitalized labor movement in the Twin Cities is as well.