WINTER 2026
ISSUE 05

₁ Dan Clawson wrote, in a reflection upon the end of Madeloni’s tenure, “In MTA practice, the sitting vice-president ascended uncontested to the presidency; elections for vice-president were contested, but those for president almost never were. Madeloni had never served on the board of the statewide union, or on any of its committees, nor had she held office in her local union. She was a pure rank-and-file candidate.”

Ellen David Friedman is a 50-year veteran of the US labor movement with especially deep experience in the K–12 sector. She currently serves as chair of the board of Labor Notes. Her new book, Keep Going: A Guide to Organizing When It’s Hard, will be available for purchase at labornotes.org.

L-H: Tell us about your background in the labor movement in the United States, and especially your involvement in the K–12 unions and teacher organizing more broadly.

EDF: I always say that it’s important for us to examine what we’ve actually lived through, to use it as intelligence. Your own experience will continue to teach you new things if you keep reflecting on it. I was raised in an entirely Jewish neighborhood by first-generation Americans from the Eastern European Jewish Pale. We were secular humanists – never Zionists. In fact, we were always very critical of Zionism. My parents weren’t communists or socialists; they were FDR Democrats. Personally, I was always averse to Democratic Party politics, with the exception of Jesse Jackson’s two campaigns for president in 1984 and 1988; those were worth a diversion. At an instinctive level, I never thought there was anything about bourgeois democracy that made sense. I became a Marxist very early in my life, in my teens.

I’ve been a labor organizer essentially since I left university in 1974. I moved to Vermont and spent a few years supporting myself in various ways but mostly tried to figure out what it meant to become a union organizer. I’d come out of the student left and was very involved in the anti-war movement, but it was hard to parse out what it all meant. I looked around for possible directions and began volunteering for United Electrical (UE), a union with a long history organizing the machine tool industry in Vermont. UE was a very significant part of Vermont’s labor environment. In fact, the national president of UE was a Vermonter at that time, and very widely respected.

Those of us on the left side of the labor movement have always felt the strongest affiliation with UE. I was able to find mentorship from a field organizer there and spent several years trying to organize a General Electric plant in Rutland, Vermont. The plant made aircraft equipment – I don’t believe any military production took place there. Unfortunately, workers weren’t convinced that they needed the “outside” help of a union, and the drive failed. I was left wondering how I could contribute to a transformation whereby workers would see themselves as the union.

First, I decided to become a machinist and get a job in the machine tool industry. With a degree in political science from an expensive elite institution, I went to night school at a vocational high school three nights a week for a full year for my machinist certificate, which alarmed my parents a little bit. It was very humbling because almost everyone else in the class with me was a teenage boy who’d been rebuilding the engines of their cars since they were toddlers. It was not an ego-strengthening activity.

This coincided with the relocation of much of the machine tool industry to the South or Latin America. There were workers in machine shops all up and down the Connecticut River in Vermont, many with 10–25 years seniority, being laid off. There was no way I was getting a job. Instead, I went to work in a local grocery store in our small town and got my blue-collar experience, which was also humbling, although I learned a great deal about myself and about making relationships with coworkers. In the early 80s, I had a child and took a year off with the baby. I was struggling to figure out my own relationship to class. Like many of my New Left peers at the time, we tried to shed our middle-class identities, thinking we could blend with the working class. But it was an exercise in being inauthentic. When the opportunity came up to organize municipal workers for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), I took it and never looked back.

I didn’t know anything about union organizing, so I began seeking out those who did: mostly retired blue-collar workers, most of them communists. Many of them had been with UE or other unions, and they were living out their lives quietly in the back hills of Vermont. I would drive out to where they lived and just sit at their feet and drink instant coffee and say, “How do you do this?” I revered this guy, Gene Ryan, who retired in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. He was tough, a chain smoker, a person of few words. He changed everything I thought about organizing one day when he said – none too gently – “Ellen, when you’re talking to workers, you’re not the expert about anything.” I must have found nearly a dozen brilliant teachers over those years. I recall that only one was a woman: Helen Trueba from Williamstown, Vermont. She was gracious and lovely, showing me a humanistic version of an organizer I needed to see.

Eventually, I left AFSCME to manage Bernie Sanders’s campaign for governor in 1986, which only increased the reputation I was achieving for being a “left radical” in the state. It is worth recalling that Sanders, at that time, was reviled by the Democrats because of the threat he posed. Afterwards, and much to my surprise given my reputation, the Vermont affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA) solicited me for an organizer position. I accepted and started at Vermont-NEA in summer 1986 and remained in that role for 20 years. NEA is the biggest union in the United States with over three million members. It’s independent and has large cash reserves, although they don’t typically maintain strike funds, because it’s illegal for public teachers to strike in most states. In Vermont, however, we did have a strike fund, and I went on to help out with a good number of teacher strikes.

By then I’d met Steve Early, a Labor Notes founder, who had gone to school in Vermont and started the first Vermont Workers Center in the 1970s. I credit Steve with so much: teaching me a brash attitude towards bosses and union bosses, the serious commitment to democratic unionism, and the most unrelenting work ethic. Maybe most importantly, he was my path into Labor Notes, which has remained my North Star in the movement for nearly 50 years.

L-H: Aside from NEA’s coverage, size, and clout, was there something about organizing in the K–12 sector that drew you towards it and made you stay?

EDF: At that moment in the early 1980s, I found myself trying to process the signs of major political transformations in this country. We didn’t yet call it “neoliberalism,” but you could see and feel that something was happening. Us baby boomers had been able to grow up with the sense of an expansive state, one capable of collecting and redistributing wealth in the form of social goods. It was a period of high tax rates and tremendous growth in public institutions, social security, Medicaid and Medicare, public education, national parks, etc. Clearly, this was possible because we were pillaging the entire world and bringing the loot back home, alongside the real and present threats of communist or socialist examples abroad or insurrectionary rebellion from below here in the United States. At this time, one could believe that there were adults making decisions, even while we didn’t agree with them. 

It took a while for us to understand what neoliberalism was about and what it was aiming to do. I gradually came to understand that it took aim at democracy: it targeted the institutions that make democracy a living thing. This obviously means the labor movement – not only to bust wages, which is the common narrative, but a wholesale discrediting of the union movement. This is what the Reagan years and post-Reagan years were about: that the greedy trade unions caused inflation.

None of this is to say that the union movement is blameless. The contradictions in the labor movement were apparent as soon as I was hired and got invited to a training held at some seaside resort in Maine. I saw the brochure for it and immediately called a regional training director and said, “I’m on staff and I already make too much money. Let me know when there’s a less luxurious option.” I was disciplined for this. Early on in my experience, then, I saw that whatever fantasy I had about the labor movement wasn’t quite right, or at least the movement was rapidly changing. I was a child of the 1960s, immersed in the nostalgic literature and legacy of the militant 1930–40s, and somehow thought that was the movement I’d be entering. It took many years before I could grasp the bureaucratization of the labor movement as part of a wider hollowing out of democratic institutions.

Faced with this, in some primitive part of my brain, I asked, “Who’s gonna be left standing when this project is all done,” this thing we came to call neoliberalism. My answer was K–12 public education. There are public schools in every single city, town, and state, and they need teachers. K–12 teachers and school employees form the most densely unionized sector we have, even if some of these unions are barely unions. (Some more closely resemble insurance malpractice machines and many don’t have collective bargaining rights or the right to strike.) All the same, teachers have an associational matrix; it’s a very collectivized and quite horizontal profession. It’s the only wholly publicly owned and licensed profession in the country.

I can’t say I fully understood it at the time, but it seemed to me that K–12 is saturated with a public character in every cell of its being. It’s publicly financed; schools are run by publicly elected school boards; the teachers have to be publicly certified and approved. That’s quite unique. These attachments to the wellspring of democratic process – the public funding, the public elections, the public licensing – create a direct connection to every community they’re in because you’re talking about raising the children. What could be more democratic than parents being able to access, through the school boards and funding, the education of their children? Of course, public education by itself is a democratic experiment. I decided that if anything would be left standing at the end of the assault, it might be here.

L-H: It sounds as though your thinking had two aspects: that public education is a certain kind of social institution with a particular history and structure, something that might survive the neoliberal onslaught upon democracy and upon the state you had grown up with; and also that there was a size and depth to the union movement in that sector. Does that describe it?

EDF: Yes, and added to those aspects is its connection to something beyond its own labor process. When you have an important consolidation and mobilization of labor power – let’s say in manufacturing, as in the auto sector or coal or steel – it affects the communities in which those plants are located because it brings money into the community and has an impact on family relations and so on. It also affects the larger economy. But it’s not necessarily imparting much that can be replicated, identified with, repeated, and amplified everywhere else. This is because not every town has a steel plant; not every town has an auto plant. Schools are everywhere. They differ by county, by city, by state – absolutely. But there’s something basic about having babies and young people and teenagers around: arrangements need to be made that cycle continuously through the lifeblood of a community.

I said earlier that teaching is a very horizontal profession – the most horizontal profession. Anything else at that time, even among the proletarian class, was much less horizontal. The imprint of the industrial labor relations system in the United States, based on the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, set down rules that defined boundaries between jobs and hiring processes, promotion, discipline, firing, etc. – and underneath all of that is the presumption of hierarchy. The law itself defines managers from supervisors or foremen and stipulates where “workers” begin and end, assigning rights accordingly. The system proliferated a tremendous set of job titles, all presuming hierarchy. But that’s not true in public education. You had teachers and then you had maybe a department chair, and then you had an assistant principal and a principal. That’s it. Even substitute teachers are often in the union, especially in bigger cities.

The flatness of the profession meant a third-grade teacher in New York City could instantly identify with someone who taught third grade in Baton Rouge. If they met on a plane they could go on for hours and be totally identified with one another. It appeared to me that one intent of neoliberalism is to make us believe that nothing is horizontal, that there’s no connectivity to anyone. It has been very successful. You hear people say all the time, “I’m at work and I feel so isolated.” But teaching is a bulwark against that. I loved that, and I thought that would be a defense against neoliberalism.

In 1975, public law 94-142 was passed: the Education for All Handicapped Children Act as it was then called. (The name was later changed to IDEA, Individuals with Disabilities and Education Act.) This was not an education law but a civil rights law, passed to guarantee the right of every child to a free and equal public education regardless of ability. This meant everyone – from someone who was slightly dyslexic to a severely handicapped child, or one with severe behavioral problems – got a full public education for free and everyone had to be in school. 

No one was prepared for this. The next thing you know, literally millions of new employees had to appear at public schools. At first it was the parents of kids with disabilities. Then you needed an associate’s degree, then a bachelor’s or equivalent. This led to a long, slow elaboration of new job titles. Was this good or was this a threat to teachers? There was a tension between guild unionism (professionals protecting their privilege) and industrial unionism (everyone in, wall-to-wall). And this was layered over, of course, with the antagonisms of race (in cities, anyway, where teachers are mostly white and teaching assistants mostly not) and class. Ultimately, much of what I did throughout the 80s and 90s for the Vermont NEA involved organizing dozens and dozens of new unions of teaching assistants.

L-H: You ended up spending ten years in the orbit of the labor movement in China. What was the path to China from organizing the K–12 sector in Vermont?

EDF: I began work as an organizer at NEA in summer 1986 and stayed for 20 years. I left because unexpected things developed in our lives and my husband Stuart and I ended up going to work in China. We thought it was a short-term gig, half a year, but it turned into a ten-year engagement. I officially retired from paid employment when I left the NEA in 2006. To be honest, going to China was alluring because I was really despairing about our movement. All the trends offended me: union officers and staff acting like bosses, turning their backs on the members, and cozying up to Democrats – losing all will to fight. It felt like an endless squandering. The movement energy of the 1960–70s drained away. This alongside the decline of union militancy made me restless to see what might be possible elsewhere, although I hadn’t anticipated it would lead to a decade in China.

L-H: While you were in China, autoworkers staged a remarkable series of strikes, particularly in Honda plants. Among their demands was a restructuring of their own unions. What was your contact with this movement?

EDF: My contact with the movement was so damn extensive and varied and persistent that, inevitably, the National Security Police found me in December 2015 and told me to leave the country. I haven’t tried to return since. But before that happened, I had an amazing chance to develop relationships with workers, unionists, labor lawyers, journalists, students, and scholars. It was this small bubble of history under President Hu Jintao when things were a bit open. 

How this happened was quixotic. Our son – Eli Friedman, who’s now a professor at the Cornell Industrial Labor Relations School – had just started studying in China. We went to visit, met some grassroots activists and labor scholars, and got hooked. This led to my husband Stuart and I quitting our jobs in Vermont, selling the house, giving away the dog, and spending part of each year from 2005–15 in Guangzhou. We managed to finagle teaching jobs at Sun Yat-sen University, formally for a couple of years and a bit surreptitiously for the rest. He taught social work, and I migrated to labor studies.

It was a moment of deep social upheaval in China, when hundreds of millions of rural people – called nóng mín gōng (农民工) or peasant workers – flowed to the Pearl River Delta to work in sweatshop factories, live in factory dorms, eat in factory canteens, and work 12 or 14 hours a day to send remittances back to their village. The government attempted to manage the seismic shift by establishing legal rights for this new proletariat, and tiny worker centers appeared and began propagating the idea of rights. I got involved. This meant traveling by bus to a dense industrial zone, setting up ironing boards to serve as folding tables laden with workers’ rights pamphlets, and waiting for rivers of young workers to stream by in the thousands at shift change, all in colored work smocks embroidered with the company name. Sometimes it led to an invitation to visit workers in their dorm after hours and the start of organizing conversations.

By 2010, the extreme exploitation producing explosive wealth for the new capitalists – skyscrapers, luxury cars, high-end apartments – was too much and a powerful strike wave began in the auto sector. Starting with a small wildcat strike in a Honda transmission parts plant in Nanhai, close to where we lived, a ripple of strikes moved through the plants of foreign auto companies. The wage demands were audacious, but even more riveting was the call for election rather than appointment of shop-floor union officers. Claims for democratic voice were being raised in a wholly authoritarian environment. It was quite astounding.

By then, we’d established an international labor research center in the School of Government at Sun Yat-sen University. We sent students down to the strike. They made relationships, built trust, and laid the groundwork for what followed: worker education to prepare for collective bargaining within an emerging network of auto enterprise unions. Our center was invited to do the teaching, and here my time spent reflecting on pedagogy seemed to pay off. We set up discussions, dialogue, and roleplays that crashed up against the strictly hierarchical mode of Chinese training. Using the space created by massive social struggle – the strikes, all unauthorized by the single Chinese union – we pushed to introduce bottom-up confidence, channeled through local union structures. It was brilliantly, briefly, astonishingly generative.

But then Xi Jinping came to power in 2013 and the walls started closing in. The experiment in “union reform” and democratic pedagogy was stopped. Our labor center was closed, the small library we’d assembled was locked away, and I was washed out of the country during a major anti-labor crackdown in December 2015. Many of my closest comrades were surveilled, jailed, blacklisted from jobs, forced into exile. But networks persist, absolutely.

This period also taught me so much about how people become organizers. The conditions may be conducive or super challenging, but workers and leftists will always find ways to organize. I had to strip down my approach to pedagogy and organizer training to the bricks and start again. What really mattered in helping people to grow as organizers? I was so unmoored by the political and cultural differences in China that only my deepest instincts could serve me. So I refocused on dignity, or radical respect and self-respect, on independent critical thinking, and on how to overcome fear. It has served me well.

L-H: You were already an experienced organizer by the time you went to China, and yet you’ve noted that your time there changed a lot about how you approached organizing. What was the change and what caused it?

EDF: By the time I was forced to leave China in December 2015, I knew something had shifted in my ideas about organizing and how organizers develop. The principles of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy had been with me since the early 1970s, but this really got put to the test in China because I couldn’t rely on anything formulaic from my past life. In regularly witnessing stark fear in others and in myself – knowing a competent authoritarian party-state was always watching – I had to find methods of diminishing fear, building collective trust, and taking action.

The fundamentals of Freirian pedagogy are these: to create group dialogue, to invite people to come to a shared understanding of the causes of their suffering, and, through that, to make decisions for collective action to reduce their suffering. No brilliant plan or ideology imposed from above can accomplish this. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed he says, “Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people – they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.” So I tried to hone my organizing towards inquiry, towards promoting dialogue, lifting up shared themes, and waiting to hear what actions people wanted to take, such that they made their own plans rather than following plans others had made for them.

L-H: Forty years after your original intuitions about the K–12 labor movement, many of us would recognize that K–12 has become perhaps the sharpest edge in the labor movement. What have been its most important aspects and developments in the past decade or two?

EDF: The K–12 sector has proven to be an incredibly generative breeding ground for resistance to important dimensions of the neoliberal assault, which had sought both to undermine the credibility of public education and, of course, the unions. This took many combined forms, including school vouchers and charter schools. From our side, the truth is that we’ve done far too little to meet the threat. It’s a sad fact. We have to acknowledge that we have not been ready to meet the moment fully. This is not to pass judgement; that is not our role. We need instead to analyze the situation according to what the skirmishes in a given moment can tell us about the arc or trajectory of the struggle.

Occupy came roughly 30 years after I had entered the movement in the public education sector. These decades were just a steady erosion of equality, of democracy, of any real class militancy. Some see in Occupy the beginning of the end of neoliberal hegemony. It was certainly a shout of distress and indignance. What did we see right afterwards? We saw militancy explode in the K–12 sector. To me, this was not surprising. The Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), the left caucus within the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), was elected to leadership. CTU is the third-largest teachers’ union in the country and was suddenly led by militant socialists. The CTU strike in 2012, in which nearly thirty thousand teachers and paraeducators shut down the schools and, in many ways, the city for a week, was a signal fire.

Draw the line from this through the red state strikes that started in 2018 – about half a million teachers on wildcat strikes in conservative states – and the 2019 strike by United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), onward to the illegal teachers’ strikes in Massachusetts starting in 2019 and continuing through today. Add in the wave of elections of reform rank-and-file slates in teachers’ unions in Baltimore, Seattle, Richmond, Virginia, San Antonio, Washington, DC, and Massachusetts. It’s a transitional moment from passivity through incoherent protest onward to consolidation of oppositional power.

In the last 10–15 years, we are seeing again a certain unmistakable kindling of the rights of workers to fight for themselves, which really was extinguished by the middle of the 80s into the 90s and the first decade of the 2000s. At its base, this politics functions like a canary in the coal mine: people see the dire extent of what’s happening and turn to each other to discuss it and what to do about it. The answer to this question, in certain circumstances, can express itself as an internal dissident movement within the wider labor movement. This is often necessary because the US labor movement is so deeply pro-capital. (This is also why I found my home in Labor Notes as soon as it appeared on the scene, and I’ve never left it.) The caucus movement in K–12 has developed into a remarkable network and traces an arc forward in this critical sector for democracy.

This is not to say that I am not also critical of recent developments. In fact, I see in them the very flaw that I consider most damaging in our movement: top-down imposition. The reason that’s a flaw is because it is a method learned from capitalism. The notion that we should concentrate power and decision-making and impose it downwards is learned from the enemy. No one ought to be blamed for that; we all learn from what’s around us. But we have to root it out.

Therefore, one of my favorite moments in the Chicago teachers’ strike was when Karen Lewis, then-president of the union, came out and announced, “We got a deal!” and the teachers replied, “Wait! We haven’t read it yet.” Lewis had told the mayor and the school committee that teachers would be back at work the next day, but the members kept schools closed for one more day and sat out on the streets to read the contract line by line to understand it. To be sure, there’s a little bit of playacting there. But that was beautiful. Lewis had been elected CTU president as a leader from the left caucus, CORE, so members felt more confident in holding her accountable to principles of union democracy.

I also loved one moment in particular from the red state strikes in 2018, which had many important, really splendid, marvelous, hyper-democratic moments. Many teachers had come to the state capitol to talk to members of the legislature. They were demanding funding. The governor, Jim Justice, was a complete prick criminal. He walked out on the steps of the capitol with the president of the West Virginia American Federation of Teachers (AFT) on one arm and the president of the West Virginia NEA on the other arm, and said, “We’ve got a deal. You’re going back to work tomorrow.” There were a couple hundred teachers still there after a long week of protest, and they started booing both their governor and the presidents of their statewide unions. They went back into their county meetings that night and no one was really sure what was happening. “Are we going back? What’s going on?” And county by county (there are 55 counties in West Virginia), they all voted to reject that deal and stay on strike. It was extraordinary.

I am, in general, always inordinately exhilarated by any evidence of anything that looks anti-authoritarian, that looks radically democratic, that looks like a collective self-possession of a group of people. It could be as small as five coworkers saying, “We’re gonna tell the supervisor, no, we’re not taking this overtime shift she wants us to take; we’re leaving!” That will make me as enthusiastic as a strike of forty thousand people. That’s my orientation, and some would consider it a little indiscriminate or something. Certainly, I have a syndicalist impulse in me, which I don’t consider fantastical in any way. Of course, I understand that you need coordination; there’s always going to be people facilitating committees and running organizations. But the matter of decision-making authority always returns. That is the problem, as you know very well: it gets concentrated at the top.

I am always examining the impact of the big strikes in Chicago and Los Angeles on the day-to-day practice of union democracy. The leaders and organizers there have really turned both of those unions around and are rightly celebrated. We see the saturation of progressive values in them – especially at the current moment – as the fierce resistance to ICE raids in these two cities draws on the skills and experience of teachers and union members. This is of immense importance.

But I also am always asking myself how much of this good organizing is self-initiated, or self-sustained from below, and how much still comes from decisions at directives above. Of course there are no absolutes in the real world, and some elements of top-down can productively coexist with elements of bottom-up. The main question for me is what keeps the bottom-up impulse alive and growing. In Los Angeles, the caucus that elected reform leadership has been permitted to wither away. In Chicago, the CORE caucus has been sustained, even through some very difficult periods. Caucuses are put to new tests when the union leadership is elected out of them. The question then becomes how much the caucus will be the political machine of leadership and how much will it focus on recruiting and developing members around a set of radical values. These need not be exclusive, but attention is needed to keep the core principles forefront. 

After the strike in Los Angeles in 2019, I had some serious conversations with Labor Notes staff, who had observed the way UTLA began operating on a command-control model. This is critical to acknowledge. It doesn’t mean you condemn what happened or overlook what was accomplished. That strike was powerful and seminal. It only requires us to examine why it happened the way it did. The answer, in that case, is that there wasn’t yet adequate organization at the base. It’s a fact, but it’s also fine. Nobody needs to freak out about it. We should simply pay attention to this going forward. And who has paid the best attention to that development? In my mind, it’s the Massachusetts teachers. For me, the rolling series of non-legal teachers’ strikes since 2019 by locals of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) show good learning from these earlier strikes and a further development of the same trajectory. 

L-H: How does that manifest concretely? Was there a specific transmission or discussion about these kinds of issues among workers and organizers in Massachusetts, or does it owe more to the broader sequence and development of these K–12 strikes, such that teachers in Massachusetts could overcome some of the earlier limitations?

EDF: Nothing is born full-blown from the head of Zeus. There are always developmental steps. We have Chicago and Los Angeles in 2019 and the red state strikes in 2018–2019, and then we get the MTA with their series of non-legal strikes beginning in 2019 and continuing through 2025.

A caucus had existed for a number of years within MTA, Educators for Democratic Union (EDU). It had become stuck where many caucuses get stuck, in what we call “resolutionary politics.” They’d go to the big annual meeting and bring motions on gun control or climate change or BDS and so on and be seen as extremists or peripheral. Many of the resolutions were shot down. This strategy doesn’t generally rely on – or lead to – broadening the base. It wasn’t grounded in the day-to-day life and concerns of coworkers.

But slowly and steadily, they were also building something of a network, in which they found Barbara Madeloni. Barbara was previously a K–12 teacher but at this point was running teacher education programs at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where faculty are also in a union local of the MTA. In 2014, after winning a grievance for being fired for her opposition to standardized testing, she ran for president of MTA. She was then elected, which no one expected would happen.¹

All of us stand on the shoulders of what has gone before, but there was also something particular about who Barbara was, her deep commitments. She was very clear that she would never consolidate power and decision-making in her own hands. The same cannot be said for everyone who becomes president in reform movements.

Barbara asked Labor Notes for help and so Mark Brenner, who was then the director, and I placed ourselves at her disposal. MTA has strict term limits like many NEA affiliates. She was entitled to serve two two-year terms, so she didn’t have a lot of time. Everyone was against her. The senior staff, the lobbyists, everybody. Remember, it’s the largest union in Massachusetts, a very big organization, some 150 people on staff. She told them, for example, that she wouldn’t lobby or go to the state house. The political department lost their minds because that’s all they’d been doing for years. She told them to do whatever they wanted, but she wasn’t going. They all eventually moved on.

One important initiative concerned the training department. As in most unions, and certainly in MTA at the time, there was a lot of gatekeeping with trainings. Local presidents had been developed in a culture and ethos that taught them that they were in charge of everything. Of course, control by local leadership is better than total control at the level of the state, but it’s not better than democratic control. Barbara told the training department to keep doing whatever it wanted, but she reserved the right to have one training track with two strict criteria: (1) she chooses the trainers; and (2) local presidents cannot decide whether or not it happens or whether members from their local attend.

This track came to be called “Next Generation Leadership Training” and was only open to people who had served fewer than three years in office in the union, or none at all. Anyone who met that criteria could apply without approval from their local president. I ended up running the trainings with a member of MTA’s training staff, a wonderful and brilliant comrade named George Luse.

The approach we developed was different from anything either of us had done before. We didn’t use PowerPoints, lectures, exercises, or roleplays: it was all dialogue. We’d ask questions and bring the experience of the participants into the room for everyone to observe and reflect on. There was a bare framework for the questions:

1. How do organizers help coworkers understand the power relationships in their workplace?
2. How do organizers help their coworkers overcome divisions to form groups that share a common goal?
3. How do organizers help their coworkers overcome fear to take collective action and solve workplace problems?
4. How do organizers help their coworkers reflect and keep going?

The questions were all very concrete and focused on people’s actual experience. We might start by asking, “Can anyone share a time when you saw someone in your workplace abuse their power? Tell us about it.” The story might be about a boss, or another worker, or even a union officer doing something that struck them as abusive . . . anything at all. And then we’d ask follow-up questions to others in the group, like, “What have you learned about the power relations in this person’s workplace, or union, from this story?” Participants would start asking each other questions, everyone listening really attentively, offering good solid insights. Dialogue like this could flow indefinitely with our occasional interventions to dig deeper, or underline keen observations, or suggest a lesson that might have wide applicability. 

Participants always commented on how great it felt to talk frankly, to expose problems but use them productively rather than just complaining (which is standard in most workplaces). The sense of mutual support was palpable and often sparked brilliant ideas about what might be done to address the problems. We started getting reports that people would leave a Next Gen training and immediately start organizing in their own locals, bringing coworkers together, identifying issues, taking steps to fix things. 

This began to kindle a tendency or current that was so discernible, even early on, that the old guard, in addition to trying to trap Barbara and get rid of her, immediately tried to cancel the training program. But it survives to this day. During the pandemic, I was hosting Zoom trainings, and we developed a whole cadre of members and staff who now do it themselves. We came to call it “long talk” training. It is ultimately Freirean consciousness-raising.

Many workers found their way into the caucus, which has maintained leadership ever since. It has not been without its challenges, but it has been sustained. What we can say Barbara did, from on top, was create and permit space underneath her. The result now is that many locals within the MTA are now led by people who grew up with this democratic ethos. When such locals came to the question of bargaining, their answer was to build power. They insisted on open bargaining, which has been anathema to leadership from the moment I entered the labor movement. Mark Brenner and I staged a conference on open bargaining for Barbara in her second year in office, fully expecting the staff and old leaders to lose their minds. It happened, and it fed into the preparation and development of a whole series of strikes that are open-ended, serious fights, illegal in Massachusetts, and in which the locals sustain serious fines. I consider the growing capacity of these locals to wage these fights to be a very important signal fire in the long resistance to neoliberalism.

The caucus grew within a wider context and a longer trajectory. There was a wave of caucus formation in many K–12 teacher locals all around the country that are knit together in a national network called the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators (UCORE). This is a very light structure, with twice-monthly Zoom calls and annual in-person conferences that have been running now for a decade, in which people can examine their own experience, learn from one another, reflect together, gain courage, keep going. 

L-H: What would you say to workers and labor organizers in the present moment as the movement faces arguably an even more intense and direct attack upon democracy?

EDF: Everything in my experience tells me that our best hope for economic, political, and social democracy – while we’re still captive within capitalism – is through self-organization at the workplace. When we engage coworkers with deep respect and purpose, aiming for conditions of mutual dignity, then we see the kindling of resolve and power. Every worker is well served by forging alliances on the job. If possible, turn those relationships into a union. If you’ve got a union but it’s undemocratic, reform it. If your union is competent, help make it militant. If it succeeds at militancy, bring it into social struggle to defeat authoritarianism and capitalism. And keep going.