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.
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…
Auteur: Michael McQuarrie
