In 2019, Oakland teachers joined the wave of teacher strikes across U.S. cities sparked by teacher activism against neoliberal reforms that cut funding to public schools, increased privatization, and led to school closures. As in other cities, a group of progressive rank-and-file teachers working toward transformative change moved their union…

This article explores the efficacy and cost effectiveness of New Labour's skills-based policies to help low paid workers adjust to the pressures generated by globalisation, of which the leading example was Train to Gain (T2G). It also analyses the more general issue of how, why and under what circumstances education, training and skills can help…

Teachers in England and Wales are involved in the largest campaign of industrial action since the mid-1980s. At the heart of their grievances are government plans to abolish a national framework for teachers' pay and the removal of important safeguards relating to working conditions. Wider questions of workload and pensions are also involved. This…

Trade unions and other sites of community-labour organizing such as workers centres are rich, yet contested spaces of education and knowledge production in which both non-formal and informal / incidental forms of learning occur. Putting forward a critique of dominant strands of worker education, the authors ask what spaces exist for social…

Robert Michels' famous "iron law of oligarchy" has come under criticism from scholars that question assumptions regarding the concentration of power within social movement organizations (SMOs). Despite such concerns, Michels' broader interests in organizational structure and power continue to be relevant for analyzing the goals and…

Fear can be conceptualized differently as experienced by those inside and outside the school organization. Internally, participants respond to fear in a politics of maintenance aimed toward protection against anticipated job loss(es). This article examines internal organizational participants' fear, with particular attention to teachers' fear of…

In this article, the author claims that the steady corporatization of American higher education has threatened to relegate faculty governance, never strong, to the historical archive. In public institutions, faculty disempowerment has been codified by law--legislatures, the governor or county executive or their staff, or state boards of higher…

Collective bargaining cannot work when the parties are not free to assess the costs of agreeing against the costs of disagreeing and act on their decisions. Management must remove substantive bargaining restrictions, even if this means working to eliminate employee strike benefits and restrictions on the board's taxation ability. Affirmative…

Recent study of emergent collaborative bargaining processes in several urban school districts charts typical bumpy progression from wrangling to genuine cooperative problem solving among teachers, administrators, and unions. Rules of power game change when one party makes first move toward open communication and trust building, when teachers and…

Unions of professionals are comparable to neither traditional professional associations nor traditional unions. To reject unionization because it is allegedly "unprofessional" is supported neither by the theoretical base, the historical record, nor the current reality. (Author)

In the positive theory of public bureaucracy, the prevailing view is that the structure of public agencies is designed from the top down by political superiors. Faced with bureaucrats who may disagree with them on policy and who are advantaged by private information, superiors choose rules and procedures to try to ensure that agencies do what they…