A Failure to Lead
The MTA During the Pandemic
In the summer of 2020, Massachusetts educators began to think seriously about returning to school during the pandemic. We had recovered enough from the traumatic end of the 2019–2020 school year to start worrying about what would happen in September. It’s hard to remember now just how scary things were, but teachers, paraprofessionals, daycare providers — everyone in education — really needed to talk. They also needed advice and information and support. Understanding this need, a handful of educators formed the Massachusetts Educators United Facebook Group (MEU) at the end of June. The group quickly grew to more than 20,000 members.
The MEU has provided a place for information, guidance, and whatever reassurance was to be had during this difficult, uncertain time. In the beginning, members posted and commented in droves. About their districts’ plans for returning to school. About their legal and contractual rights. About CDC recommendations and DESE guidance. About the meaning of pandemic data. About whether or not children could spread the COVID virus. About choosing between continued employment and their health or that of their families. About potential budget cuts and layoffs. About retiring early. About protests and direct action. About going on strike. The death rate slowed over the summer, but Massachusetts had lost 1500 people a week in April and no one knew what the fall would look like and whether schools would be safe to return to.
While the casual membership of the MEU was actively communicating, the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) was comparatively mute. During the biggest crisis to face public education in decades, MTA members turned, not to the MTA, but an ad-hoc Facebook Group for answers, support, and guidance. Like most people, I was unnerved by the pandemic, but I was terrified by the absence of the MTA. I’ve belonged to the MTA for 28 years. My parents were also public educators and MTA members. Like most members, I paid my dues and took for granted that the MTA was doing its job. As a building rep for the East Longmeadow Education Association, I knew that any return to school would depend on the East Longmeadow School Committee, but still, I expected some leadership from the MTA. It’s never any good when an organization and its leaders are missing in action.
Until I posted a question asked on MEU about how the MTA was responding to the pandemic, there had been no official MTA presence in the MEU group. Several MEU members were also active in the MTA, but not serving any sort of representative function. At the prompting of MTA Board of Directors member Sue Doherty who was in the MEU, I eventually emailed MTA President Merrie Najimy who eventually joined the group and posted. What did she have to say? Most of the talk was about protests and calling our elected officials. The MTA leadership had taken part in negotiating a 10-day delay in the 2020–2021 school year with the American Federation of Teachers - Massachusetts and Boston Teachers Union. Besides this agreement, nothing constructive emerged from the MTA. That’s not to say they didn’t try.
Who’s in Charge?
Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU) is a caucus of progressive, if illiberal, MTA members whose stated concern is social justice and modus operandi is protest. They assumed power with the election of Barbara Madeloni as MTA President in 2014. As far as I can tell, about half of the MTA Board of Directors now belongs to the EDU as do current MTA President Merrie Najimy and Vice President Max Page. Most recently, the EDU secured a majority on the Candidate Endorsement Committee.
In spite of its nominal desire for a democratic union, the EDU’s methods have led to an increasingly illiberal, union democracy. By forming the first and only caucus within the union, the EDU took advantage of a relatively unorganized political environment of the MTA. There are no other caucuses or parties in the MTA, which means the EDU has had no organized opposition. They found candidates to run for the Board of Directors and used their organization to drum up the votes to elect them. (The results of MTA election are not published, but few people presumably vote. Most members have never heard of any of the candidates anyway). It should be noted that prior to the advent of Madeloni and the EDU, the MTA was dominated by members and locals in Eastern Massachusetts, and those in power were not particularly interested in changing the status quo.
The EDU captured the MTA Presidency and Vice Presidency through effective organizing. Appealing to the resentment of Western Massachusetts locals and members and actively espousing a social justice platform, they stacked the Annual Meeting in 2014. They even took the unprecedented step of going so far as hiring buses to take members (and votes) to Boston.
The MTA’s long-standing tradition of electing the President and Vice President at Annual Meeting, an arcane event held yearly in Boston, is profoundly undemocratic. The number of attendees and votes at the Annual Meeting are not publicly available, but people who regularly attend estimate the number at 1200 or so. That’s one or two percent of the membership.
A number of factors limit attendance at the MTA’s Annual Meeting. Aside from the fact that most people don’t want to travel to Boston and spend a Saturday listening to speeches and arguments, there are several costs. For members not living the Boston area, there is travel and/or accommodations. Larger locals and chapters often defray these costs for their members by paying for hotel rooms and some meals. Smaller locals, which have less money, are less likely to spend thousands of their members’ dollars on an event that has little effect on their working conditions or pay. Once or twice, my local has taken the day to attend. Including meeting up, parking, and walking, our trip to Boston, back and forth, takes four hours. When it comes to the election of the President and Vice President, distance and money are forms of voter suppression.
Electing its executive branch at the Annual Meeting, the MTA also disenfranchises voters in apportioning delegates based on the size of each individual local and chapter. Thus, Worcester has more delegates (and proportionally more votes) than Palmer. This proportional representation makes at least some sense when it comes to legislative functions like setting the MTA’s budget and making policies. It makes no sense, however, for the MTA President and Vice President, who represent all MTA members to be elected by delegates. Political legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed, yet the MTA dilutes that consent to 1–2% of the union membership when it elects those who speak for them.
The EDU broke no rules when it formed a caucus. In taking control of the MTA, they merely took advantage of a badly designed system that had been in place for too long. They also demonstrated that the MTA was asleep at the wheel when it came to the political possibilities for organizing. Nonetheless, the EDU presents three problems for the organization and the membership: 1) continuing the decline of already troubling MTA democracy, and 2) pushing an agenda with methods that reflects neither the will of the members nor interest of the MTA, and 3) neglecting to provide the high-quality services members value.
The Misleadership of the MTA Leadership
After almost five months of no communication with members, Najimy and Page gathered thousands of MTA members in the first of a handful of Zoom Meetings. The primary purposes of the meetings were aimed at organizing some direct action and conducting a structure test, a labor organizing strategy employed to the strength, organization, and leadership of a union.
At the first meeting on July 29, they claimed that Education Commissioner Jeff Riley had “left the table” and “walked out” on them. The implication was that he had refused to negotiate with them. Whether this actually happened is a matter of debate, I later learned. Other attendees of that meeting said that Page and Najimy had requested this meeting, and that Riley didn’t walk out on them. The meeting had simply ended. Regardless, recounting their version of events to the membership was clearly intended to agitate them.
Next, as an apparent structure test, Najimy and Page asked attendees to call their state representatives and senators to ask for “full funding” of education in the budget. If people do what is asked, there’s a measure of success. At that meeting, thousands of communications were immediately made. The next day, many more communications were sent from people who didn’t attend the meeting.
This request for the full funding of education happened at the July 29 meeting. Unbeknownst to members in the Zoom meeting and perhaps Najimy and Vice President Max Page, the budget had actually been passed on July 28, the day before the meeting! The thousands of communications had absolutely no effect on the state budget. And the legislature didn’t even “fully fund” education; our “demands” for college funding were not met.
At the next meeting in August, Page explicitly credited member communications with the passage of the budget:
“You sent thousands of emails and texts and made calls to legislatures demanding that they provide clarity on funding on public education… This is how the legislature responded: they passed a budget that level funds the state budget through October.”
Did Page and Najimy know the budget had already passed before they asked members to call state representatives and senators asking for full-funding? It seems unlikely, which is embarrassing. Ignorance, in this case, is almost as bad as lying. It’s the MTA’s job to know what’s happening on Beacon Hill. Yet he misled the members who could only have influenced the budget if they had gone back in time.
Finally, Najimy, Page, and the EDU attempted to “escalate conflict in ways that build… solidarity” by trying to do an end-run around the Chapter 150e prohibition against encouraging a strike. Najimy and Page offered up a bizarrely worded statement for local ratification that was construed as obliquely calling for a strike. It is telling that members of the EDU Caucus explicitly called for a strike on the Massachusetts Educators United (MEU) Facebook Page and in the comments of the July 29 Zoom meeting. Prior to this, they began to promote events there without being clear about their identity or their mission to MEU members or moderators. A groundswell of direct action never materialized, and with the exception of the Andover Education Association, which accidentally struck (with members losing a day’s pay), and Sharon Teachers Association there was no strike. After the school year began, Najimy and Page held another meeting of the general membership. Approximately, 500 people showed up.
What If They Threw a Strike and No One Came?
Chapter 150e of the Massachusetts General Laws prohibits public employees from striking and the MTA from encouraging strikes, so Najimy and Page did not explicitly call for a general strike of public school teachers. As is clear from the Facebook entry above, the EDU, however, was on the job. Caucus member and Malden Education Association President Deb Gesualdo called for a strike on the MEU Facebook group and in the comments of the July 29 Zoom meeting. The oblique push for a strike culminated in a peculiar statement that sounded a lot MTA and local negotiations and contained the ultimatum, “we will refuse to return to unsafe school buildings.”
What might not be obvious to people unfamiliar with the basics of teacher contracts is that refusing to return to unsafe school buildings is tantamount to a strike. Andover teachers learned this the hard way when they refused to enter school buildings for professional development prior to reopening schools. They were found guilty of striking. A teacher contract is signed by both union local and a school district. One side can’t simply refuse to carry out its side of the bargain.
This statement troubled the Quincy Education Association so much that they refused to endorse it and penned a Letter to the Editor of the Boston Globe:
“After considerable time spent reading the MTA statement and trying to understand its language, intent, and purpose, the executive board determined that the MTA statement is essentially asking us to commit this union to a strike,” the letter dated Aug. 1 stated. “As a rationale for such a work action, it is shockingly vague.”
The strike, obliquely called for in the statement, never materialized. Many locals voted to endorse the statement, but none followed through on their refusal to return to work. Direct action certainly has its place in unionism, but the MTA is, as it name suggests, less a union than an association of unions. Associations are typically organizations of union locals and college chapters with little or no authority over its members. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve the unity necessary for a general teacher strike in Massachusetts. There are simply too many locals and chapters with different interests. More importantly, locals and chapters contract directly with their employers. The MTA itself cannot strike. There’s not even a way for it to vote to strike.
The MTA Leadership never gave up on direct action. At the MTA’s behest, many locals also engaged in a fruitless vote of no confidence against Education Commissioner Jeff Riley. Governor Baker wasn’t going to fire Riley; in fact, his spokespeople had some choice words for the MTA, which the Governor himself followed up on.
Thanks to anti-union pundits and politicians, teachers’ unions are a frequent and easy target. Perhaps worse, they confuse locals with the MTA, so the MTA’s missteps can reflect badly on our locals. My local actually has a cordial, working relationship with our district administration; we worked together on a safe reopening of school. When our school committee decided, with no pressure from the ELEA, to reopen our schools remotely, town residents blamed… the teachers union for the decision. No good deed goes unpunished.
Ineffective job actions tend to make us look foolish and counteract any organizing benefits they might have. Teachers remain popular and appreciated in Massachusetts, but the MTA has been no help in that regard. Worse, they inadvertently positioned us in opposition of the best interests of students, whom many parents believed would be better off with some form of in-person teaching. The MTA is, if anything, less powerful than it was before the pandemic.