And of course, Andover is an affluent community, there’s a significant number of very vocal and very loud parents who feel like, for convenience and economic purposes, the students should be back full time, that this pandemic is not a serious concern. We just kept getting this oppositional attitude that they had no need to negotiate over this, that they could unilaterally decide what the opening of school was going to look like. So we met as an association and formulated our own task force to develop a set of principles, health and safety being the highest priority for our membership, and demanded again to bargain over the start of school. What we found was that the district very much loathed negotiating in these formal processes, and over the summer when it became clear that the return to school was a big question mark, they started going unilaterally and developing their own plans.
The pandemic hit, and we were trying to define remote learning through the typical processes of negotiation and coming up with memorandums of agreements. We’ve been fighting at the Labor Board against issues all year that we find unjust and part of managerial overreach.
So when we were pushing the issues, we organized in one building around a bully principal. The previous leadership was more connected to the administration than the members. When the pandemic hit we were already sort of in a struggle, a major battle, with the school committee and superintendent to build our union basically from the ground up. Hrough the process, we built a bond and we built our union in a way that we would not have been able to in the past year without the crisis, without the callousness of management. WIth a core group of EDU members and activists and allies, we began changing our local union. Then we went back and tried to start taking over the locals. EDU, basically over the last eight years or so, has taken over the leadership structure of the MTA in an attempt to make it more radically democratic and more activist in a sense of rank and file organizing rather than making deals with politicians or contributing to politicians’ campaigns as much.Īnd so we got the president position a few years back with one of our members, then many of us got onto the board of directors and the executive committee, and we began changing the association into an organizing association. So, many of us who were disenchanted with that formulated a caucus with then the association called the Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU). It was “business unionism,” the term we use to describe that. Electoral politics was the only strategy that the association seemed to subscribe to, as well as a strategic retreat on issues that affected teachers most of the time. The longstanding problem with the MTA was that it was basically an extension of the Democratic Party. They are connected to the locals across the state, and I’m the local president in Andover. Sure, it’s part of a bigger story about the teachers union in the state of Massachusetts. Can you walk us through again what happened and how you all organized yourselves?
You spoke on the lead up to your teachers’ action of working outside of the building on Monday, August 31st. In the first of a two-part interview, Matt discusses the leadup to the action.Įvan H: I’d like to start off by thanking you once again for joining the BRS’ public discussion on teaching in the time of the pandemic. The Massachusetts Department of Labor Relations (DLR) later ruled the teachers’ action was an illegal strike.
Andover teacher union class actio portable#
Teachers set up Wi-Fi hotspots and portable toilets to conduct their work, while the district drove the teachers off school grounds. In late August, Andover teachers organized an outdoor workday, in protest of the school district’s demands that teachers risk health and safety by entering school buildings. Reed interviewed Matt Bach, president of the Andover Education Association (AEA), the union that represents the Andover teachers, on organizing in the time of the pandemic.
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