At the first MTA Bargaining Summit, a vice president of the St. Paul Federation of Educators talked about the days when his members looked at the union the same way as they looked at a soda machine.
"You put some money in, and something comes out. Instead of a Coke, they expected a contract," he said, noting the deficiencies of traditional bargaining practices and behaviors.
MTA President Merrie Najimy was also at that first summit, held in 2015, and at the time was president of her local in Concord. The MTA was embarking on a mission to revamp the way locals approached bargaining.
"We came out of the summit with a strategy and got our best contract ever," Najimy said in her opening remarks to the 2021 MTA Bargaining Summit, which was held remotely on Nov. 13.
Nowadays, the MTA does not need to bring in speakers from Minnesota or other states to tout the benefits and successes of using expanded bargaining and coalition organizing to win better contracts for educators. The union’s own locals possess a great deal of experience — and many successes — to discuss. This year’s summit featured leaders from Haverhill, UMass Boston, Springfield and elsewhere, as well as representatives from the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts, leading conversations and workshops for about 150 participants.
Democratizing union work and building solidarity — be it across bargaining units or among many different unions — were the main themes of the event.
Maureen Zuber of the Haverhill Education Association discussed the contract campaign waged by the HEA’s Education Support Professionals unit. Inspired by the contract victory achieved by the ESPs in Somerville, the Haverhill ESP unit engaged more members in bargaining-related activities and formed robust alliances with the community’s teachers.
"We knew we would be stronger all working together," Zuber said. "Now more members know about the details of the contract. Members are much more willing to bring forward problems at their jobs. And members feel more respected."
Anneta Argyres, president of the Professional Staff Union at UMass Boston, talked about the benefits — and challenges — of bargaining in a coalition, particularly when there are more than 8,000 workers represented by 10 different unions and 25 local associations.
"We’ve won some pieces of our demands," Argyres said. "But the most profound change has been the change in our awareness of the industry we work in and who the decision-makers are."
Now the coalition has a better handle on how each unit is being treated at the bargaining table by UMass management, and union members can better challenge inequities and disparities.
In Springfield, union educators used bargaining and organizing to drive an ongoing racial justice movement in the public schools.
Tracy Little-Sasanecki, the first Black president of the Springfield Education Association, led a delegation of members who described the slow and steady work of empowering educators of color and how that has led to powerful alliances between the SEA and community organizations. Those relationships, in turn, are yielding ways to hold elected leaders accountable for their actions in making the Springfield schools more equitable and racially just.
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The SEA’s commitment to building strategic alliances has resulted in a commitment on the part of the schools to hire more educators of color, assess curriculum to ensure that it is inclusive, and review policies and procedures that may have a disproportionately negative impact on students of color.
Expanding bargaining teams — so that union negotiating groups are not limited in size — continues to be a popular tactic for engaging members and upending management’s desire to confine talks to a small group of people working behind closed doors.
In response to a case in Belmont, the state has upheld the right for a union to have silent bargaining representatives at negotiations.
The Massachusetts State College Association credits its expanded bargaining team for changing the tenor of bargaining that had become negative or was floundering.
"Members seeing management’s bad behavior at the table changed everything," MSCA Vice President Maria Hegbloom told participants during a higher ed workshop.
It took time to refine the use of the silent representatives so they could function as more than observers, Hegbloom said. The MSCA’s Contract Action Team developed a way for the silent reps to communicate via text and to then prepare strategies once the negotiators broke into caucuses.
"We learned to capitalize on the model," Hegbloom said. "The more you know what bargaining is, the more integrated you become into the fuller life of the union."
As the summit began, MTA Vice President Max Page reminded participants that the work of revolutionizing a local’s approach to bargaining is not something that happens quickly. And not all locals attending the summit are in the same position when it comes to such work.
"Nobody is born a union leader," Page said. "Our union power comes from members working together and supporting each other like we are doing today."
