From Professionals to Unionists: Illinois Teacher Organizing and the Fight for Public-Sector Labor Rights, 1968-1984

Joseph Rathke, University of Chicago

From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, militant teachers organized to transform the Illinois Education Association from an advocacy organization devoted to the "professional uplift" of educators and school administrators into a full-fledged labor union, expelling administrators from its ranks and taking the reigns of what would become the largest teachers' organization in the state. In the years that followed, IEA teachers pursued political power for labor, waging a decade-long campaign to win collective bargaining rights for teachers that culminated in a complicated but nonetheless resounding victory with the passage of public-sector collective bargaining laws in 1984. This paper examines the significance of this teacher-led campaign. I argue that militant Illinois teachers, influenced by the social movements of the 1960s and the economic crisis of the late 60s and early 70s, acted to form a new class consciousness, asserting themselves not only as respectable professionals but as part of a broader working class. The political and legal victories that resulted came about not only despite the decline of New Deal liberalism and the rise of neoliberalism, but precisely because liberal hegemony was under siege, undermining the institutional ties between Illinois unions and the Democratic Party and providing new opportunities for militant, worker-led political action among teachers and other public-sector workers that Democratic oversight had repressed.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 29. Social Reproduction Politics and the Boundaries of Economic Rights