Can you tell us about what UCORE is and how it came into being?

The acronym UCORE stands for the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators. It took us about two years to build the network before we even came up with a name for it. It is a network characterised by as much informality as possible. It is not a union, a federation, or an NGO. It is not really an organisation. It doesn’t have bylaws, a constitution, or officers. There is a modest budget, but it is just used to help bring people to conferences. So, in essence, it is a network.

In the United States, there are two major unions. First, the National Education Association (NEA) is far and away the largest union in the US. It is more of a federated model because public education in the US is a municipal, not a federal, responsibility. The structure of teachers’ unions reflected that. But the NEA has 2.8 million members, making it the largest labour union in the United States. The other major teachers’ union is the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the breakdown between the two is largely that the AFT was founded and grew in major metropolitan cities. So most of the big cities in the US were originally AFT locals, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Chicago, and they began collective bargaining long before the NEA. The NEA was a professional association before it began to turn in the direction of collective bargaining.

But in any event, there had been many, many years of incredible acrimony and bloodshed between these two unions as they competed for membership and hegemony in various ways. That period is over, and there is hardly anything that constitutes competition between them that affects the life of the rank-and-file member. In fact, there has been a long development of merged locals. Some cities are now merged, like Los Angeles, that are affiliated with both the NEA and the AFT. Then, some states have engaged in a complete merger, for example, Minnesota. So the existence of two different unions is not a big factor or problem in teacher organising. UCORE is made up of caucuses within local associations, local teacher unions, and, in some cases, statewide bodies and affiliates. Regardless, some are AFT, and some are NEA; some are merged, and it doesn’t matter in practice.

What is the organising history of these kinds of teachers’ unions?

Both the NEA and the AFT definitely have a craft background. Membership for decades was limited to people whose jobs required a state licence, such as classroom teachers, social workers, librarians, school nurses, and special educators. These require at least a bachelor’s degree and a licence. This began to change at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. A landmark civil rights law was passed in the US that guaranteed free, full, and equal public education for all children, regardless of any disability. All of a sudden, millions of new jobs had to be created to accommodate this student population, which previously had mostly been sort of shunted off into separate institutions. NEA and AFT locals can certainly represent what we sometimes call para-educators or teaching assistants. Some of them do, but in almost all cases, it will be in two different bargaining units. They may belong to the same local or a different local. It has something to do with state law, something to do with culture, and something to do with racism and classism. They are definitely a new body of workers in the last forty years who have been unionising. For UCORE, our history is about twelve years old, so it comes after that, organising with both kinds of workers.

Are there quite different kinds of conditions across the state and municipality within which workers are organising?

Yes, there certainly is! For example, I think there are only about thirty-five states where collective bargaining is enshrined in state labour law. Then, only seven states allow teacher strikes. In the vast majority, they are not considered legal. In every state, there is quite a range of what is permitted and what is prohibited. In a lot of the southern states, for example, the law will be very clear: “Collective bargaining of any sort is prohibited, so don’t even come and talk to us, we don’t want to hear from you.” In other states, it is patterned after our National Labour Relations Act, which is our private-sector labour law. This can mean a sophisticated legal framework and protections. So as you can imagine, what the presumed norms are can be really different. What are the rights? What are the expectations? What kind of relationship can you have with your employer? But I will say this: the contradictions of this current moment of the decay of this cycle of capitalism have created far more similarities than differences. So even where the law exists and seems quite good, it is clouded and ignored so universally across so many settings that you might as well be lacking any legal rights at all.

How does that connect to the history of schools and education workers in the US?

Well, maybe some of the most relevant history is quite broad. However, these are some important anchor points. Collective bargaining in the private sector was enshrined in law in 1935. For public sector workers, it is a subject of state rights, so it can be very varied. Every state has a different set of laws. Collective bargaining laws for teachers, in general, did not appear on the books in various states until maybe the late 50s, but more into the mid-60s and early 70s. This obviously was also a reflection of the dynamics of post-war industrial capitalism. As the US began to de-industrialise, starting in the 60s and accelerating in the 70s, other sectors grew, including public services and other forms of service work. This increasingly replaced basic manufacturing.

Alongside this, there were several intense waves of organising and militancy emerging in the teaching sector. And when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s outside New York City, it was not unusual to hear about organising very contentious contract campaigns and strikes. New York State still has the Taylor Law, which prohibits public sector strikes. Most public sector workers can’t remember when that was passed, but at the time, you saw television coverage of teacher union presidents in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York being led off in chains and handcuffs to jail. There was also this tumult and drama around teacher strikes. There was also a material necessity for these struggles, because wages for public school teachers in the post-war period remained quite low. It was, and remains, primarily a female profession. It was bifurcated: young working women came out of college, but when they started a family, they left the profession until their kids were old enough to start school.

It was a time of great militancy, but also conflict with the public. Generally speaking, parents, politicians, and the media were very polarised against these strikes. That period of militancy was obliterated by neoliberalism, starting towards the end of the 1970s. By the 2000s, a style of bureaucratic, service-oriented business unions had really settled in. It was part of a labour peace agreement, so wages came up, and teachers were now considered middle class. The prevailing attitude was that this was a cushy job: you had the summers off and stopped work at three in the afternoon. There was not only public sentiment against thinking of teachers as workers, but they were also thought of as privileged professionals. That was very much internalised, and many teachers felt that.

Then, as things happened, both material and political conditions began to create circumstances, particularly in urban areas, that teachers found intolerable. This included inadequate resources, buildings falling apart, increased class sizes, and an increasing burden being piled onto schools as the state withdrew from its caretaking function in society. So tremendously needy, desperate communities were looking to the schools for everything that was needed. This included behavioural counselling, dealing with drugs, dealing with student violence, broken homes, housing, precarity, race crises, and immigration crises. When they land on the doorstep of the schools, rank-and-file members were looking to their union leaders to say: “All right, what are we going to do about all this?” At this point, the union leaders are bureaucrats who are very tied to the Democratic Party, but are not paying attention to their members. And so this, I think, sparked the possibility of insurgency. That is the bigger background and history.

So, how did starting UCORE relate to these differences and challenges?

UCORE is part of the US caucus tradition, which differs from the British tradition. Its roots are not that ancient. Our caucuses were a very important feature of labour politics in the 1970s. Some of us, myself included, who grew up in that moment, including the founders of Labor Notes and the founders of Teamsters for A Democratic Union, were aware that if your union is to become a force for controlling members, rather than helping to build power for members, then this is what you do about it. You aim to democratise your union, reform it, and build a struggle orientation through a caucus. Caucuses are acknowledged and protected under our national labour law. It varies in state labour law, but they are understood. It is therefore acceptable to criticise your union leaders, to form an opposition slate, to run against incumbent leadership, and to demand financial transparency. In order to do this, you must have elections, and virtually all states will require that if there is collective bargaining, you must permit members to vote on their contract. So with some of those democratic handholds, the idea of rank-and-file democratic caucuses was not unusual.

As conditions began to worsen, I think it is fair to say two things happened. First, members of my generation who are still leftists and still active in the labour movement would say, “hey, what do you think, maybe we should do something about this?” About 15 years ago, when the caucus movement started to pick up again, that was an important influence. But, second, and perhaps even more important were younger teachers. These were teachers who had grown up under the dark cloud of neoliberalism, but perhaps were even younger and had different ideas. They were mostly socialists of some sort. They had a critique and an analysis about what the union should be, that they should be autonomous and in an adversarial relationship with the employer, and not be confused by the fact that they were working in a public setting for the public good, and that they should have the right to think and act collectively as workers. Many of the early caucuses were absolutely sparked by young left teachers. Many of whom, I think it’s quite accurate to say, were trained and possibly we could say “dispatched” by the ISO (International Socialist Organisation). Although it has since dissolved itself, at that stage it was producing a kind of serious, disciplined cadre working as teachers with the idea that this is what we should do.

Could you tell us more about the caucus model?

One of the benefits of the caucus model, and I hope I’m not being too partisan, is that Labor Notes has survived this long, dark period since it was founded in 1979 during a moment when caucus politics were very robust and enlivened. Many of the initiatives we took, both in terms of stories and publications, on what to highlight in our work, in conferences and consultations, were around us. The point really is finding a part of your union that can be democratised in any way. Maybe you’re just one teacher. Maybe you start with one building, or even just one wing of a building. Maybe this can spread to a local, a district, or a state entity. But we were very, very clear in Labor Notes that you should start at the bottom and build up. So in the early days of UCORE, for example, some people came in and said, “What we should be doing is running a slate against the national leadership!” And pretty much everyone said, “No, no, that’s not what we’re doing, you can go and do that.” For us, building from below was critically important, as well as varying tactics and strategies. We thought everything was worth considering and had to assess what might work in practice. We encourage a lot of caution in relation to elections. When people say, “Our executive board is corrupt, and we have a slate we want to run against them.” Our response is usually, “Why don’t we talk about this first?” We ask many, many questions about who they have spoken to, how many other people agree with the problems, what they think, what efforts have been made to pressure the executive board, which network or organisation they are part of, whether they have a plan, and how much they know. We discuss many practical questions. Many of our caucuses have started with simple aims, such as getting our local branch to hold meetings. We think about how to accomplish that. This is a start for democratising our union, getting a functioning local, and taking the first steps.

What does this mean for UCORE as an organising model?

There are three important parts to it. One, it is often harder to win an election than you think, because even if your incumbent leadership are lazy and stupid, you will find out they are much better organisers than you thought as soon as you challenge them. So that is often hard. The second is that if you run and win, it will be much harder to transform your local than if you had done earlier work to build relationships and get people ready to fight. And, finally, between the founding of Labor Notes and this latest period of return of labour militancy, we have seen so many reform slates be elected and then just be wiped out because they were not prepared. They had no base and did not know what they were getting into. They were red-baited, undermined, or they could not get it done. Then you really set back, because people are now much more cynical.

How does UCORE organise on a practical level, particularly with teachers so spread out across the US?

We have a simple answer to this. Since we established the network, it took us a little while to figure out who would be involved, what we would do, and how it would grow. It started with the reform of the Chicago Teachers Union and the caucus of rank-and-file educators. This was about a decade ago that we coalesced enough to start building UCORE. We have held two Zoom meetings a month since then, pretty much steadily. On the second Tuesday of each month, we would have a steering committee meeting. This was a reasonably small group, a dozen or so people from the most mature caucuses. On the fourth Tuesday of each month, we have a national call in which all members attend. You could be in a caucus or be thinking about starting one to join. These national calls are generally topical. They could be debriefing an important strike that had happened, discussing what to do about high-stakes testing, or something like that. More recently, we’ve moved from monthly steering committee meetings to quarterly, but we still have national calls every month. There is so much happening at the moment that we wanted to give the steering committee members a little bit of a break.

In even-numbered years, we organise a one-day UCORE conference on the day before the Labor Notes conference in Chicago. In odd-numbered years, it’s a three-day conference that rotates among cities where caucuses take turns hosting. These have been held in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Jersey, Durham, North Carolina, and other cities. In addition to that, we also sometimes have gatherings and regional conferences if there’s enough of a cluster. We’ve had one in West Virginia, a couple in New York, and one in California. These happen when enough people want to get together and do it. Additionally, UCORE is always available for various consultations. For example, if teachers are preparing to go on an illegal strike in two weeks, we might find people who have been through this before and put them in touch.

UCORE is organised horizontally. It is hosted by Labor Notes in the sense that they have provided light administrative support. For example, sending out reminders and the Zoom link for our calls. I participate in the facilitation (as a Labor Notes board member) with two members of the Labor Notes staff. The substance of those calls is what happens when you bring people together for the exclusive purpose of saying: “What’s going on?” We ask each other, “What have you been working on? Why did you decide to work on that in this way? What choices have you made about strategy? How did it go? What were the results? What did you learn? What can you teach from that?” This is what we do in the calls. The substance can cover everything from what we mean by Black Lives Matter in schools? What do we mean by the school-to-prison pipeline? What are you doing about the growth of homelessness among students? What are we doing about ICE raids, and how are schools responding to that? As well as, how do you try to achieve paid family leave in your contract? And so it goes across the whole range, teaching each other through our own experiences.

How did you come to organise like this?

I think for some of us, myself included, it came out of the politics of the 1960s and 70s. We had many years of experience to reflect on. We had the whole period of building organisations, the Marxist, Leninist, Maoist experiences, and the chance to think about what worked and what didn’t work. Especially in the US, being so close to Latin America and the influences there, we have an anarchist tradition, even if it was obliterated a hundred years ago. Coming out of this were currents rethinking the left. Labor Notes was one of those poles, oriented towards the idea of not recreating the problems of the past, but leaning into ideas of more distributed leadership, power, autonomy, and so on. But many other ideological elements were competing. I was surprised by this at the third UCORE national conference.

Some of us who had been serving on a coordinating committee developed a proposal for a constitution, bylaws, and some officer structures. When we presented it, the response was just “yeah, I don’t know. We don’t think so.” It wasn’t fierce opposition. We tried again the next year, and the response was the same. In retrospect, I understand that people know so much about capitalism instinctively, but one of the things they just hate is having bosses of any kind. If you set up an organisation that is too hierarchical, it just doesn’t feel right to people. It was interesting because it was so instinctive. However, we had the luxury of doing that because we are not a union. UCORE is a network. In a union, there must be processes, decision-making procedures, and who holds legal and financial responsibilities. We’ve been an experiment, a laboratory for what it looks like when these principles are allowed to run free and see what you get. People say, over and over again, they feel like the UCORE spaces are the ones they most want to be in. They are the most generative and the most helpful because they help them think and sustain themselves in the work.

What kinds of successes have there been?

I am ridiculously enthusiastic. I get excited about the person who wants to have the first conversation with a co-worker, as well as the strike of 35,000 teachers. I am so enthralled by people becoming organisers. My criteria for success are that outcomes come from a process as democratic as possible, given the conditions. This is even more evident during periods of crises, such as strikes or the existential threats we are now facing. In the US, there is a concerted attempt to utterly destroy civil society. So, the question is how much can those democratic principles get you through? How can they help us during a crisis, remain available as we emerge from it, and sustain us during periods that otherwise seem inactive? This is a different measure of success. It is not whether this strike achieved an above-inflation wage increase. It is about what we are trying to achieve and how we help others achieve it.

That said, there have been some amazing and important examples in both ways of thinking about success. There are the reforms of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), the second-largest teachers union in the US, and Chicago Teachers United (CTU), the third-largest. Both have undergone democratic reform through caucuses that began a decade ago. CTU has retained the caucus as it is now the leadership caucus. In UTLA, the caucus has not been sustained for a variety of reasons. They are still a progressive and democratising union, but without a functioning caucus. Both are tremendous successes that have inspired a vast number of workers, not only teachers. New York City has one of the most mature caucuses, the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE), but it may never achieve leadership. We refer to their union, the United Federation of Teachers, as a single-party, authoritarian state. You have to take a loyalty oath to join the Unity caucus to be a steward. This caucus is large, with several hundred members. The UFT covers about 200,000 active and retired members, and MORE almost functions like a parallel union in some respects. MORE does its own stewards training, and they run members for stewards or building reps. They run at district, branch, and borough levels and have elected leaders. They organise social events and reading groups. They push and push the existing leadership. That is a model that we call “leading from below.”

There is also Educators for a Democratic Union, which is the statewide caucus in Massachusetts. They have held state-level leadership for almost ten years. There are about 3-400 affiliated local unions in the state. This includes virtually all public schools except Boston, as well as the higher education system by and large, community colleges, and state universities. It is a big state-wide union with many locals. They have succeeded in permeating this model of militant democratic unionism from above and below. There are now dozens of locals with leaders involved in non-legal strikes that are achieving great success.

There are these victories within varying levels of internal democratic success. However, there have also been some colossal losses. After the 2018 Red State Strikes, which were utterly illegal strikes involving as many as half a million teachers in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona, Oklahoma and elsewhere. No one was fired or disciplined for these illegal strikes. Hundreds of millions of dollars that had not previously been flowing into schools were then allocated by state legislatures. This was a tremendous success, but in almost none of those cases, despite strong efforts by UCORE, were we able to help them figure out how to translate that into union reform.

Why do you think it is important to keep organising with education workers?

I made a personal decision in the mid-1980s to apply for a job as an organiser for the NEA in Vermont. I had that job for 20 years. I did this because we were in the throes of neoliberalism. I had an intimation that many of the things we had built would be sort of washed away in what we thought of as the labour-management peace accord. De-industrialisation was already well advanced. I thought, what is going to be left to build upon for the next cycle of struggle? I decided it would be teachers for several reasons. They are in every city, town, and suburb. Every community must educate its children somehow. Even when you are subjected to deep privatisation, you are still teachers. There may be a different management structure, but you still do the same work. Teachers are still densely unionised. Many of the unions are not good, but a lot of them are good enough, or even great. They have an inherently democratic DNA, because education is a public good. There are elected school boards at the municipal level and publicly passed budgets. You are in consultation with society, taking care of their kids, so they give you their money and elect people to govern you.

The education sector permits an unusual kind of access to external support and alliances. If you are in a steel plant or a coffee shop, you will have customers, maybe even loyal ones. Even with hospitals, there is a clear dependency, but with public schools, it is different. There is nothing else like public school workers saying, “Something is wrong here, and we need to talk to people outside of these four walls.” Then there they are: the parents, community, taxpayers, and the public bodies that are elected to govern you. This has been an important feature of this movement, trying to make non-transactional, non-performative relationships with parents and the community.

All of this tremendous fabric of democracy seemed to me to offer a buffer against the forces of the concentration of capital and its evil twins: authoritarianism and kleptocracy. So, I thought, why not see if it’s possible to strengthen the sector and be a sort of anchor for the rest of the working class? Fast forward, and that is what has happened. Teachers are the cutting edge of militancy. It has been built, sustained, and can be learned from. I think the assessment still holds. The attacks are deep, you know this in Britain too, and privatisation is well advanced. There are controls on our freedoms. But we would have been less able to resist if we had not been building this current with teachers. This could be a life raft for both teachers and the working class.