Teachers Unions and Associations

Abstract

This chapter explores the global phenomenon of teachers’ labor organization and association for protective worker rights. Responding to the development of mass education systems in nations across the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, teachers began to organize in associations and later labor unions to advocate for their collective benefit and for the general improvement of their workplace: the school and classroom. This process of organization challenged many emerging, and often contradictory, public assumptions of teachers as a passive feminized force, a professional force, and a public sector work force. The chapter studies the origins of teacher organization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the more recent responses of teacher organizations to neoliberal educational reforms beginning in the late twentieth century.