Mary Reed has been a teacher since 1994 and a union rep for over a decade. Mary shares with us the basics of teachers unions, how they can help you, and how you can get involved.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
Mentioned in the episode:
- Use code “TCC” to get 50% off of everything at Aspireship
- Our career path quiz at www.teachercareercoach.com/quiz
- Explore the course that has helped thousands of teachers successfully transition out of the classroom and into new careers: The Teacher Career Coach Course (If you are a Teacher Career Coach Course member, you can also sign up for our one-on-one Career Clarity calls.)
Elizabeth: Welcome, Mary.
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, Mary, we’d love to hear a little bit about your experience in education, how long you’ve been teaching
Mary: this is going to be my 30th year as a teacher in elementary school. I’ve mostly been a bilingual teacher, um, from grade third through sixth.
Elizabeth: That’s awesome. And we appreciate all your service. 30 years.
you also hold another role at your school site and you have a lot of knowledge about teacher unions. So today we would love to learn from you. Would you be able to give us kind of a quick summary about what a teacher’s union is?
Mary: Yes. So that the union its purpose is to advocate for teachers. Mainly for, um, salary compensation, working conditions like hours and class size and things like that.
But so they, bargain collectively to, make sure that the working conditions for teachers are adequate and that, um, kids have what they need when the teachers have what they need.
Elizabeth: I’ve always been pro union. That’s just kind of the way my family was raised. My, dad was also a teacher. so I joined the union as soon as I became a teacher. but then as we had, um, some situations at our site where the working conditions were less than desirable, and we needed to try to fix things. So I became more involved.
Mary: Moving forward, I’ve just begun to learn more and more about what the union does and how I can, through the union help support teachers and how the union as, the, the district union, the state union, and the national union supports teachers in all sorts of different ways.
Elizabeth: It sounds like you’re doing a lot of problem solving within a union.
Mary: Sometimes. Yeah. Yes. That’s one. A major, major, result of what happens at the union. We try to get problems solved between the management and the rank and file.
Teachers are traditionally women. And it’s an area of collective bargaining where women are supported which is different than many of the other unions or or at least historically.
Elizabeth: teachers in the community that listen to this podcast, some of them are still thinking that they’ll stay in education, so we try to support them with resources.
if they want to get involved in their teacher’s union, what do next steps look like? What should they look into and research?
Mary: Well, it’s, hopefully, um, if things are working well and you have a, strong or a functioning union, somebody should reach out to you, a site rep, like myself, when you come to a site and help you get signed up.
And then it’s, fairly simple to just sign up even often now at, at your orientation, when you were hired, there’s someone there to help you get started.
it does cost money, there’s dues each month. But that goes towards, the advocacy that we do, not only within the district, but, unions advocate for political leaders that are supportive to education, helping them to get elected.
What they’ll do on the on the more personal level when you need help with management, the union rep can be there to listen to your problems and help you figure out a way to solve it. And if they don’t know the answer to something, they can find out from the district level.
Unions negotiate for, whatever the majority of the members want and usually that salary, benefits, class size, and working conditions.
So we’ll, we’ll negotiate for those. And then once we have a contract, we can help teachers navigate that and know, when the administration is asking them to do something that’s outside of that and making sure that teachers know what they’re expected to do so that they don’t, violate the contract.
With the union, do you have meetings? Is the voting, you know, once per year, what does the community look like and how often do you get together to collaborate?
Mary: where I work, we have the site representatives, there’s about one per 10 teachers.
We have monthly meetings where we find out what’s going on from the executive board, who makes more of the decisions and who, part of whom does the bargaining. We find out what we need to know from them, what’s going on in the district, what sorts of decisions are being made that our members need to know about.
Then we go back and have a monthly meeting with the staff and let them know what’s going on. And we also meet with our administrator to hear from her what her concerns are or questions or just what’s going on. So that we’re more aware and can share with our staff, and then she also hears from us.
If there’s anything going on at the site, everyone’s invited to those rep council meetings. There’s more opportunities, for advocacy sometimes, like I said, there are political campaigns that you might want to get involved in that affect us directly, either statewide, school board, kind of depending on if you live in the area or not.
Elizabeth: In your teaching experience and union experience, can you think of a memorable situation or time where you’ve celebrated that the union was able to negotiate something positive for the school and the district and the teachers?
Mary: This was a recent example. we’ve had a sudden influx of immigrants from all over at the end of the school year, and there just weren’t enough spaces for them. because that we have a class size caps at grades fourth and up. And so they negotiated with the union, that if you took a student above your, your cap, you would get a daily, stipend each day. You’d get several hundred dollars a day, every day and every kid you took over your cap.
So. It’s a way to just solve problems when, we need to be supported in that in some way.
Hopefully they’ll build some classrooms over the summer.
Elizabeth: do you know if there’s any challenges that unions face currently?
Mary: I feel like, in general, in the nation that unions are, um, gaining more power because like Starbucks and Amazon and some of those, types of retail organizations are uniting to form unions. So I think, um, In general, I think it’s kind of a good time for unions, but part of that is because, just the structure of our economy that people make very little money and work long and hard hours.
So that’s a challenge just getting people to understand the importance of unionizing and working together to try to make things better and then there is opposition from very wealthy people that don’t want that to happen. It’s a little bit different. Like I said, with, with the our union
it’s state money and federal money that’s given to, to the state and to the districts to, to make things happen. So the challenges for our union can be that the money is just, we had a lot of money after COVID for all sorts of different things and that’s kind of fizzling out and, teaching is really hard and not as many people want to teach.
So, and, the effects of COVID are ongoing and students have more issues and are struggling more so we have more needs and the same amount of resources or or fewer resources. So that’s a definite struggle.
Elizabeth: as you become more involved in the union, what have you learned about yourself?
Mary: I’ve, I’ve learned that, when we work together with all of our colleagues, teachers or psychologists or nurses things we all work with kids, even though we have diverse jobs, we, we have a common goal and that’s to work with and support students, and by Taking part in the union, we’re able to better do that because when we’re in a better, more solid, more secure place, and we enjoy going to work because it’s a positive place to, to be, then that’s better
Elizabeth: well, Thank you for sharing that Mary and teaching us more about unions and also just for your support, teaching and serving these kids and parents for all these years.
Thanks for having me. I hope that was helpful.
