By Daegan Miller
“Strike!”
It’s a word that sends shivers of hope and fear up and down spines: one of the most powerful tools in labor’s toolbox, a strike can win an otherwise unwinnable fight and is the bane of bosses everywhere—but if not done deliberately, a strike can make a union look unprepared and extinguish a campaign before it has the chance to ignite.
Strikes are written into the history and lore of the labor movement. In the U.S. alone, one thinks of the nationwide Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike (in support of which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech), or the recent Longshoremen’s strike, which concluded in early January 2025 with a 62 percent pay raise over six years and agreements on job-killing automation. When well-organized, unions on strike can achieve remarkable results.
According to our parent union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, there have been twelve educator strikes in Massachusetts since 2019, four of which (in Newton, Beverly, Gloucester, and Marblehead) have occurred—and concluded successfully—since PSU began bargaining its latest contract.
It’s worth noting that public-sector strikes are illegal for public-sector workers to engage in, induce, encourage, or condone in the state of Massachusetts (download an FAQ by the MTA on this subject). Courts in Massachusetts commonly impose fines on public-sector unions that strike—and those fines can be steep. For instance, Newton was fined $625,000, Beverly and Gloucester $560,000 each, and Marblehead was docked $450,000. However, it is also not uncommon for the fines to be waived during negotiation, as they were in the case of Beverly, Gloucester, and Marblehead.
One can read acres of news, commentary, and analysis on the recent educator strikes in Massachusetts, but in an effort to cut through some of the noise, here are a few points worth considering:
- Every strike was successful in winning higher salaries for teachers and especially paraprofessionals. For example, The Boston Globe reported that teachers in Gloucester saw their salaries rise to 15.8 percent over four years—and this is on top of the steps that educators and most paraprofessionals already have built into their contracts. Paraprofessionals, who are among the lowest paid education workers, saw an increase in their starting salaries ranging from $8,000 – $13,000 per year in Beverly, Marblehead, and Gloucester.
- One of the biggest wins was around parental leave. For example, Newton won a minimum of 40 days and up to 60 days paid.
- Newton also won additional social workers, caps on classroom size, and a reduction of working hours for paraprofessionals.
- The strikes lasted a week or longer: Newton’s lasted 11 business days, Marblehead’s 12 days, and both Gloucester and Beverly were on their picket lines for 13 days.
- Strong organizing was the key to each union’s win. Hundreds of hours of planning, research, community outreach, and member activism laid a foundation of solidarity that, ultimately, overcame austerity. Nor were the strikes top-down affairs called by each union’s leadership. Instead, there was an overwhelming groundswell of grassroots support in each local driven by the understanding that management’s intransigence could not be overcome in any other way.
- The most disadvantaged workers—the paraprofessionals—were at the center of every bargaining effort, and no bargaining team left the table until these members had won better pay and working conditions.
- Community support was crucial, and every local spent significant time building the support of parents, students, local faith communities, and other public-sector unions.
But what of the longer-term fallout?
Crucially, the authors found that there is “no evidence that U.S. teacher strikes, which are much shorter [than those in Europe], affected reading or math achievement for students in the year of the strike, or in the five years after.”
On the contrary, the researchers “could not rule out that the brief teacher strikes actually boosted student learning over time, given the increased school spending associated with them”.
Furthermore, a recent poll from GBH News/CommonWealth Beacon recently found that Massachusetts residents support legalizing education workers’ strikes—legislation for which the MTA is currently seeking sponsors.
Finally, this wave of recent education strikes in our state is part of a much broader, tidal shift across the U.S. Whether the historic United Auto Worker wins at the Big Three, strikes at Starbucks and Amazon, the culinary workers’ strike in Las Vegas, or the ski patrollers who recently struck for, and won, a $2-an-hour raise in base pay, workers across the country are uniting to collectively demand fair pay and full staffing—and they’re winning.
