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Get Informed

This is a place for people who are curious - sure you have read our newsletter, but you are ready for some more information on unions, school budgets, organizing & negotiations. Let's get started! (PS if you read all of these, please reach out so we can get you into a committee!)

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You can click to jump straight to a section: 

Budget 101

Organizing 101

Negotiations 101

Trading Graphs on Computer Monitor
Budget 101

Learning a lot about school budgets is not easy, but here are a few places you can start:

MBTA Resources

MPUSD Resources

CTA Resources

Outside Resources

Budge 101
Protesters
Organizing 101

Key Terms

Structure Test: An action taken by the union as a whole to assess our current strength. These start with low-risk actions (signing a poster) to ensure the group is together and slowly build so that a group can become strike-ready.

Strike-Ready: This is the goal for a union, to be in solidarity enough that if the bargaining team & union leadership called for a strike, at least 95% of workers would do so. Getting strike-ready requires building trust, solidarity & transparent communication throughout the union. 

Organizing 101
Fists in Solidarity
Negotiations 101

How do we bargain: Currently, we follow an Interest Based Bargaining model, which our team was only trained on at the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year. You can learn more about it here. 

Our team meets with the district about once a month to discuss whatever is next on the agenda. This means negotiations can take a long time. 

We pull language from other unions & meet outside of negotiations to analyze different contracts' language. 

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Informational Videos: 

- Why We Wear Red

Negotiaions 101

How do others bargain: Other teams engage in traditional bargaining - when teams work on language in their own teams then come back to the table to negotiate. We are still finding the balance between traditional and Interest-Based bargaining. 

- We are looking at ways to can be more inclusive and transparent in bargaining. Read this report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center on Transparent Bargaining to see where we could go in future. 

Your Legal Rights

Learn more about your legal rights as an educator and union member. 

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