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Charter School Teachers Vote To Unionize

Citizens of the World Charter Schools tried to balance their books on the backs of teachers. Those teachers are now part of a union.

“Teacher’s working conditions are students’ learning conditions. When we fight for a contract, and improve our working conditions, students benefit.”

– CWC Educator

From the CWC Educators United Instagram feed.

The right-wing has been largely successful in its decades-long attempt to get rid of unions. Since 1983, the union membership rate has been halved so that today only 10% of workers belong to a union. Unions represented almost 35% of workers in 1954. A stagnation in the incomes of middle-class workers has accompanied this decline in union representation.

Private sector employees have been most affected by these losses. While only 6% of these employees are represented by unions, 32.5% of their public-sector counterparts have these protections. One of the ways that right-wing politicians have tried to reduce these rates is to transfer education funds from public schools to privately run schools whose workers are not represented by unions.