In this session, membership chairs, building reps and other officers will learn and develop tactics and strategies to ask non-members to join the union and to effectively enforce our rights under the Massachusetts Freedom to Join Act. The session will be participatory and allow space for discussion. This is NOT about managing membership lists but will focus on enrolling current nonmembers and new hires.

This all day workshop begins with organizing. Do you have silent representatives attending bargaining sessions? Have members attended a rally? What’s next? In this workshop, attendees will hear from local leaders on how to organize and continue building a contract campaign mountain when things are heating up. Learn how to overlap aspirational bargaining demands and intentional organizing strategies to ensure members are educated, agitated, and moving to action! Having best practices in place at the onset of a campaign will support your union when your contract fight becomes increasingly public.  In the afternoon the conversation will turn to bargaining.  Attendees will hear from local leaders about how they developed vital bargaining roles to assist with their contract campaign, ensured they had proposals for the “common good,” and worked in close partnership with other union committees to keep all members engaged and involved! 

This workshop counts as 1 elective in the MTA Bargaining Certificate program. 

We believe that keeping our MTA retirees engaged is essential to the union’s health and strength. Retirees are an under-tapped political force. Not only do we have the time, but we have the energy, experience, wisdom and knowledge to fight for our public schools and for our profession to be treated with respect. This workshop will explore various ways MTA retirees are organizing, focusing on recruiting retirees for activism — locally and statewide. The MTA’s Retired Members Committee will present ongoing projects and engage participants in a discussion on effective strategies for organizing change. 

Additionally, we will explore successful local models for retiree organizing, including:

• Wisdom Warriors: A retired group providing solidarity to locals in need and supporting MTA initiatives.

• Teachers of Color Mentoring Program: A mentorship initiative pairing new educators of color with retired mentors of color to navigate workplace challenges and promote retention in the profession.

• Community Organizing Models: Organizing strategies within our locals, featuring the CPS Retired Network

• Retirees Against High-Stakes Testing: A group dedicated to protecting and expanding on our MCAS Question 2 victory.

• Protecting Our Pensions: Strategies for safeguarding retiree benefits.

• Our Retired Member Speaker’s Series. Informing and organizing.

The Trump Administration aims to privatize public education. School privatization includes outsourcing educational services and charter schools, reducing public investment and increasing student costs at public universities. Privatization undermines the mission of public education and eliminates union jobs. Each form of privatization has serious consequences for students and education workers, including deteriorated working and learning conditions and loss of institutional and teaching autonomy. Privatization aims to transform public education into privately controlled enterprises where private interests profit from public dollars.

In the first half, presenters will share lessons from a statewide organizing project exposing privatization on Massachusetts’ public campuses. This will help participants explore what’s at stake for educators and students and provide examples of collective union and community action to expose and oppose privatization. Participants are encouraged to share their examples of privatization on their campuses.

In the second half, we will have a discussion among participants and the MTA’s newly created Task Force on Anti-Privatization to hear from participants what’s going on in their locals, what resources are needed to discover and organize against privatization and how the MTA Task Force can help move that process forward on at different levels.

Do MTA members work in dramatically divisive circumstances or actually have much in common?   Do ESPs, adjuncts, bus drivers, classroom teachers, and professors share common interests or does our variable pay and privilege irrevocably divide us?  How does our understanding of class inform our organizing for better wages, working conditions, and the common good? This workshop will ask participants to examine their economic class position. We will compare alternative notions of class and the criteria used to clarify class divisions. Finally, we will discuss challenges, successes, and possibilities in building cross-unit solidarity.

Every school union has conflicts among its members. This workshop will include the necessary skills we all need to improve communication, uncover motivations, work collaboratively and resolve problems. Through hands-on activities, discussions and role plays, participants will learn the importance of active listening, negotiation and the structure of mediation sessions.

Newly elected as a building rep for your K12 local union?  Need a refresher on how the grievance process works?  This day long workshop will go over the basics, so you feel confident heading into the coming school year.    

Suggested Audience: Prek-12 members

Baffled by IACs and PECs? Other unions driving the ship, but you know you should get involved? Make sure your local is taking control of the process, ensuring brokers are doing their due diligence, that the rate increases make sense, and that all options that should be available are. Ensuring your PEC or IAC has written bylaws on attendance, who votes, minutes, agendas, and how to raise a topic for the next meeting can ensure the process is fair and effective for all covered members.

Every local association and union chapter should have a communications structure ready to handle strategic messaging. Shaping the public narrative, keeping members well informed, and responding to media are important skills for building power and achieving goals. Your union’s communications plan will support your organizing and bargaining work. This workshop will help local associations build a communications team and learn effective communications techniques. A local should send members who will be on the communications team and doing the work. The workshop will cover messaging, social media, external communications and internal communications.

Some claim that Marxism is a tool we can use to analyze our lives, our work, the broader world and the history that has created it. But, the basic ideas are almost 200 years old. Do they still apply? Have they ever been true? This workshop will introduce the major elements of Marxist philosophy. It is NOT intended for those who want to debate what Marx really meant. Rather, it will ask participants to share what they have heard, question the validity, and explore the advantages and disadvantages of this perspective. Is this a method of analysis and activism that can empower our organizing?  

Reserve a room to meet with your local union members attending Summer Conference to discuss your plan for 2025/2026.

Join fellow MTA members in an informal conversation about Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.