Revolution begins at home
Localizing the fight to defend public education
by Munib Sajjad
In 2022, OSSTF/FEESO embarked on an ambitious endeavour to reflect and challenge ourselves in a time that has already challenged us so much. It began with a singular goal: “to create a plan that will foster relationships between organizations, groups, communities, and OSSTF/FEESO to grow a more fair, just, and equitable society together” (OSSTF/FEESO Strategic Action Plan, 2022).
After spending the last two and a half years with OSSTF/FEESO, I find myself continually inspired by the resilience and strength of educators across the province. The power that I see on a daily basis shows how teachers and education workers persevere through hardship and challenge adversity with a government that undermines their work, attacks their livelihoods, and seeks to alienate them from the community abroad.
Building a more fair, just, and equitable society while fostering new relationships starts with reflecting on our principles and deepening relationships with those who depend on us to keep Ontario’s world-class education system alive. Our plan has evolved considerably from just two years ago. Our conviction to defend public education is matched by a bold ambition to enact change in Ontario. We must rethink everything and pursue a path that will shake the very ground under us all.
The Federation began this pursuit by forming a small committee of rank and file members and some elected local leaders entitled the Organizing for Better Schools, Stronger Communities Work Group to answer six significant questions:
- How do we support and engage with our local leaders to identify and develop positive community relations?
- How will we know the relationships are positive and complement each other?
- What are reasonable goals to expect from these relationships?
- What strategies and supports can we deploy to sustain these relationships over the long term?
- How can local efforts align with provincial/organizational goals?
- What can we learn from our Districts with established cultures centred around fostering community relationships?
We took to answering these questions and several more while delving deeper into a reflection of the current practices of OSSTF/FEESO and the experiences felt by members. Through deep discussion and honest reflection, we realized that there is untapped potential in many of our current structures, structures that impact the involvement in community activities that solely falls onto local leaders. Capacity becomes strained and opportunities become lost. This is where we must focus on empowering members, so they may identify their own community members and fight locally. We further researched several other North America unions to explore and identify tactics to integrate into our plan. This article highlights some of our findings.
Equity and coalition at the heart of our core principles
To build power around public education, it is crucial that the principles be foundationally rooted in equity and anti-oppression. This was dictated in how relationships were mapped, how communities were communicated with, and how coalitions were established. Publicly funded schools and post-secondary institutions can demonstrably be places that solve systemic inequities through unhindered and universal access to education.
Building broad-based coalitions, such as Reclaim Our Schools Los Angeles with United Teachers of Los Angeles, highlighted a strong example of actively participating and resourcing with major student, parent, and community groups. Developing relationships with these groups was done reflexively and dialectically. Community was given space to identify priorities informing the objectives of the joint coalition.
The practice of this work can also be linked to bargaining for the common good (BCG), where there is an active network of unions, coalitions, and community groups who seek to redefine traditional practices of bargaining, creating campaigns expanding into broader organizing objectives with the community.
The relationships developed are maintained through active and consistent engagement with members, not just local leaders taking part in community-led initiatives. This makes participation sustainable and ensures there is no loss of capacity on behalf of the union.
Organizing our membership
To pursue new partners in the fight for public education, we must work alongside our local leaders, as well as our members, in identifying key communities that exist in all regions that our Districts call home. Our worksites offer unique networks and pathways to various communities. Our memberships will be key in connecting us and providing perspective on the impacts various communities are facing in Ontario under the Ford Conservatives.
To get our members involved in the process, we recognize that we are not only teachers and education workers but that we carry a variety of identities and are affected by a multitude of circumstances that they relate to. Our members have intersectional realities and so must our organizing. As academic and civil rights activist Audre Lorde once stated, “There is nothing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
The breadth of interests and priorities of our members far exceed those they encounter at their work sites alone. They can be impacted by various circumstances, including conditions of economic status, citizenship status, race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, gender, sex and/or disability among many others. We can enhance public education quite easily when we diversify our approach and centre the experiences of members as well as what informs their decisions.
Central campaigns and training programs
Building the necessary organizing curriculum is imperative in order to achieve our goals. This can include workshops on community/member mapping, having effective one-on-one conversations with members and community, organizing action, and using digital tools for action.
Member-driven and member-led unions with strong internal organizing structures are paramount to successful community organizing. Each union we researched actively worked to develop member capacity.
Unions like the United Teachers of Los Angeles, the Chicago Teachers Union, as well as the Canadian Union of Postal Workers all have some form of central organizing program and/or a member training centre to train local leaders and rank and file membership alike. Central organizers, working full time, train local organizers at either the local office or the worksite. These organizers then work to build local member capacity and participate in union campaigns, community outreach, and coalition.
The road to 2026 and bargaining for the common good
Applying this theory and research is not an easy feat. To conduct this, it requires a major commitment of leadership, resources, and buy-in from the collective. This is where the OSSTF/FEESO 2023-2027 Strategic Action Plan, envisioned by the Provincial Executive, ushers in that very commitment to build a movement for the change we seek.
Under this plan, the Federation has hired six full-time Regional Organizers to build membership capacity and to work alongside community members to harness our collective power to effect change in our communities. They collaborate with OSSTF/FEESO members, parents and guardians, students, and community groups to build towards provincial and school board Trustee elections as well as our upcoming round of bargaining in 2026. With renewed vigour and focus, we are working to be ready.
Deploying these Regional Organizers alone cannot be the single solution. To conduct this work, it is imperative that members are the ones leading the charge in their communities. We have therefore developed the OSSTF/FEESO Organizing Network, as an additional space for members to work collaboratively towards regional initiatives. The needs and make up of public education are unique in every part of the province; organizing strategies and tactics must then meet the needs of the local communities. There is no one size fits all approach to this, and our networks will allow for the localization of power.
Our work group is ongoing and a central project that will be conducted through members is the creation of a purposeful examination and strategy the Federation can take on BCG. Through this approach, the Federation can actively embed the principles and tactics learned from unions already engaged in revolutionizing their structures.
It is more than just a way of practicing bargaining with a central or local employer, it is about building long-term power both within organized labour as well as with the community. Bargaining, across organized labour, is a time when union organizing is at its highest level of engagement. With concerted purpose, unions generally enlist members to participate in strike votes and job-action, including strikes, and leverage the influence of workers as part of a broader effort to raise public awareness and pressure decision-makers to meet the workers’ demands. Strikes don’t always need to occur to get to a deal for members, but the lasting impact of effective democratic processes elicits deeper meaning of involvement for activism. Leveraging that power for more than just contract language around wages and benefits into long-term scaled campaigns, and utilizing that momentum for community issues, elicits deeper relational influence and support for efforts in-between contract bargaining rounds. This does not mean we are neglecting or watering down language in a contract for the sake of community, it means we are strengthening the working conditions of educators and raising the quality of life for all those who directly or indirectly are affected by public education.
A great and recent example of this work can be demonstrated by the Canadian Teachers’ Federation (CTF) and their massive victory with the federal government in the founding of the National School Food Program. It took many years of advocacy to achieve this goal as Canada is the one country among the G20 states that does not have a national school food program for its students. The establishment of this program, with federal funding to the tune of $1 billion, will support the most marginalized students in accessing free food while at school. The CTF did not have to do this in their advocacy for educators alone, but it saw fit to focus on students and their learning conditions. No student should ever attend school without access to healthy and nourishing food and it will only improve the working conditions of educators by building the best learning conditions for all students. This will lead to better student achievement, enriching our communities.
We, as trade unionists in public education, are on a path of changing hearts and minds. With the Ford Conservative government continually denigrating our roles as educators and defunding education, we must work collectively to shift public opinion by being exacting in defining the impact of this attack on our system with parents, guardians, students, and all stakeholders who believe in universal access to education. The work we do in classrooms, from kindergarten to post-secondary, is already in line with this as we seek to inspire students for the choices they make as growing and ever-learning working members of a fair and just society.
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