Working Mass

BOSTON - The largest labor union in the state - the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) - convened in their highest decision-making body early last month.

Since 2014, when a business unionist leadership was ousted in an upset victory only since further built upon by the militant Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU), rank-and-file leaders have led the union to major gains. Since 2019, under EDU leadership, Massachusetts educators have gone on strike multiple times, despite  Massachusetts state law prohibiting any form of work stoppage, and won large concessions from their bosses. 

In 2019, Dedham teachers became the first local to strike since 2007. They were followed by Brookline, Haverhill, Andover, Woburn, Malden, Newton, and, most recently, the historic and coordinated strike of North Shore educators in Beverly, Gloucester and Marblehead. All of these strikes were substantial victories for their members, including increased pay, especially for the lowest paid education workers, such as paraprofessionals, smaller class sizes and contract language that protects students and staff from ICE. Throughout these outbursts of increased worker militancy, EDU has led the charge by transferring their strike program to different MTA locals throughout the state. It is also important to point out that the Dedham, Brookline, Andover, Malden, and Haverhill strikes were led by presidents who are also members of EDU. 

While membership elected several rank-and-file leaders to the presidency and union executive offices, the election was contested by a middle wing and an old guard representing a less confrontational approach to the state.

The 2026 Convention's key debates centered on the budget for organizing in 2026-2027, a direct member vote for union president, and priorities of the MTA Rank & File for Palestine including freedom of speech for rank-and-file educators talking about Palestine and the campaign.

Read more at working-mass.com

OUT NOW: Lowell residents have been living in the shadow of Markley Group's massive data center, nicknamed by residents 'the Dungeon,' for more than a decade. The Center's cooling towers emit a constant hum 100 feet away from the surrounding homes while backup diesel generators spew fumes into the air.

While Lowell emerged as the first MA city to impose a moratorium on data center construction, Markley associates have been buying surrounding properties near the Dungeon. State leaders, such as the Governor, meanwhile have left the decisions on data centers to cities, but expressed support for their construction.

Massachusetts has the highest risk of AI-related job loss nationwide, with up to 535k+ lost in the next 5 years.

Even though data center construction is often most driven by Chambers of Commerce and their allies, data centers often employ union labor. This has divided working people in Lowell, just as around the country.

Read more at working-mass.com!

OUT NOW: From Palestinian-Jordanian philosopher and adjunct professor Ashraf Hazeyen:

"The adjunct belongs intensely to the classroom: to the students, the discussion, the readings, the long hours of preparation, and the fragile moment when an idea begins to matter for someone. Their labor turns institutional promises into lived experience while their own place inside the institution remains uncertain.

They assemble academic life from borrowed offices, temporary schedules, short appointments, and partial recognition. The instability spreads across space, time, memory, and the long movement through which serious thought gathers shape and continuity.

Spatial instability begins where academic life is expected to continue after class. The adjunct teaches in the building, walks its hallways, answers students’ questions, writes recommendations, and carries much of the university’s daily teaching responsibility while remaining temporary inside the institution they help sustain.

Their labor fills the space with meaning, yet the campus gives that labor only a passing address. A student stays after class to discuss a paper, a family crisis, or a sentence in a difficult text that opened a new way of seeing. The conversation happens beside the classroom door, over a library table, in a shared room between appointments, or later inside an email thread. This is the geography of adjunct labor: a living presence carried through borrowed rooms, hallway conversations, and whatever corner the campus leaves available."

Reas more on our website!

GREENFIELD - are prepared to strike at Franklin County's only hospital, citing poor and unsafe patient-to-staff ratios and threats from hospital management to hire non-union floater scabs during negotiations.

"Nurses are the ones who keep us alive. This is part of an ongoing war on the working class." -Ethel Everett, incoming president of the .alf

OUT NOW: Harvard students are in their reading period in advance of finals as Harvard’s graduate union representing workers in around sixty programs surge to the end of their third week on a historic strike at the world’s richest university. Seeking to continue escalating pressure following a 79% turn out with 96% of its membership in favor of militant strike action for the union’s demands in April, workers have escalated to withholding teaching and research, disrupting end of semester activities, and slowing operations.

The Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU) – UAW Local 5118 strikes as other unions on campus have so far chosen other strategic routes in negotiations, despite the potential for contract alignment, but anger over workplaces issues in campus rank-and-file movements is increasing across campus and its surrounding communities. The university focused entirely on attacks from above increasingly faces dissent from below.

And since workers make Harvard run, ultimately, the workers’ threat demands the university’s attention.

OUT NOW: Somerville and its new mayor face a test from organized labor as the city’s executive sits across from a burgeoning municipal workers’ union: with , whose members are joining a union representing 45,000 state, county, and municipal workers across New England.

The new city workers’ union, which seeks to represent around 220 non-union workers in the city including both the bulk of the city’s administrative staff and positions of lowest compensation, hovers near the 50% threshold of cards needed to formally request voluntary recognition from the mayor. 

The union crosses the threshold after taking the unusual organizing decision to announce their intent to unionize to the public before reaching a 50% majority — which led only to more support, both externally and internally.

Compensation and rising austerity in the city government were common themes in conversations between city workers and Working Mass. 

Read the whole article at working-mass.com.

Working Mass's spring Issue 8: DSA at 100K is out and in subscribers' mailboxes, newly glossed and embossed, featuring the unionization of the first brewery in the state, carpenters fighting bad developers, and the testimonies of individual leaders and rank-and-file workers about their personal stories of how they came into organization.

To subscribe and receive your own magazine copy of labor and working class news, or read Issue 8, visit our website at working-mass.com.

are on STRIKE with pickets across the city, including multiple locations on Harvard's main campus and Longwood! How will Harvard respond after disrespecting the union's demands with one refusal after another now that workers have upped the pressure?