1 Introduction

In March 2020, the emergence of the novel virus covid-19 (henceforth, covid) provoked a global disaster. Within months, it killed millions and infected hundreds of millions more, exposing massive health inequities: people of color and those living in poverty face greater risks of contracting the virus (Samuel et al., 2021). In the pandemic’s wake, people lost loved ones, health, work, housing, and childcare. While covid has been an unequivocal catastrophe, less attention has been paid to how covid has ushered in unforeseen organizing opportunities. Decades of movement aspirations became reality in weeks: the federal government instated an eviction moratorium and halted student loan payments (Cowin et al., 2020); politicians coined previously undervalued work as “essential.” How did covid, a global crisis, catalyze opportunities for new political organizing and social formations?

In this paper, we argue that a crisis in and of itself does not create organizing opportunities, much less achieve a movement’s goals. Rather, we argue, a crisis can become an opportunity, depending on the strength and capacity of pre-existing organizational infrastructure. These existing structures do not need to be robust or powerful. They simply must be responsive, capable of redirecting the energy produced by a crisis—e.g., anger, clarity, a new willingness to act—into the existing organizational infrastructure to give it new life. Organizations’ capacity to harness and channel this energy enables them to transmute crises into opportunities. Although social movement scholars have drawn on concepts such as political opportunity structure, indigenous organizations, and framing (McAdam, 1999) to analyze the emergence and evolution of collective action, in this article we apply political articulation theory to examine how political organizations mediate crises for greater opportunities.

Specifically, we turn to social justice caucuses in teachers’ unions to examine how crises can catalyze progressive union organizing. We draw on the case of the Movement of Rank and File Educators (more), a social justice caucus within New York City’s United Federation of Teachers (uft), to illustrate this point. Social justice caucuses are factions within teachers’ unions that approach the struggle over teachers’ working conditions as intimately connected to broader struggles for social justice within and beyond the workplace. Since more’s founding in April 2012, it has unsuccessfully attempted to secure leadership amidst uft’s massive bureaucracy. Unlike social justice caucuses elsewhere which have successfully won union leadership (e.g., Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore), more has not been able to gain power within the uft. This is largely due to the uft’s highly institutionalized context, as well as the sheer size of the school district: the uft is the largest teachers’ union in the country, representing 200 000 members, including teachers, retirees, paraprofessionals, occupational therapists (Klein, 2020). However, as we explore in this article, covid has strengthened more, catalyzing a growth in membership, and legitimizing its leadership role among the city’s educators.

In early March 2020, just prior to covid, there were no indications that a revitalization of the caucus was on the horizon. In fact, the caucus was in a difficult place. Its membership was in decline and caucus candidates had recently lost by huge margins in uft elections. However, unlike previous eras, more leadership had a clear and united vision for transforming their union and their schools. This unity in vision, albeit among a small group, would prove critical to more’s ability to emerge as the primary leader and political articulator among teachers throughout the city when the pandemic struck. In this article, we examine the conditions that enabled more to—paradoxically—take advantage of covid, turning a crisis into an opportunity.

2 Theoretical Framework: Crisis, Organizations, and Political Articulation

3 Social Justice Caucuses and US Teacher Unions: Possibilities for Political Articulation

Between the emergence of the Great Depression and the United States’ entry into World War ii, labor unions harnessed immense popular energy into political and organizational power. The political emergence of industrial workers, record levels of class struggle, and the influence of radical left-wing political tendencies in US history during this period were facilitated by three key factors: (1) strikes waves of 1934 and 1937–38; (2) the establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio) as a separate body from the more conservative American Federation of Labor (afl) in 1938, and (3) the growing strength and influence of left-wing parties, especially the Communist Party-US (Brody, 1975; Davis, 1980; Goldfield, 1989; Stepan-Norris, 1997). Thanks to these pushes, labor was able to consolidate much of its power through the New Deal labor legislation, known as the Wagner Act. This legal framework granted labor protections, such as collective bargaining rights, to a select number of workers (Lichtenstein, 2002; Katznelson, 2005). However, over the next decade, labor’s legal enshrinement paradoxically opened the doors to prohibiting the key elements of workers’ power that precipitated these advances. The 1947 Taft-Hartley law made strikes illegal for vast segments of workers, punished solidarity job actions, and purged Communist-affiliated leftists from union leadership (Lichtenstein, 1989, 2002). This new labor accord would, in the words of labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, “generate a set of depoliticized unions and increasingly insular collective-bargaining regimes” (Lichtenstein, 2002). Stripped of political militancy and bound by narrowed bargaining laws, a dominant style of business unionism settled into the nation’s postwar economy. As the wartime economy cooled, unions agreed to maximize capitalist profits in exchange for a secure cut for workers—even if doing so meant consenting to the logics of capital that intensified work, provoked job losses, and divided workers by race, gender, nationality, and ethnicity.

In this style of unionism, known as business unionism, unions primarily work to secure members’ wages and benefits (Brenner, 1985; Fantasia and Voss, 2004; Burawoy, 2008; Davis, 2018). As Hoxie defines, business unionism is “essentially trade conscious, rather than class conscious ….it expresses the viewpoints and interests of the workers in a craft or industry rather than those in the working class as a whole. It aims chiefly at more, here and now, for the organized workers of the craft or industry, in terms mainly of higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions, regardless of the welfare of the workers outside the particular organic group” (Eimer, 1999).

While advancing members’ immediate “bread and butter” concerns is an important dimension of labor power, the exclusive pursuit of these goals contains a key contradiction: maximizing the material concerns of members may help a union survive in the short run, but in the long run, such narrow priorities undermine its success for building working-class power by foreclosing broader categories of political struggle, such as the contours of the political economy (Offe and Wiesenthal, 1980; Rogers and Streeck, 1994). A strong teachers’ union, for example, that secures robust contracts for members but fails to address declining public-school enrollment caused by political-economic factors such as charter school proliferation and unaffordable housing may not in the long run actually be able to guarantee its members’ interests. The tension between securing members’ short-term interests and advancing long-term political-economic demands reflects a key dilemma in the logic of working-class collective action (Przeworski, 1985; Wright, 2013). As sociologist Claus Offe notes, business unions’ prioritization of short-term material benefits and internal bureaucracy is a “rational but unstable” response to the fundamental dilemmas of working class associations (Offe and Wiesenthal, 1980). Yet business unionism is hardly the only response to navigating this dilemma.

One strategy that labor activists have used to counter the erosion of working-class power is to form social justice caucuses. Caucuses are groupings that form within a union to unify around and advance different issues. They function similarly to political parties. Social justice caucuses typically form in opposition to a given union leadership and are focused on suturing together different worker groups and concerns for broader social and political goals. Before the 1960s, when public sector unions were prohibited from collective bargaining, social justice caucuses were mostly present in private sector unions. For example, in the 1930s and early 1940s, cio unions brimmed with rank-and-file factions and caucuses, many led by Communists and socialists of all stripes, alongside Democrats, Catholics and unaffiliated militant trade unionists (Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin, 2003; Uetricht, M., and Eidlin, 2019). These groups of “institutional opposition” debated union policy and contested for power and, as a result, produced high levels of union democracy (Lipset et al., 1956; Galenson and Lipset, 1960). However, changing geopolitics catalyzed the Cold War anti-communist historical bloc, and trade unions became conscripted by this new regime through three main factors: the wartime no-strike pledge; the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 (which barred members of the Communist Party from taking official positions in the labor movement and required all labor leaders to sign non-Communist affidavits); and the general ostracism of the left through the expulsion of left-led international unions from the cio (Lichtenstein, 2002; Davis, 2018). Whatever vestiges of social justice caucuses had harbored within labor unions were effectively extinguished during the Cold War era.

But the combination of a cooling economy in the mid 1960s and budding social movements spurred a revival of militant rank-and-file caucuses (Brenner et al., 2010). Workers were increasingly pressured by union leaders to concede to capital’s demand, as the postwar union leadership largely saw itself as capital’s junior partner. Many rank-and-file unionists created informal networks to coordinate militant shop-floor activity that labor leaders had bypassed. As Black Americans migrated to the industrial North and women joined the workforce in large numbers, they brought renewed militant energy, broad social visions, and deep movement connections (Moody, 2007; Windham, 2017). Caucuses emphasized democratic methods, militant action and concerted connections with social and political issues beyond “merely” economic matters (Taylor, 2011).¹ While these caucuses hardly represented the dominant tendencies of the labor movement, they held open critical spaces for democratic, social justice visions to root within the labor movement.

Union caucuses, we contend, offer a mechanism for political articulation. Caucuses can bring together constituencies and issues not often represented by traditional union programs, such as environmental concerns, anti-war agendas, or representation by people of color or women. Like political parties, social justice caucuses structure and politicize existing social cleavages that union leaders may have dismissed, consciously or not. Caucuses can connect disparate populations (i.e., union members with external communities) and expand the set of ideas typically overlooked by a union’s narrow concerns. Of course, not all caucuses possess these aims, but the caucus structure can be well-positioned to construct and mobilize around broader grievances.

Within teachers’ unions, social justice caucuses have played a prominent role in developing teachers’ political power. For the first half of the twentieth century, educators formed two distinct types of associations to advance their workplace demands—labor unions and professional associations (Murphy, 1990). Professional associations sought to develop teachers’ professional identities as an educated, refined and middle-class workforce—and built power by brokering relations with school administrations (Quantz, 1985; Leroux, 2006). Teachers’ unions, by contrast, sought to grow educators’ power by organizing job actions and aligning with the broader labor movement. By the 1960s, public sector unions had earned the right to collectively bargain in dozens of states across the country (Shelton, 2017). As a result, many professional associations embraced contract negotiations and collective bargaining. Within teachers’ unions, particularly in urban settings, leftist factions developed to advance more progressive visions of public schools and educators’ working conditions (Perillo, 2012; Toulodis, 2019; Kolokotronis, 2021).

Over the last decade, the most successful, militant and boldest examples of teachers fighting for a robust vision of public education have emerged from teachers’ unions’ social justice caucuses (Maton, 2016; Todd-Breland, 2018; Asselin, 2019; Givan and Lang, 2020). From Chicago to Los Angeles, scholars have documented how the recent revitalization of teacher union power has been incubated by social justice caucuses (McAlevey, 2016, 2020). These movements were successful because rank-and-file educators built oppositional cells within their unions capable of challenging union leadership’s accommodation to austerity regimes. The Chicago Teachers’ Union’s social justice caucus, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (core), has provided the most triumphant example of social justice caucuses (Brogan, 2014; Uetricht, 2014; Ashby and Bruno, 2016). core’s work has illustrated the importance of teachers’ unions building alliances with parents and communities of color, and of broadening the scope of bargaining to include “the common good.” Its success showcases social justice caucuses as critical union infrastructure, potentially well-suited to engage in political articulation to challenge the ruling order. We explore these capacities through an examination of a smaller and less well-known social justice caucus—the Movement of Rank and File Educators (more) in the United Federation of Teachers.

4 Methods

Our methodological approach is ethnographic, involving long-term participant observation in union meetings, informal union gatherings, rallies and strikes, as well as in-depth interviews with union leaders. To understand the dynamics of labor union caucuses, crises, and political articulation, we focused our study on the New York City teachers’ union’s more caucus. We focus on more because it was one of the first social justice caucuses to emerge after core won power in the Chicago Teachers Union, and in fact, was directly inspired by core’s capacity for political articulation and focus on building a broad coalition of teachers and communities of color. more, however, has struggled to have the same impact as ctu’s core, until covid. Thus, more is an interesting case to explore the challenges and possibilities of political articulation as well as how caucuses can leverage a crisis to strengthen organizational aims.

The bulk of the data for this research came from semi-structured interviews with new and veteran more leaders to understand their work before, during and in the immediate aftermath of covid. Data collection for this research occurred in two phases. The second author collected the data for the first part of this article before the covid pandemic hit New York City. In total, between March and September of 2019, she interviewed 25 teacher union leaders active in caucuses within the United Federation of Teachers (uft) from the early 1960s until today. Of these teacher union leaders, ten of them are part of the Movement for Rank and File Educators. She also interviewed two union leaders who are part of the uft and aft elected leadership. During four research trips to New York City, the second author also participated in multiple more events including membership meetings, strategy retreats, and caucus happy hours. The first author conducted the second phase of data collection, focused on more’s activity since covid. She conducted in-depth, semi-structured phone and Zoom interviews with thirteen more activists, half of whom have been long-time members and half who became activate during the pandemic. Six of these activists had also been interviewed previously by the second author. Both authors participated in data analysis, transcribing interviews and coding them to deepen our understanding of the key events and themes that influenced more’s formation and evolution. Although this article draws heavily on our interviews, we also incorporate data from participant observations. The argument is ethnographic in so far as it is informed by our deep knowledge and long-term participation in the U.S. teacher union movement and with the social justice caucuses that we write about.

In the next three sections we examine, first, the history of opposition caucus organizing in the uft and why previous caucuses failed to articulate a broad coalition of teachers and community members around a common vision. Second, we analyze the history of the Movement of Rank and File Educators (more) leading up to March 2020. We explore the barriers the caucus faced gaining institutional power prior to covid’s advent. Nonetheless, we argue that more’s previous organizing efforts created three preconditions that proved critical for its ability to respond to crisis: (1) Structure: an internal structure of monthly meetings, working groups, committees, and chapter chairs in schools; (2) Internal unity: a relatively united network of activists dedicated to building “social justice unionism”; and (3) Moral leadership: authority on issues that would become central to the subsequent crises, including the embracing of direct actions and racial justice organizing. Finally, we analyze more’s organizing in response to covid and how the caucus engaged in political articulation and brought together a bloc of teachers, parents, and students who would fight together for school safety during the pandemic.

5 Failures of Political Articulation: Precursors to more

New York City offers the country’s longest, if not most storied, history of caucus organizing within its ranks. The first teacher organization in New York City to receive a charter from the American Federation of Teachers was the Teachers Union (tu) in 1916. The first organized opposition to the tu’s leadership emerged less than a decade later, in 1923, when tu teachers who were also members of the Communist Party created the Rank and File Caucus (Taylor, 2011). This cp-led caucus won tu leadership in 1935, prompting the previous leadership to leave the tu and form the more moderate Teachers Guild. According to Taylor, the cp-led tu pioneered what is today referred to as social movement unionism by prioritizing “strong alliances with unions, black and Latino parents, civil rights and civil organizations, and political parties in order to gain greater resources for the schools and communities in which they worked” (Taylor, 2011: p. 3). The tu engaged in political articulation by bringing together diverse constituencies to fight for common educational and political goals.

The anti-communist movement of the 1940s and 1950s, however, weakened the Teachers Union and opened space for other teacher organizations to vie for the right to represent the New York City teaching force. In 1960, the Teachers Guild merged with the High School Teachers Association, becoming the United Federation of Teachers (uft).² On November 7, 1960, the uft led New York City’s first teachers’ strike; in 1961 they succeeded in obtaining and then winning a collective bargaining election, thus becoming the single teacher organization in the city representing New York City teachers. Since the 1960s, the United Federation of Teachers has been led by Albert Shanker’s Unity Caucus. Shanker’s vision of unionism rested on the notion of teachers as workers as well as professionals; however, Shanker was also explicitly anti-communist and targeted the communist-affiliated factions of the uft (Kahlenberg, 2007). In 1964, Shanker easily won uft presidential elections, a position he held until 1985. As Unity caucus leader Leo Casey described, Unity became “like the Democratic Party in New York city, everybody’s in it except for people who are ideologically left in some way, so communist and Trotskyist.”

The Unity caucus, however, struggled to articulate teachers’ concerns with those of the broader community. As has been documented extensively (Podair, 2002; Perlstein, 2004; Perillo, 2012; Shelton, 2017), the 1968 Ocean-Hill Brownsville strike, in which uft members struck against Black Community Control demands, left a huge divide between the uft and communities of color. Some teachers affiliated with the defunct cp-led Teachers’ Union created the group Teachers for Community Control and crossed the picket line, defying the union’s orders. After the 1968 strike, these teachers founded the Teacher Action Caucus (tac), which became the main opposition caucus in the uft. Other teachers critical of Unity but not affiliated with tac formed a bevy of opposition caucuses over the next several decades, including Another View (1970s), the Coalition of New York City School Workers (1970s–late 1980s), New Directions (1975–late 1990s), Chalk Dust (Late 1970s–early 1990s), Teachers for a Just Contract (1993–2012), and the Independent Community of Educators (2003–2012).³

These caucuses attracted teachers that were part of leftist socialist parties, as well as teachers who identified as “independent” leftists. However, none of these caucuses were able to articulate—bring together disparate elements to move together in unison—a coherent bloc of teachers to contest the uft’s power or mobilize community. To the contrary, according to interviewees involved in this oppositional organizing, split after split led to multiple small and competing caucus organizations within the uft. These groups lacked structure, internal unity, and moral leadership and thus had limited power.

In the early 1980s, New Directions and the Coalition of School Workers formed a temporary electoral coalition, the New Action Coalition (nac), which eventually became a permanent organization in 1996.⁴ In 1985, this merger created enough structure—chapter leaders and members in schools as well as a communication network to garner votes—to win the vp of High Schools officer position and six executive board seats. However, the nac slate was unable to retain these seats. The point to underscore here is that throughout the 1980s and 1990s the leaders of opposition caucuses made several attempts to form coalitions that could articulate a common vision for their union and mobilize members to vote against the Unity caucus. These coalitions even built a structure of opposition caucus leaders in the high schools. However, the “myth” these leaders focused on—vilifying the uft leadership—was insufficient to build a cohesive narrative about the world and convince teachers to take action outside of elections.

In 2003, nac supported the Unity Caucus President Randi Weingarten for the uft election—in exchange for seats on the executive board.⁵ Importantly, this nac-Unity alliance created an opportunity for other uft opposition groups.⁶ The two caucuses that gained influence were Teachers for a Just Contract (tjc) and the Independent Community of Educators (ice). tjc was a leftist caucus organizing since the mid-90s and was small but ideologically coherent, with members committed to a “rank-and-file union strategy” (Moody, 2014). ice was a newer group, whose members were united by their disdain for Unity and their skepticism of the organized leftist parties that were prominent in tjc. Despite these animosities, tjc and ice won six executive board positions in 2003. For the next decade, tjc and ice jointly ran candidates for uft elections, increasing their network of supporters and caucus infrastructure in the schools. However, the two caucuses never developed a robust social justice vision, and consequently, most teachers concerned with racial justice chose not to engage in union politics.

6 Building a Structure, Internal Unity, and Moral Leadership: more’s Founding and Evolution (2012–2019)

This section explores the founding of a new social justice caucus in the uft, the Movement of Rank and File Educators (more), and how this caucus was able to overcome historical tensions to build the three major precursors to effective political articulation: a robust organizational infrastructure, internal unity, and moral leadership. Three major events led to more’s founding. The first was the educational policy context, and more specifically, the onslaught of new educational policies in New York City, which overlapped nationally with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Among the most significant changes were the breaking up of large public high schools into smaller schools, the proliferation of charter schools, and the increase in standardized testing and teacher merit pay (Giroudm, 2011; Hursh, 2012). During this period, the Grassroots Education Movement (gem)—a grassroots social justice group, not a union caucus (Picower, 2013; Asselin, 2019)—organized pickets outside of charter schools and took part in a variety of educational forums to challenge the expansion of charter schools in New York City. Importantly, teachers associated with oppositional caucuses as well teachers involved in racial justice organizations participated in gem’s organizing efforts. This unity was unprecedented. Rosie Frascella, more founder and member of the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE), explained: “There’s just this mentality that whenever you say union, like a hundred white men show up, you know? … When you say union a lot of people, like women and people of color, are like, ‘That ain’t for me.’” The fight against these educational policies brought these teachers together.

The second event that took place was the formation of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (core) in 2008 and core’s electoral victory in the Chicago Techers Union (ctu) in 2010 (Uetricht, 2014; McAlevey, 2016). In 2009, New York City teachers who were part of NYCoRE, tjc, and ice met core activists in Los Angeles at a meeting of the “Trinational Coalition in Defense of Public Education” (Boecking, 2020), developing personal connections with core teacher activists. As Brian Jones, then a member of tjc, described, “core’s election was basically a massive vindication of everything we had been saying … the whole project, capture union office, use it as a weapon to indict the injustice, and to call out boldly the racial injustice in the school system.” core’s successes encouraged New York City teachers to overcome the legacies of left factions and bring other social justice teachers into union activism.

Finally, the 2011 Occupy Wall Street (ows) movement solidified the fusing of these different groups. According to tjc member Kevin Prosen, teachers who were participating in ows in the Fall of 2011 called for a “grade in,” in which educators graded papers in Zuccotti Park. This action inspired the formation of an education-focused working group, which became known as Occupy the doe (Picower, 2013). The founding of more took place amidst these Occupy the doe events, and caucus members were very influenced by the ows direct action tactics (Picower, 2013). Importantly, more included not only the oppositional groups that had been around in different shapes and forms since in the 1960s, but also the more broadly focused education justice groups that had emerged in New York City over the previous decade. They hoped to form a new caucus to unite the disparate teacher organizations in New York City—what more founders jokingly referred to as a “Voltron.” For the next two years the teachers involved in more worked to establish the caucus’s internal structure, including monthly membership meetings, a network of chapter chairs in schools, a blog, internal communication structures, including annual leadership retreats.

Despite these achievements, it would take several more years for more to develop the internal unity and moral leadership it would need to be able to articulate a larger bloc of teachers, parents, and students around its social justice vision. For better or worse, more was an umbrella organization for educators who disliked the uft leadership. In other words, like previous generations of uft’s oppositional caucuses, including tjc and ice, opposition to Unity provided the dominant point of cohesion for many more members. However, unlike the previous generations, some more members also believed in using the caucus to take positions on the political threats facing public education as well as broader social and racial justice issues.

These internal tensions erupted in conflict and internal turmoil several times over the five years. One example of these divisions was the caucus’s response to the police murder of Eric Garner in New York City in the summer of 2014. On August 23, 2014, the uft organized “A March for Unity and Justice” in Staten Island to call for justice for Eric Garner.⁷ more’s founding members felt that it was important to support the march, despite the uft leadership’s sponsorship, in order to advance the aims of racial and social justice. However, other teachers opposed an endorsement, hoping instead to cater to the pro-police teachers in Staten Island who were unhappy with the uft march and might vote for more in the next election. In the end, the steering committee issued a statement declining to take an explicit position on either the march or the broader issue of anti-Black police brutality. Many of more’s founders, such as Rosie Frascella, were furious at this decision. Frascella said that when her fellow NYCoRE teachers learned of it, “They started calling and say, What the f***? What is this s***?” At the next more general membership meeting, Frascella and a few other caucus members put forward a proposal to retract the position. Despite the meeting erupting in a screaming match between caucus members, the proposal to retract the more’s previous statement passed; however, for months the arguments continued over email and social media, with many educators leaving more over the conflict.

Importantly, these debates within more were not simply about Eric Garner, or even the broader issue of anti-Black police brutality. The conflicts were rooted in the ongoing tension within the caucus between a focus on teachers’ bread-and-butter concerns versus broader social and racial justice issues. Teacher unionists centering “bread-and-butter” concerns worried that an explicit social justice focus would alienate conservative teachers, who were also part of the union. The only way to beat Unity, these teachers believed, was to build a strong base around the most unifying, common concerns, such as wages. Teacher unionists concerned with social justice argued that the goal of a caucus was not simply to protect teachers’ immediate interests, but rather, articulate teachers’ demands as united with concerns of poor, communities of color.

The tensions between the caucus’s two ideological flanks came, once again, to a breaking point in 2018.⁸ This time, the issue was about paid parental leave versus family leave. In 2017, a petition advocating for paid maternity leave went viral, receiving 85 000 signatures and invoking uft to take on a campaign for paid parental leave for all New York City teachers. For the social justice-oriented more activists, however, parental leave was not enough. more began a campaign to call for call “paid family leave,” which included 6-weeks of leave for both the birth and non-birth parent, as well as time off for care of elderly and sick family members. However, some of the “bread-and-butter” advocates in more were angry the caucus was promoting its own policy, leading to several bitter exchanges between members on social media. It was these bitter exchanges that would eventually lead to a major split in the caucus.

Concurrently with these events, in the Spring of 2018, a series of educator strikes unfolded in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, which took the country by surprise and illustrated that “the strike” was still a viable union tactic even in red, conservative states where public sector strikes are illegal (Blanc, 2019). The strike was influential for many more activists, illustrating the importance of what Prosen called “class struggle unionism versus internal union electoralism.” Consequently, thirty members of more put out a statement calling for a new strategy—a shift away from trying to take over the uft to an emphasis on organizing around site-based issues. This led to more in-fighting within the caucus, eventually resulting in a vote to suspend several members who had consistently responded to internal disagreements with hurtful and inappropriate comments on list-serves and in meetings.

In summary, during 2018–2019, more solidified into a more internally unified social justice caucus. The previous seven years had been filled with important campaigns that had built the structure of the caucus. However, it also represented an uneasy compromise between two different visions of unionism, resulting in what more members referred to as a “toxic” internal culture, which pushed away many more activists, especially women and teachers of color. At a retreat in August 2019, more members recommitted themselves to transforming their caucus through a new set of priorities: developing a non-oppressive, anti-racist organizing culture; creating more democratic processes to determine their campaigns, together with allies and parents and communities of color; focusing on issues central to teachers of color such as curriculum fairs and promoting Black Lives Matter in schools; and building power in schools in ways that prioritizes relationship-building and broadens, deepens, and builds the base of the caucus.⁹ These priorities and the robust racial and social justice vision they represented—namely, the vision of building a grassroots union to fight for a just and equitable school system—¹⁰ paved the way for more to exercise moral leadership in March 2020 when crisis hit the city.

7 more during covid: More Members, More Legitimacy, More Strategy

In this final empirical section, we analyze how more activists used the covid crisis to catalyze a new political narrative about healthy and safe schools, which brought together diverse community and school populations into a coherent bloc that could exercise power, while also building the caucus itself. When covid arrived in the United States, New York City was the pandemic’s epicenter. The state’s first case of covid was recorded on March 1, 2020, though retroactive records indicate the virus had been spreading weeks prior. By March 12, the governor ordered a state of emergency (Adcroft and Toor, 2021). A month later, the state reported more than 161 000 cases, at least half from New York City. Yet, New York City leadership offered a slow and bumbling response. Hospitals were overwhelmed with cases, the city’s morgues overflowed, and the city had insufficient testing to monitor the virus’s spread. On March 2, 2021, Mayor de Blasio tweeted that New Yorkers should continue going about their everyday live (de Blasio, 2020, 2021); less than two weeks later, he announced he would not be closing schools, despite rising cases and overwhelmed healthcare facilities (Shapiro, 2020). Many New Yorkers not only feared for their lives, but questioned the city’s leadership capacities. Whether or not to keep schools open emerged as a particularly contentious point in the city’s response to the pandemic.

For more, the arrival of covid in spring 2020 changed its organizing terrain. Internal tension over the previous years had clarified important political priorities for more, but the caucus’s organizing capacity remained limited, with dwindling membership. “We were in decline [prior to covid]” recalled Kit Wainer, one of more’s veteran members. But covid proved to be a major inflection point in the struggle over schools and societies, and more was well positioned to take advantage of it. In the face of covid, more’s power grew by increasing the caucus’s membership, legitimizing the caucus, and enabling new organizing approaches.

8 Discussion

This quote is from an interview with more founder Kevin Prosen in January 2019, more than a year before covid would wreak havoc in New York City. The interview also took place about a year after caucus leaders had been forced to deal with more’s internal conflicts, by deciding to ask some members to leave who did not share in their vision of racial and social justice. This left the caucus smaller but more united. Although more had been steadily growing its internal structure over its first seven years—which included monthly meetings, chapter chairs, committees, and working groups—caucus members struggled to stay on the same page in terms of the ultimate goal of this union activism. Consequently, this meant that the caucus was unable to exercise moral leadership with a wider coalition of teachers, students, and parents. The caucus had its most support during elections when teachers banned together with the narrow goal of defeating the Unity leadership.

With ominous foreshadowing, Prosen noted that, “we live in a very volatile political period. … broader social struggles can really quickly shift the way things within the union operate. I think we should be open to more explosive things coming up.” Although Prosen believed that the caucus needed to focus on solidifying and deepening its vision and purpose, he also realized that the terrain of struggle could quickly shift. In other words, Prosen understood that a crisis could open up new organizing opportunities. When covid hit the city in March 2020 it caused a breakdown of the ruling order and an opportunity for groups to contest each other over different visions. The small yet united more caucus mobilized teachers’ discontent at the lack of doe and uft action to close the schools and offered a different, competing political narrative about what was happening. This allowed the caucus to catalyze a coalition, or political formation, among teachers, students, and parents to demand that the mayor close the schools.

In this article we have argued that organizations require three preconditions to take advantage of crisis: structure, internal unity, and moral leadership. After more was founded in 2012, members worked hard to develop a caucus structure that included chapter leaders in schools, elected delegates, general meetings, and committees. However, it was not until members were forced to reconcile their internal disputes that the caucus developed internal unity and moral leadership. Yet, even with these three preconditions, more remained small until the global pandemic hit New York City in 2021. By articulating educators’ acute and varied concerns brought to light by covid, more was able to attract large numbers of members, gaining legitimacy and new capacity to organize. In particular, the caucus began to create decentralized, borough-specific working groups that connected educators with parents and community groups, as well as more specific working groups that took on aspects of more’s vision, such as health justice and Black Lives Matter in schools. The caucus also shifted its focus from city-wide union elections to site-based organizing in schools. The long-term consequences of these new organizing strategies are still unfolding.

What are the broader lessons that this story offers to labor and educations scholars? First, our analysis illustrates the importance of political articulation in social struggles. As we described in our theoretical framework, the process of political articulation allows for previously disparate groups and ideas to come together and act in unison on the basis of a shared “myth” or political identity (Grossberg, 1986; Melucci, 1995). We have argued that the idea of political articulation is a useful concept not only for political parties but also for membership organizations like unions. For decades, caucuses have played that role within the U.S. labor movement. Over the past decade especially, social justice caucuses within teachers’ unions have been important articulators of broader racial and social justice coalitions. They have sutured together different constituencies into a coherent bloc, often with the rallying call of “fighting for the schools our students deserve.” These educators have also united around a shared analysis: corporate and right-wing attacks on public education have particularly harmed communities of color and poor communities. As such, teachers, students, and communities must come together to demand a reinvestment in public schools and all of the services that support the students in those schools (Stark, 2019).

Second, successful political articulation is less a function of an organization’s size than the coherence and resonance of its vision. The most famous social justice caucus, the Chicago Teachers’ Union’s Caucus of Rank and File Educators (core), included no more than a handful of teachers when it decided to contest leadership in 2010. Yet core activists drew on the already existing common sense in Chicago—that schools were failing communities of color—and built a narrative about how a social justice union could fight alongside those communities. In the case of New York City, dozens of opposition caucuses have similarly attempted to contest power in the United Federation of Teachers. Although these caucuses have had many important achievements—from issue campaigns to voting no on mediocre contracts—they were unable to garner the moral authority among teachers to build a broader coalition. In 2012, more brought together racial justice educators and opposition teacher unionists, with the hope that a caucus with these two teacher constituencies could offer a more coherent vision of social justice unionism. Nonetheless, a lack of internal unity created divides within the caucus and an inability to articulate a broad coalition around a common goal—except, of course, defeating the Unity leadership in the uft. It took seven years for caucus members to finally decide they wanted to prioritize a more coherent political vision over taking union power.

Third, the story of more’s covid response also illustrates that crises and the political upheaval they provoke are hardly predetermined. While right-wing groups have been famously known to take advantage of crisis, there are also possibilities for leftist organizations. We have described crises as externally imposed challenging events that can trigger a realignment of the hegemonic order depending on how political organizations struggle to interpret the initial incident. more used the crisis of covid to expose the limitations of existing school leadership, and to articulate their own vision in ways that fellow educators found resonant and necessary—such as a need to forcefully address harmful working and learning conditions and building alliances with teachers and students to address social and racial justice.

Fourth and finally, this case also illustrates the temporary and tenuous nature of internal unity. After more became a major city-wide leader helping to coordinate teachers’ response to covid, the caucus grew exponentially, allowing it to engage in new forms of political strategy. The caucus was able to be a city-wide leader because it had recently come to consensus around a political vision that placed social and racial justice at the center of what it meant to be a union. This did not mean that the caucus rejected the importance of union elections, or bread and butter issues, but rather, caucus members decided to focus on their relationships with communities of color through site-based organizing. However, there are also lingering tensions between the caucus’ pragmatic and visionary goals. This division manifested most concretely in a dispute between the health justice and working conditions committees. The health justice agenda put forward a transformative analysis of systemic racism, inequality, and education, whereas the working conditions group emphasized organizing around the-already existing contract. Several newer more members interpreted this tension as an emblematic schism between “race” issues and “class” issues and expressed frustration at these cleavages.

Yet, seasoned more leaders saw this tension not as a fatal flaw in the caucus’s strategy, but merely as indication that more work was necessary. Aixa Rodrigues explained, “Part of [this conflict] is that we’re getting to the understanding where we’re putting all the pieces together.” The work of internal unity, in other words, is ongoing. For some more leaders, these tensions revealed a new layer to the caucus’s task of political articulation: how to build on-the-ground organizing in a way that recognizes people’s immediate needs while also connecting those needs to a broader transformative vision. As Kevin Prosen said, “You can do politics in a moralistic way, where you tell people how the world should be. Or you can ask people what they’re concerned about and then try to build towards that vision.” These divisions illustrate the intense and often-slow work required of political articulation. Merely declaring connections among groups and interests is not the same as actually braiding distinct goals into one strand; this is a project that takes many conversations, and many actions, lest the old cleavages emerge.

9 Conclusion

In late July 2021, after an arduous sixteen months of organizing and educating amidst a pandemic, more than 50 New York City educators spent three summer afternoons together on Zoom for more’s annual convention. During an opening session, veteran more member Kevin Prosen explained the meaning of rank-and-file labor organizing, and its divergence from business unionism. As Prosen spoke, someone typed into the chat, “I loved listening to this context bc it’s why I joined more.” Prosen described more’s response to covid as a hallmark example of the rank-and-file strategy—building coalitions with parents and communities, foregrounding equity concerns beyond teachers’ wages and benefits, person-to-person organizing, a willingness to engage in direct action. One teacher typed into the chat, “Who here joined [more] after the sick-out call?”; person after person typed back, “I did.” As Prosen explained, “more didn’t just fight for teachers’ protections around school re-opening—but the whole working class. Instead of waiting for the union to do something, …more forced city officials to close schools; that’s an action that saved a lot of lives. And it’s an action that wouldn’t have happened under a different model of unionism.” more used their leadership in the face of the covid crisis not only to keep communities safe, but also to grow their own powers. As Prosen put it, “Hundreds of people joined more in that moment. The task now is to activate those members.” They had turned a crisis into an opportunity.

covid changed the organizing terrain for political parties, unions, and social movements alike, throughout the global north and global south. Conservative groups and intellectuals are notoriously skilled at transforming crises into opportunities (Klein, 2007). As Milton Friedman famously explained, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around” (Friedman, 2002).

Yet in this paper we consider possibilities for how progressive groups, particularly those embedded within labor unions, similarly use crises to strengthen their leadership. By drawing on union caucus’ capacities for political articulation—that is, the ability to unite disparate issues and people together in common cause—these groups can take advantage of the upheaval and challenge to status quo that emerges from a crisis. However, as this paper also shows, a caucus’s capacity for political articulation is hardly automatic. It can take hours, weeks, years to develop the kind of visionary focus and resonance demanded of political articulation. And timing matters—a group is unlikely to be able to take advantage of a crisis without having first developed visionary coherence and capacities for political articulation.

more’s already-existing organizing capacities enabled the caucus not only to survive a moment of crisis, but to use a crisis to strengthen its mission. Although developing these capacities had been a long and unsteady process, as this research shows, the educators’ enduring commitment to rank-and-file, social justice unionism enabled them to act as powerful political articulators in a critical moment. Upon covid’s arrival, more activists were able to exercise their organizational strength to draw together disparate groups to put together a plan of action, turning a crisis into an opportunity. Their experiences offer lessons to other union and political organizations about the importance of the deep, long-term organizing necessary for not just surviving crises, but building power in their aftermath.