Higher institutions mimic divine higher powers, and require the same devotion to operate. But the blind allegiance to unions is wavering, because without proof that your blind devotion matters, if your material conditions are not improving because of it, the allegiance dissolves. Sometimes instantly, while you’re watching a speech. Sometimes so slowly you don’t realize it, an erosion of cliffs by raging waves and grains of salt thrashing and grinding, thrashing and grinding, thrashing and grinding.
Shortly after the strike and I was appointed chair of the committee, but before the committee was full with others, I was asked at a union social event if I was interested in running for delegacy for our state union and/or national union.
I thought our national union was a colossal waste of time and energy, but I obliged to run as a delegate for the state union.
I didn’t have to be elected. I still don’t. The elections aren’t competitive, which makes them not real. Our local union, being quite large, gets several seats for representation in the state union. Our membership is so disengaged that we can’t even fill the seats, let alone have enough interest for the need for a real election.
Everyone who fills out the form to “run” is awarded the seat by acclimation, and every year there are several people that fill out the paperwork, get the seat, and then don’t even attend the event. They fail to represent their members.
Members are disengaged for good reasons. Working is exhausting, public education gets worse every year, and the state union does not serve as a means for change, it does not actually solve problems or improve our working conditions.
My first state representative assembly was incredibly boring and I audibly laughed when they followed up the union’s “land acknowledgement” with the pledge of allegiance and the star spangled banner.
The allegiance and celebration of the country that committed genocide of the people who were just “acknowledged” was a bit too much for me to stomach silently. Surely educators must see, hear, and feel the hypocrisy there, no? The latter negates the former.
I ran to be a delegate to the National Education Association, our national union, after the NEA union staff went on strike during the 2024 representative assembly in Philadelphia. I was viscerally appalled the institution I give my fucking money to would drive their own staff to a picket line. I read the staffers’ bargaining demands on their social media, they were far from outlandish.
But educators have so little, the boss (NEA) is able to use that to their narrative advantage. These people don’t deserve decent conditions or wages! Look at what you all have to suffer through! What’s more, I found my own local and state union’s silence on the staff’s picket line to be disgusting. So the following winter, when the delegate forms circulated, I thought okay, put me in, coach.
The last effort my union president and I collaborated on was, oddly, what became the start of a statewide caucus: Central Ohio Rank and File Educators. When we attended the first national organizing event for May Day, in March 2025, we started a mass mobilization effort together: we were going to lead a protest at the statehouse on May 1 for public education, and we were going to get as many locals active in the effort as possible.
Happening concurrently was our local union contract negotiation campaign. Just as it got off the ground, the Ohio legislature started pushing their biannual state budget bill through, which was defunding public education to the tune of $2.8 billion. We didn’t have a shot at a raise if our district was going to take a hit of that size.
Organizing that contract fight had its own set of problems, isolated from the state budget crisis. Our slate members talked about that on this podcast episode, listening there will supplement your understanding of how this compounds, should you be interested.
The local union president reached out to other local leaders, suggesting the organizing chairs get together with me and plan this protest. We needed as many locals and districts in on this as possible if we had a shot.
We were dead in the water, but I have a knack for getting people together and talking about how we can solve problems. I was back to my Big Green roots: holding weekly virtual calls to gather ideas on what to do.
I went with our local union president to meet with our state union leadership about the mobilization effort. I was, true to my nature, blunt about what I expected: this is what we’re planning, and I need you to stay out of it and let rank and file members come together and organize, it is the only way union work will be successful. I also told them both I had no interest in escalating to a position of power, I simply want workers to be able to gather and organize without leadership getting in the way.
“You know, it’s good that you tell people you’re not coming for their job, but you just shouldn’t do it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like that.”
I waste no time telling people in power exactly what I am doing and what my desired outcome is. This is for three reasons:
I think what I’m doing is a good because it will improve working people’s lives, and it is usually the work that the people in power are supposed to be doing.
I need to know if the people in power agree with what I’m doing or not. If they do, we can organize faster and with more resources. If they don’t, I will need to schedule some meetings and build an issue campaign, which demands more time, buy-in, and brass tacks organizing structures.
People in power don’t get to cry about it when I do exactly what I say I’m going to do.
I am aware that I can make people uncomfortable with this approach. For a long time I tried to sand down my edges to make it more palatable, but public schools are simply in too bad of a spot to be frivolous with time, children and educators are suffering. Members are generally either with me or not, and most of the time they are.
When there are people on the edges, or disagreement within, I thrive. I want to know, genuinely and quickly, what their hesitations are and why, because that is how you make any collaborative effort better: you collaborate, you adjust, you include. It is never just one person’s decision when you are organizing labor, if it is, you will fail.
But I have learned to identify the baseless hesitations that slow down organizing: I don’t smile enough, I’m not old enough, I don’t drink enough, it’s “not my time” (my favorite).
I don’t move in the shadows. I don’t move behind closed doors.
But I do move. And I’m not sorry about it. Things are too bad for children and families and workers for me to not organize for change, especially within the structure I pay to be a part of. The structure only works if there is movement, but it has been stagnant for decades, and sometimes I point that out.
So they put a spotlight on me, thinking it’ll blind me, make me sweat, make me run for cover. And I do sweat, but I don’t run for cover. I grab a microphone and I keep talking, even if my voice catches the shakes.
Through planning the May 1 protest I learned that I forget most union members have a different understanding of “organizing”. I call this the “omg organizing!” experience, which is they have done something within the structures of the institution that the union has labeled as ‘organizing’. And those ‘organizing’ tasks are not built on real connection, they are not built on solving the problems in our working conditions, and most importantly, they have no measurable structure tests or risk, there is no definable win.
That is the opposite of my organizing experience. I have, quite literally, only done high-stakes organizing. The kind that involves getting fired for wanting a union, the kind that involves testifying in court, the kind that involves a picket line, the kind that involves retaliation from your employer, the kind that involves retaliation from your union.
For a long time I did not realize the two kinds needed a bridge. If people were going to come over to the nitty gritty labor organizing, I was going to have to create the mechanisms so I could reach them, and they could reach me.
Organizing the May 1 protest started as a joint effort and ended with division. The protest was sabotaged by state union staff members, and recovered only because, when I was distraught over it happening, a dear friend and fellow organizer kindly told me to stop crying and start putting things in writing. “They’re doing this to you because they can. So show them they can’t.”
They’re doing this to you because they can. So show them they can’t.
When you organize well, you have the right people together, you have a team that can handle situations.
After the May 1 protest, I asked educators from other locals if they wanted to keep going. Did they want to fight for public schools in Ohio? And did they want to use our union to do it? N. phrases it as: do we want to actually use our labor union for what a labor union is for?
Did we want to fire up this group of people after they’ve been complacent for decades while our profession has backslid into the dredges of political corruption and oppression?
They did, actually. They were in.
I consulted the Association for Union Democracy for definitions, laws, books, and support on how to start a caucus. That is how the Central Ohio Rank and File Educators (CORE) was born. Four teachers from different unions sitting on a Zoom, exhausted at the end of the school year, committing to lighting our torches, mounting our ponies, and trotting into the darkness to fight for a better world.
Our next caucus action came in the middle of June. Our state union was doing absolutely nothing to fight the state budget bill. We planned another protest at the statehouse, but this time, inside the building.
We had the support of my local union president during the planning stages of this action, until he changed his mind. He cited that our state union’s legal department had told him they had concerns, though none of the concerns could be articulated.
The institution that was not fighting for us, nor were they going to support us in fighting for ourselves. With raised eyebrows, we made notes, and kept going.
This is why CORE is not technically affiliated with our state union. When you affiliate, they own you. They control what you can and can’t do, what you can and can’t say, and how you operate.
Productive caucus leaders will tell you this. The Association for Union Democracy will tell you this, it is not a secret. Caucuses that change how their union operates, that use a union structure to fight for workers and push for change, are largely not affiliated.
Three months later, sitting in a Governance Board meeting of my local union, a Governor will say she wants to help members start a special education caucus. She will ask leadership how members can do so, and leadership will not have an answer.
I will say, from my chair on the sidelines of the meeting, “You just do it” and she will quip back “My members want to do it the right way”. What she will mean by “the right way” is to be affiliated, and one year later, the affiliated caucus that was started will have done nothing, and CORE will have passed New Business Items for actual change, organize on our union’s national floor, and continue to grow our membership.
We issued press releases, made some social media videos, and billed our protest inside the statehouse as a “field trip”. We guided attendees as though we would students, stopping to read snipets of our favorite profound pedagogy theory, knocking on the doors of legislatures, and most notably, distributing our iconic burn book.
My local union president, while pulling our own local union support from the action, showed up to our protest. He thought it was a good action and enjoyed it; he would also properly ignore the fact it could have been much larger if he wouldn’t have pulled his support.
Two weeks later, at the end of June, our state union had a “rally for public education” on the steps of the statehouse. They paid the statehouse for a permit, for permission, to rally on the day the legislature was going to take nearly $3 billion from our schools. They are nothing if not consistent with their performativity, from land acknowledgements to rallies. But I went.
I spent the morning at the OSU Nurses Union informational picket, to as they were nearing a strike and garnering community support, before I went to the statehouse.
That is why, in this video from The Rooster, I’m holding a poster with a Venn Diagram of “Teachers and Nurses” working conditions that is nearly a single overlapping circle on one side and “Teachers <3 Nurses” on the other while scolding a legislator for torturing public schools.
When I sent the video to my local union president I felt the need to apologize for confronting such a monster in a union shirt.
That scenario is the personification of the relationship between me, my unions, and the politics that control us. The state union is paying the institution that oppresses us to gather outside their doors and speak softly about how “important” we are, while my local union president is there, albeit off to the side, and I am wasting no time getting to the actual decision makers, the people with power, calling them out for what they are doing: defunding schools, harming children, lying to the people and taking public services.
CORE grew in numbers over the summer, and the complicity in our unions became even more apparent.
That came to a head in October, when I attended an “Educator Town Hall” that my state affiliate put on with four legislators and was “moderated” by a union staff member. I not only wrote up an article for CORE about it, but I posted this video on my TikTok.
It was an epic crashout, it went viral overnight.
And it really pissed people off.
I thought about deleting it, and in the video I debate even posting it in the first place. But every single thing I say in that video is true. I’m not wrong, they just don’t like the way I say it. They just don’t like that I say it.
When we launched our campaign, at 5pm on January 5th, it took less than 30 minutes for someone to link that video on our campaign launch post on a ‘closed’ “[District] Coalition” Facebook page.
“I just don’t want someone like this representing me.”
Which I found kind of hilarious, because I have been representing members for years.
And we expected that. We talked about how to combat that video, if we combat the video, what we do about it.
I hate that Coalition facebook page. Many members do, we would hear that at school visits and in conversations with educators. Like the medium of Facebook itself, the page is sick with toxicity, bullying, and AI slop.
For months the toxicity firehose would be shot directly at me, dialed up to full blast. I would sometimes lean into my bathroom mirror, nearly touching myself nose-to-nose, look deep into my own eyes and coach myself.
“Do not let them bait you with this stupid shit.”
“They are 50 years old and cyberbullying, you are better than this.”
“Stay rooted in what you believe. Stay on message.”
The posts on the Facebook Coalition page were almost always lies. One post, from the page administrator, was several paragraphs long, saying that the language on the CORE website was divisive and “frames this moment as 21st century teachers needing to replace or push aside older educators.”
I commented and said I was troubled to read that was her takeaway, as the CORE messaging had been developed by educators from year 4 to retirees, and our slate itself was multigenerational! My comment got buried with “Very well stated”, “Well said”, and “Amen” from the usual haters.
I was never able to be visible enough on that page. It was the strategy that worked.
I wouldn’t be able to cry about it until now, until July, when I decided to write about it. I had to lay my forehead on my desk’s edge and sob.
At the time, it hurt so much that not allowing myself to feel it was the only way to survive the election. I spent months thinking that made me weak, and that was likely their intention. It worked. If it wasn’t their intention, I think that’s worse.
That is the culture in our union, the culture that leadership upholds and rewards. I think it is how they get through their jobs and knowing that no matter what they do, our jobs are getting worse.
They work incredibly hard, but they do union work in the only way in which they know how, which is to manage the decline of our public schools, the decline of our worksites, and the decline of our membership. I truly believe they know that, and that is why they are so hard, so cold, and so unwilling to feel.
And that’ll never be me.
The Facebook behavior hurt so deeply because none of them would say it to my face, despite having plenty of opportunities to do so. They hid behind their screens and keyboards and agreed in their groupchats on strategies, watched my every digital move, finding ways to bury me.
Our district had a week of snow days in January which was devastating to the campaign. I had building visits scheduled that I missed, most I wasn’t able to reschedule, members I’d never be able to reach. We held virtual campaign events in substitution. The first day went well and many members showed up, engaging in good faith.
The second day our opposition’s campaign committee co-chairs showed up — 9 of them, most of whom also serve on our union’s Governing Board. My heart slammed against my sternum as I clicked “accept” on every name, and I stared at our campaign flyer to steady myself.
When I feel backed into a corner I remind myself there is always more than one option out, I just have to look for it. To my left, I saw the option to be intimidated, to let tears swell up, to pray for the end of the event, to see my own failure reflected back at me through their presence.
My eyes stayed on that option, moving them was akin to ripping apart the velcro Command strips that hold a whiteboard to a classroom wall. But to my right, I saw the option to pitch a more productive union to people that are in power. I saw my one chance to show them who I am.
Despite knowing the room was filled with people counting on me to veer left, I went right. Only one person had their camera on and asked questions, and I do not believe it was in good faith. Everyone else had their cameras off and stayed muted, one person put a question in the chat toward the end.
Tiny black boxes with names of my biggest haters stared back at me while I gave my campaign pitch and fielded questions from their sole spokesperson. It was meant to remind me I was not good enough for them, they would not let me in, they were there to watch me, to make sure I knew they were banded together, they were circling their wagons.
Who does that? I think back on that specific experience even now and think, what the fuck? What kind of leaders behave in that manner? I was not engaging in my opponent’s campaign in that way, no one on our slate was.
Not only do I see that behavior to be cowardly, but I didn’t want to win votes that way. I wanted to win votes on our platform, on the vision of a stronger union. To do anything else was simply a waste of time to me, and I could not give one second to those tactics.
Despite knowing the above, and repeating it out loud to myself, their behavior hurt. Maybe that’s stupid, maybe I’m too soft, maybe that shows I was never good enough in the first place.
That night, as I laid on my right side ready to drift asleep, I cried. The first few tears fell and I could tell if I didn’t stop I would be sobbing myself to sleep. I got up, had water, and rummaged around in the cupboard next to the sink. I sat in the frigid darkness, watched the fireplace, and waited for the NyQuil to kick in.
But hey, that’s campaigning, baby!
Chris and I have talked about our “what if”s. What if we would’ve gone low, too?
What if we had pointed out most of the wins on their flyer was work we had done?
What if we told the truth about how our union president treated us?
What he said to us?
How he had treated our committee?
What he had said to me?
Because I wasn’t the only one, I learned this on the campaign trail. The behavior and treatment I was experiencing wasn’t necessarily unique to me, it had actually driven engaged members out of doing union work.
That kept me going.
But I didn’t know any of that on January 5th, and when my crashout video was the first thing they reached for on the Facebook Coalition page. I thought with a shrug, well, that’s who I am.
And when other people would say “But you’re so much more!” and I would say yes, yes, I am. But I am also her, and she is important.