If I had a dollar every time someone told me my union president and I were incredibly similar, I would still be broke, but I’d have some money.
It always shocked me how similar we were in aspects not related to union work. I also had a nomadic time, living out of my car for some time in my 20s, driving up and down the west coast, surfing, rock climbing, and running mountains. I also spend time sitting and listening to vinyl, I too love baseball, dogging on the political system we’re caught in, and recharge best in the wilderness.
But the similarities end there. And unbeknownst to him, I was the last one to admit it.
I spent an unreasonable time believing the people in positions of power in our union would get on board with organizing and teaching members how to protect themselves.
The first year I was chair of ‘The Committee’ (of one) the building substitutes organized to come into our union. I worked with a union staff member of our state affiliate to help accomplish this feat. I would meet with the building substitutes organizing committee and I loved it, it was like putting on a new pair of your old favorite shoes. It’s organic organizing with people who want a union, not people who happen to be part of one. Those are two very different types of workers to organize with.
The task was far more difficult than it should have been because the structures of our union are weak. They are very rarely utilized for organizing, they are generally used to relay information that rarely matters or affects a member’s job or wellbeing. And that information, the vast majority of the time, isn’t relayed effectively.
I say that with no animosity or judgement, it is simply a fact. It can be corrected, this can change, and that was the basis of our campaign. It is impossible to communicate that information objectively, because many members hear that they’re doing something wrong and get defensive.
Educators are told all day every day, in their classrooms and at their worksites, that they’re doing things wrong, so when they hear that they’re doing their union job in an ineffective way, the job that they’re volunteering to do on top of every other task that administrators demand of them, that students demand of them, that parents demand of them, that they demand of themselves, it’s understandable why that message doesn’t go over well.
Punching across is easier than punching up. It is easier to hate the person who is pointing out the ineffectiveness than it is to take criticism, evaluate the system, and then be open to being taught something new.
It also feels good to punch stuff.
Educators are always on the defense, and that’s generally in direct conflict with the personality traits that draw them to the job in the first place.
My second year chairing The Committee I was adamant on finding my people. I was going to build This Committee, and I was going to teach people how to organize. We would build the army of workers we needed.
I found people in a variety of ways. Some I reached out to from organizing the strike, some I found on the inside of the institution, and some a combination of the two methods.
We (The Committee) met on the top floor of the union office for two years, keeping official union business in the official union building, at a time that ran concurrently with our union’s Governance Board meetings. It created the vibe of “put the children upstairs while the adults speak about the grown up issues downstairs at the table”, and that was undoubtedly intentional1.
The Governance Board meetings are catered, and while we were told we could “help ourselves”, the eyes-like-daggers as we took a paper plate and waited in line were noticed.
But I’ve never met a cheese pizza I could say no to, and no one’s glares will take that from me. My confidence and self-respect? Sure, but cheese pizza? Get real.
They thought about us so little that they left and locked us out. Twice2. To them, we were nothing, and they made sure we knew it3.
Our union president wasn’t always like that, though. He tried for awhile. He’d come up after their downstairs meeting and chat, but it was only chat. Every time we tried to ask about utilizing The Committee to do something, to improve our jobs, it was communicated to us that we didn’t understand enough of the system to do so. When we pushed back, the best we got was a variation of “I’ll think about it”, and when I would follow up (which I believed was my duty as Chair), it was a “No”.
About a year after the building substitutes won their recognition to be union members, the district tried to fire them. That was the only campaign we got a green-light for, and I had to be the one to initiate it. In a functioning union that fights for workers and has an internal organizing committee, that should have been a direct phone to call from the president to the chair with the directive to mobilize members to protect those jobs, to help protect those members.
We recorded two podcast episodes about the organizing campaigns we did. I suggest a listen, but I’m bias. Because those stories already exist on the internet, I digress from sharing them here. We successfully saved the building substitute jobs (at that time).
But it’s been 8 months since those episodes were recorded, and the building substitutes have since been fired through RIF (reduction in force).
When Trump took office for his second term in 2025, two of our union representatives reached out to me for help in an organizing effort. I had just led a successful campaign at my own workplace, and they were looking to do something similar, but with the goal of our school board passing a resolution barring ICE from entering school buildings.
It was a pretty tame resolution, all things considered, and was penned and endorsed by our national affiliate union. I readily accepted the invitation to help.
I worked with them to talk about how to organize such an effort and draft language for an email campaign from union members to school board members. I then asked them if I could share it with others from The Committee, because I knew members around our district would want to partake and support. We were terrified for our students, families, and communities, and wanted to act.
We had a remote working day in our district, and I sent out a calendar invite for a committee meeting. Over 40 people showed up, and I invited two Governance Board members. The union reps leading the action explained our organizing campaign, and the group talked about how best to execute it in our union. We ended the call in complete agreement on the strategy, timeline, and measurable outcome.
I hadn’t been told to not help with this effort, explicitly, but my union president had told me to let him handle the issue, and that they were “working on things with the district”. I had met with the union representatives from the effort anyway, but I did give it one week until amplifying the effort. There had been no movement on the leadership side of things, so I moved.
The day of the virtual larger committee meeting, I received 8 phone calls from our union president. Most of those 8 calls he was raising his voice with me (5), and the calls he wasn’t (3), was because I didn’t answer. He kept calling and yelling because I would not back down from helping our members organize around this issue. I told him about the big virtual meeting, how well it went and that this was a deeply and widely felt issue in our membership, it checked all the boxes for a successful campaign. It didn’t matter.
What he didn’t know was that I wasn’t the only person who heard him yelling at me. We had a smaller organizing committee meeting scheduled for later that day on Zoom, and he happened to make phone call #8 right before it started.
As the 7 other members came into the Zoom, they stayed muted and I put my phone on speaker. For the first time, they heard how he spoke to me. He screamed.
This wasn’t an isolated issue. This is the communication method that is used. It is one of the worst kept secret of the union’s inner circle.
This same behavior happened in front of our Governance Board later that month. He was angry I had told members they could4 call a union meeting in their building and tell their colleagues about the organizing effort to pressure the school board to pass a resolution barring ICE from our school buildings.
BREAKING NEWS!
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
Union members have every right to call a union meeting at their worksite.
I responded to his tantrum by saying “I know there will be growing pains, but I am not your punching bag.” Not a single person in the room said a thing about his behavior.
Not.
One.
Person.
I had attended that meeting of the Governance Board to give my Committee Report, and when it was over I went upstairs with a union staff member to switch gears and discuss our upcoming contract negotiations campaign.
I tried to help it, but once I got upstairs, I lost it. I sobbed. Between tears and rigid breaths I said I just could not understand why they wouldn’t want members to organize themselves, why they wouldn’t want more people doing the work of our union.
That is the most vulnerable I have ever been in that triple-storied building and I made sure it never happened again.
I truly did not understand why I was being screamed at by our union president. I know now that is just what happens when you confront institutions of power, and to be fair, I knew that then; but at the time, I didn’t see my union that way. I genuinely thought everyone on our Governance Board would be in support, and that they would be glad, they would be proud of our members for stepping up and taking action.
Because I was. I think about that campaign and the very difficult conversations rank-and-file members had with each other because they cared so much and it makes me weepy. At the end of the day I have and always will be a true solidarity sap.
Three people who were in that room contacted me after the meeting. I received two phone calls, one I answered, one I missed but had a voicemail, and a text.
Two people mentioned the treatment I had received during my Committee Report was not okay. All three mentioned “that’s just how he is”.
Abuse is normalized in our workplace.
Abuse is normalized in our union.
Abuse is normalized.
It wasn’t always like that. If it was, I wouldn’t have kept going.
The following month, in March, he took me to Chicago for the first organizing event, spearheaded by the Chicago Teachers Union and the United Auto Workers, which would evolve into the MayDay Strong coalition. He paid out of his own pocket for me to go, I assume because he didn’t think the Governance Board would rubber stamp the expense. I didn’t get union release time from work, I had to use my own accrued paid time off. He knew I wanted to be there, he knows I utilize every single opportunity I get to the fullest extent.
In the fall of 2023, I lost my first student. He was missing for weeks before his body was found, murdered and left in an abandoned house on the north side of the city. The car he was murdered in was set afire and the parents of the person who murdered him helped cover up the crime scene.
I learned that information on the 5:30am report of NBC4, with the day’s first cup of coffee. There were only two people that reached out that morning, before contract time began. One was V, a friend and veteran teacher at another school, who asked “Is this your first?”
I’d learn over the course of the week this is how veteran teachers gauge early career teachers’ traumatic experience level when a student dies: Is this your first?
The other was my union president. I was headed east on 104 and sitting at a red light at the Hamilton intersection when he called, 7:08 in the morning. He had read the news and was sorry, he knows how much it hurts, he has been there. Was this my first?
The red light was blurred and I could not properly see, scared to blink because I Did Not Want This To Start Right Now. I eeked out a tiny yeah and he probably heard the hiccup in my sharp inhale and he knew I was now crying and I was crying quite a proper bit.
And he said you want to know where I was last weekend? And I said where? And he said this organizing event down in North Carolina and I asked him if he talked to anyone from Durham because had he seen the Durham educators lately? They were doing really incredible things and he asked me like what? And we went on like that for a few minutes.
It could have been happenstance of the conversation, but in my bones I think he knew organizing is the only thing that was going to get my mind off of my broken heart, so I could regain my composure because he knew I had to walk into that building and be something stronger, a different version of myself, a new version of myself, a version of myself I was just now meeting and would never be able to say goodbye to, for the kids, always for the kids.
Teaching hardens you. No one tells you that because no one talks about it. They talk about the kidney infections from holding your bladder, they talk about the dehydration, sometimes they’ll talk about the constant stimulation but only in coping methods: silent commutes home, disassociating during planning periods. But they won’t teach you how to find your softness, they don’t tell you it gets covered with armor you didn’t ask for, custom-fit but uncomfortable, hard to live in.
I got used to the way I was treated by our union president, a second custom armored suit that I did not ask for, an expense that wasn’t in my budget. I found myself having to don this armor far more often than my school armor. After every eruptive encounter it was always me that reached back out to repair and move the union relationship forward.
At the end of the school year in 2025, I answered a call and he started with “What does our contract say about summer school?” and I said “I honestly don’t know I’d have to look,” and he repeated the same question, with his voice raised, and I said “I think we have language around the selection process but that’s it? I don’t know, summer school is supplemental, aren’t you on your own?” He then asked “Then why did you post on [the Facebook Coalition page] asking about it?”
“I didn’t.”
“You’re not Kelsey Ann(e) on Facebook?”
“No, I’m Kelsey Gray. Ann(e) isn’t even my middle name.”
His tone switched, absent apology, and offered to be my ‘mentor’ at our national union assembly later that summer.
“The work can’t wait for my feelings to catch up” is what I would repeat to myself. It is not a mantra I recommend to anyone, but admittedly it is still a mantra I use.
Many times over the years many my fellow organizers would suggest we confront union leadership in a more public way, would suggest we start to tell other members what we were coming up against. I always rationalized a reason not to, I always came back to believing they would see the work we were doing, that our local union president would simply recognize the union that we have and start to respect us.
I knew how hard it would be when we finally went against our leadership. I knew I wasn’t ready to go through it, I kept getting just enough evidence that he still saw me as a person, still believed in the work we were building, I still had a few glimmering threads of hope.
Because I didn’t want to be union president, I wanted to teach members to and help members effectively organize. I wanted to continue to teach English Language Arts and bring more members into our committee, I wanted to strengthen our union into a member-driven force to be reckoned with in this city of corruption.
I would need my own solid evidence that our leadership could not be moved by worker power, I would need a clear point of no return to be willing to do the amount of work needed to reform our local union.
In August of 2025 I would be working through this tension with a mentor, a person who had reformed their union and now helps fellow educators around the country make their unions more democratic.
I said I was scared.
They asked What are you scared of?
After a few moments I said: I just don’t want them to come for me.
They said Kelsey, it sounds like they already are.
A month later, in September 2025, I would get my own solid evidence, my clear point of no return, which CORE wrote about. I share how I was treated during and after that issue in this coming Thursday’s post.
I believe this has to be intentional because this environment being created out of incompetence is even more outlandish.
It might have actually been three times.
See footnote #1
Not that they must, simply that they were able to.