 So just so everybody knows, I'm Chris Brooks with Labor Notes. In case you aren't familiar with Labor Notes, we are an organization that just turned 40 this year, which we're very happy about. We're a media and organizing project, so we have a monthly news magazine that we published. We have a website that has stories about what's going on in the labor movement with a focus on rank-and-file folks and how they organize and how they're taking on the boss and transforming their unions. We also organize workshops all across the country and do lots of trainings. We have conferences. We have troublemaker schools, which are like big one-day trainings. We have our big Labor Notes conference in Chicago every two years, which Rebecca and Emily were both at, which was a lot of fun. And just so folks know, we are recording this tonight, so we'll be able to share it with everybody afterwards. So if you want that link, you can feel free to contact me. It's just chris at Labor Notes.org. And we do offer monthly webinars. This is a little bit special. We organized this just for the teachers in Tennessee to be able to learn from the experiences of rank-and-file activists like Emily in West Virginia and Rebecca in Arizona. So, you know, there are other webinars that are put out monthly, and you can just find that information on our website or by signing up for our eBlock. So all I have to say is that, like, Labor Notes is here to try to be a resource to connect rank-and-file activists all around the country to one another and to share out organizing tools and skills and resources. So that's kind of the spirit that we're doing this tonight. So we have two folks joining us, Emily Comer from West Virginia and Rebecca Gorelli from Arizona. And the goal is to talk about how they organize as activists on the ground in their schools for the statewide strikes that they engaged in, which is a very huge and exciting feat. So as folks are joining on, if you could just mute your phone, that way we can make sure that we can hear them. So to start out, we're going to hear from Emily about what happened in West Virginia and how they organized the strike there. And then she'll talk for a bit, and then we'll, Rebecca, to talk about what happened in Arizona. And then after that, we'll open it up to questions from everybody else. All right, so Emily, feel free to take it away. Hi, I'm Emily. I'm a high school Spanish teacher in South Charleston, West Virginia. And I'm really excited to be on this call with all of you tonight. And I just want to thank Labor Notes. Thank you for organizing this. So I'm sure that everybody on this call knows that around this time last year, we, hold on, I'm trying to figure out, I can't, I minimize you and I can't see you now. Okay, there you are. Yeah, around this time last year, we teachers and school service personnel, so bus drivers, cooks, custodians, and West Virginia went on strike for nine days over rising healthcare costs. We ended up winning a 5% raise. Plus we killed bad legislation that would have brought in charter schools, attack seniority, and basically busted unions by attacking our, like messing with our automatic dues. They call that paycheck protection. And then we went on strike also this year against charter schools and we won. So I want to talk a little bit about the background of our last year's strike and how we got there. Politically speaking from what I hear, West Virginia is pretty similar to Tennessee. So we used to be a solid blue state until pretty recently. Democrats were in control for 88 years until I believe 2015 when the GOP swept our elections. And since then we've seen right to work legislation passed. It actually got struck down yesterday in the circuit court. And so anyway, we've seen state legislators aggressively go after unions in those few years. But even earlier in 2007, we saw Joe Manchin, our governor at the time, pass massive $200 million corporate tax cuts and business tax cuts that have really put a huge strain on working class people here. So in 2017, when we got the news that we were going to see these huge benefits cuts in our health insurance, that's really what we were up against. Our unions had not been a site of power in a very long time. The last teacher strike had been in 1990. The year I was born, and that strike won a $5,000 across the board raise. But basically since then, for a long time, the feeling had been that our unions were good at handling grievances and not so much else. I'm an AFT member, and the biggest event of the year was like a lobby day. And I don't know, it became clear to me and really a lot of people that just going to our representatives and sort of asking nicely was not getting us very far and that something had to change. So in the summer of 2017, I met Jay O'Neill while doing Medicare for All work, Medicare for All organizing and DSA. Jay is a teacher who's in WBEA, and I'm an AFT. And we basically shared the same perspective that something needed to change. It couldn't be the same old way of doing things. And so we started a reading group with NDSA for teachers. We read No Shortcuts by Jane McAleevy. We ended up sort of deciding that, like in our opinion, the only way to win funding for PEIA, our health insurance, was to build an escalated campaign with real demands. And we agreed that that might take a strike and it might take a credible strike threat. So Jay ended up creating a Facebook group called West Virginia Public Employees United. And I came on as an admin shortly after. The purpose of this group was to bring people together across unions because in West Virginia we have AFT, we have WBEA, and we have WVSSPA, which is a smaller school service personnel union. And it can be really difficult to get all three of them to work together. If one union is doing one thing, some people don't even belong to a union. So having this group allowed us to sort of all be in the know and all be on the same page as we were building this campaign. We also called it West Virginia Public Employees United and also allowed all public employees on it, not just school employees, because this campaign was about PEIA, our health insurance, which covers one in nine West Virginians. And we're looking at building a, you know, as broad a movement as possible. This down the road ended up doing wonders, I think for our public support when it was time to go on strike. So after we created the Facebook group, we started showing up like anywhere we could with sign-in sheets to recruit people into the group. We went to town hall meetings. We went to PEIA public hearings, literally anywhere that had public employees there, our teachers, we were there getting people signed up and then we would send them an email with a link to the Facebook group and get them in the group. We also started escalating by bird-dogging or confronting legislators about PEIA saying, how are you going to fund PEIA or what you commit to funding it with this progressive tax, et cetera, and getting that on camera and then posting it into the Facebook group. And a lot of those videos really did numbers. So I remember going to this one subcommittee, it was like a PEIA subcommittee meeting at the Capitol that no one ever goes to. And we had created an event to get a bunch of people to go. We packed the room. We ended up getting both of our state union leaders there too. And our legislators were shocked that anyone even showed up. And I was filming and the chair made me take down my live stream. I ended up confronting the chair on camera afterwards and that video went sort of like West Virginia viral and that ended up getting so much attention from teachers on Facebook who had many of them had never been to a union meeting before. They had never been involved. But suddenly they're just like seeing this activity on their, you know, on their Facebook feed and engaging and paying attention in this way and asking questions and becoming part of this movement. So from that point, there was this real groundswell and we had, I guess, about a thousand members in our group in late December. And that grew to about 24,000 by the time the strike started, which was in late February. And all this growth happened over the course of other escalating actions that we were organizing like greeting the governor with a banner at the state of the state address. Which, you know, only like four people, only like four of us showed up to do that and we were, I remember, disappointed that we couldn't get more people to show up, but we did more sort of videos of confronting legislators. We ended up doing walk-ins at our schools, taking it more to the building level and not just on social media. So we did walk-ins, we did red t-shirt days, which of course spilled over into social media when you saw all these pages of educators wearing red in their whole school. And of course, in early February, you saw the southern counties of Las Virginia do one-day walk-outs. It was really strange to think back on all of this and sort of condense it into this timeline because when we started organizing for this, we realized how much of an uphill battle it was going to be. And I think there's some small part of it that we didn't actually believe it was going to happen. Like that we weren't actually going to, you know, we weren't really going to go on like this ever. Emily, just real quick, if somebody's keeping, if everybody could just make sure to please mute your phones while you're on the call so we can clearly hear Emily trying to appreciate it. So please continue. Okay. Yeah, I think there's part of me that didn't really ever believe what would happen, that our movement would never grow to this. It's hard to ever really believe that we could have something like that, you know. I think when you're an organizer, you kind of reach for the sky, right? And you get used to losing. But also, you know, we're up against the Republican House or Republican Senate or Republican governor. And you know, to be frank, a union leadership, you want to strike in the first place. And so strike was rank and file led. So in things like in late January, we started having these emergency meetings with our unions. I remember one meeting that WBEA had that I went to because they opened it up to everyone. We were demanding, you know, we were asking questions if we wanted to go out. We said, when is the strike? People were asking that. And our union leadership, or not my union leadership, but the WBEA leadership was saying, you know, we can't have a strike. It's not going to be like 1990. And they were giving all of these reasons that a strike would be impossible. And really they were, I mean, they were sort of scaring us out of going out on strike. And that was happening around the state and not just in WBEA, but it didn't work. People wanted to go out. We were pushing. And at that point, everybody was pushing. You know, I think having a GOP legislature didn't matter. The strike being illegal didn't matter. You know, when you have people so, at that point when we had people so fired up about this campaign, people were ready. And by the time we went out, when you have every school in the state shut down, you know, that kind of power is pretty hard to contend with. That's all. Excellent. Well, thank you for that overview. There's a lot to unpack there, but we'll move to Arizona first. And Rebecca, you can feel free to take it away. Well, thank you. I also want to say thanks, Labor Notes, for always hooking us up with people across the nation. This is amazing. So, and Emily, thanks to you, obviously, because without the work that happened in West Virginia, Arizona wouldn't exist. And I mean that truthfully. And the first piece is the solidarity that came with our leader, Jay O'Neill, our fearless West Virginia leader, who actually helped me earn the courage to make our first Facebook page. And so, down here we started about a year ago on March 2nd last year, so the anniversary is coming up. And so, for us, I mean, I'm sure you guys have heard, Arizona is the bottom of the barrel for every single education statistic that exists. Literally teacher pay, per people funding, tax cuts that exist here are ridiculous and tax exemption. So, basically, and we have vouchers and we have ESAs and STOs and every piece of Alec legislation that you could ever imagine is here. And so, public schools have been starved here and charters have been pushed like crazy. And so, I think for us, we didn't have to do all that ground work that Emily sort of had to do because Emily did it for us, right? And so, if I'm in Tennessee's shoes right now, I'm thinking, man, the groundwork has already been laid by all these different states. It's just a matter of how are you going to put that package together and deliver it out? Because our members, the minute I made the Facebook page, I mean, it just exploded. I heard the word strike and the first three comments that were made. And it's like, yes, we're doing this. And so, for us, it was like out of the gate, insane. So, we had to slow it down. And we had to be mindful of where people were at because people were very angry and had been for about a decade, right? Their wages kept going down and their insurance kept going up. And so, they're taking home less and less pay. And so, people were very angry. They just needed a way to harness that. Anger and drive it into the path that would get them to be successful. And so, we started, you know, just simple wearing red shirts. We came up with red for Ed Wednesdays. And, you know, we started, you know, we, sorry, you guys, I have three little kids under the age of five. If you hear banging, I apologize. That's my kids trying to find me. So, we started red for Ed Wednesdays. That was our first action. And just like Emily said, it's all about an escalation campaign. You cannot come out of the gate, you know, guns blazing. You have to build community support. You have to build courage and solidarity throughout the state. You have to figure out ways to plug different people in on a variety of ways. And so, we started red for Ed Wednesdays. That was our first action and just like Emily said, we had to plug different people in on a variety of actions. Anywhere from wearing a red shirt all the way up to going out on strike on a huge job action. So, for us, what kept us in our planning mind is, you know, if you, you know, everyone's calling for strike. And if you want to do this huge job action, well, how about you wear a red shirt first? Let's see how many of those people we can get out there. Let's use social media to build that visual presence. And so, for us, I mean, we already knew what the end game was. We knew we wanted to go out on strike. We knew we were organizing a walkout from day one. It was just a matter of what that timeline is. And so, when, when folks ask us like, how did you build the timeline is we didn't, we knew the legislative session was going to end here. And we backwards planned it, you know, just like any good teacher would do is I unit plan backwards, right? And so we built our first week was red for Ed shirts, posts on social media, how many people we got tons of people. Then the next week was, you know, post with a sign with three reasons why you're red for Ed. And so we started to tell the story and stories are an incredibly powerful way to get people to move past fear. If you don't tell stories, nobody understands that there's other people that are like them and they, they can connect so much better if you have a way to tell the story. And so that was just everybody seeing all the different problems in the class size and all these different crazy aspects of people are going, oh man, I'm not alone. Okay, let's do this. I'm not afraid. That fear just starts coming off real fast. And so solidarity is a huge part of an escalation campaign. And I am no expert on this. However, I was part of the Chicago teachers union strike of 2012. And so we use many of the tactics that was in Chicago here in Arizona. And if you're curious of how that campaign went, here's a, here's a book you need to get. I always put this on my calls. It's a labor notes book. And you can see all the post-its because we literally used this playbook. So you build your campaign, right? Got your red shirts. Then the next week you go on to red shirts, tell the story. And then, you know, we started to every Wednesday, let's see how many campuses we had and et cetera. And we kept building. And then we decided, okay, you know, let's, let's hold a rally. Let's, let's flex our muscles a little bit. We need to know where our power stands. And so let's get together. Let's have a rally. We created a teach in where we told stories and talked about funding and all of those things. And then we threw in a little rah-rah. Here's our five demands. And our demands were clear. I mean, we asked for raises. We asked for competitive pay for our classified staff because, you know, that wall-to-wall organizing and including everybody is really where you build your power, right? Like Emily said. And so we included all of those things in our five demands. And we announced them at a huge rally. We got about 6,000 people down there. We made chant cards and it was, it was planned to a T, like a beautiful lesson, right? We had every, all the materials ready to go. And so through these weeks, and that was probably like our third or fourth weekend. It was March 28th, I believe, was our rally. And as we were going, whatever we did, we had a way to measure our power. So we created like URLs or a way to take attendance or give people a QR code to just clock. How many people are we reaching? We asked people to ratify the demands. And we ended up having thousands upon thousands of people ratify these demands. And so not only is escalating part of a really successful campaign, but taking, collecting data, measuring, you have to have measure metrics. I mean, it's just like your students, right? You need to know where you're going to, in order to plan your next step. And so we did that. We held rallies. And at the same time we, and I want to make clear that this wasn't just a union thing. We created a rank and file network, a huge network. And our page was the rank and file, but we also worked with our union and we had this parallel relationship where we had kind of the voice of the teachers. And they had kind of the resources and the funding and other aspects that we didn't have, right? But we had the power and the voice of the teachers. And so another critical component of our campaign and why we were so successful is we built what we call the, what we call the liaison network. And what this is, is we asked people to volunteer with a Google form. I mean, something so simple. We asked people to sign up. So that way two things could happen. We knew how many schools we were reaching statewide. We knew how many schools existed. And so then we could backwards plan and try to figure out the gaps of where we had people, where we didn't. Let's fill in those holes. And then once we had this liaison group, we started educating them. We would build presentations, like Google slide presentations that we would give to the liaison so that they can turn around, go back to their schools and not have to prepare a single thing. Because not only are people not hardcore organizers, they, maybe they don't know where to start, right? And so we, every time we did something, we modeled it. We said, here's what we want you to do. First, second, third, fourth, here, go, go, go. Here's a slide for each thing we want you to do. And then come back, report back and tell us, you know, how it went. So there was a feedback loop that we continued to close. But one successful thing is whatever we asked people to do, whether it was a walk-in or a part, you know, a campaign party or something is we asked them to take attendance, clock attendance, and we gave them the materials. So as we escalated, we started to build this liaison network. And we would use Action Network to send out mass emails. We would also use the text messaging system, remind and ask every single school site to have their own remind system so that we would send out information. They could turn around, send it out to their members. And so when all was said and done, we had over 1,200 sites and 1,200 liaisons. Now some of those liaisons doubled up as union site reps. And so that wasn't the case everywhere though. So anywhere that we didn't have a union site rep, we filled that gap with a liaison. And I'm talking rural nation. I'm talking Native American reservation land where there isn't a strong union presence. We built our own presence there. And so as we escalated, we moved on to, okay, we got our sites organized. We're feeling good about this. We're getting people to come to 10-minute meetings. We're collecting information and, you know, school by school. We knew we were getting up there. And then we decided April was going to be our community solidarity month is what we called it. We asked people to make events on the weekends and go out and organize. And what that does is it gets people out in the public. And when you see a group of people wearing red shirts, people are going to start asking questions. And they're going to go, what are you doing? Who are you? What's going on? Oh, hey, come join me. Oh, here's some information for you. And so we had little palm cards. We were out making posters in the city, in the suburbs. And we did car painting parties. Now that sounds kind of lame in a way, but the reason it worked and what I mean is we use these car markers. They're like markers you can write on windows of a car. I don't know if you guys have seen our red for Ed car painting. But what it did is it gave some people an action to do a way to get together, a way to get out in public. And that was our, one of our biggest tickets was this car painting idea. Because anywhere you traveled, it was the biggest message of solidarity you can see anywhere. I'm on the highway looking at 10 cars that say red for Ed. I know I'm not alone. That fear just keeps melting away. And I'm, I'm ready to, I'm ready to go. You know, come, it only took us eight weeks to pull this off. People were ready. They're like, yeah, I painted my car or whatever. Yeah, I'm wearing shirts, whatever, what do you got next? You know, just eating it, eating and eating it. But it's because we built this insane campaign. This organizing blitz and escalate, escalate, escalate, escalate. And we did it in such a crazy way that people just ate it up and ate it up because they didn't have to think they had all the tools ready to go. We built a website with everything you can download, walk-in flyers, walk-in posters. We did standouts. Anything you can think of, we did. And then we canvas businesses, right? We got red for Ed signs. I'm sure you guys have seen those red signs. They were everywhere. I mean, we literally painted the state red for Ed. That's what we called it, paint the state red for Ed. So that's kind of the whole thing. And by the time we called for a walk out, the whole state was with us. There was not a question about who we were, what we wanted and what we were doing. There were cars running down the highway with funding graphs and statistics about how Arizona is the worst in the nation for per-people funding. I mean, it just happened. And now it's the number one issue in Arizona. And into the election, it helped us win some stuff. And it's still the number one talked about thing here in Arizona. So this escalating, and it didn't matter if you were a union member. It didn't matter if you even knew anything about organizing. You were welcome. And you could come in because it was rank and file bottom up. We drove this campaign. So I hope that helps. Yeah. So I'm going to ask two quick questions and then I'll turn it over for others to ask questions as well. So the first question I have is, you know, so in 2014 Karen Lewis was the speaker at the labor note conference and she said ground zero is everywhere for education. The privateizers are out. You know, we've seen Republican takeovers of many states, but even if there are Democrats in charge, they're gutting for the teachers unions and for education. You know, the funding is at an all time low. So we know that these problems persist everywhere. And I think the lesson that I see in West Virginia and Arizona and many other states is this recognition that the Calvary is not coming to save us. Like if we're going to fix this problem, it has to be led by the rank and file themselves. It has to be members taking control and driving their agenda. And that is met with mixed responses from the union leadership. So I'm wondering if Emily, if you could speak a little bit to like what the response was like from the union leaders in your state and how you, you know, what the relationships like with the right to found pushing from below. And then Rebecca, you could speak after that to kind of this parallel course, you know, and how you've worked with the union as well. So what the responses like from the union leadership as we were pushing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like as this whole thing is coming up, like, you know, and how you've held them accountable. Yeah. So I mean, yeah. They, again, I think that they are union leadership. Um, was very, I'll say, I think they were anxious about the idea of a strike. Um, they, you know, a strike had not happened. Uh, in a very long time here. It was just not, uh, like anybody's real house, you know. Um, so it's not, not that, you know, in West Virginia, um, people here, there was a time here where strikes were a common thing. Right. But, uh, that's, it's not really the case anymore. And so, um, when people started talking about striking and all of a sudden social media was sort of blowing up and people were saying, Hey, when are we going to go on strike? I think we should go on strike. This isn't going to be fixed. Unless we go on strike, uh, our union leadership sort of said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on. Like what? Wait a minute. You're like, and I think that a lot of, uh, them reacted in a way. Um, and not just, I don't want to just say the union presidents, but, um, a lot of people who were more act had been more active in the union, um, sort of ask questions that were like, we can't get people to show up to a union meeting. What do you mean? We're going to go out, go out on strike. Um, and you know, people, I, I'll just, to that, I'll say that I had not been active in AFT. You know, I was active, uh, an active organizer outside of my union. Um, but I think there was the, you know, as soon as we, uh, started this escalated campaign to actually win something. And it felt like we were headed in a direction where we might be able to win something or at least that was the goal. Um, suddenly people really wanted to be involved in that. And then they were involved in their union, right? Um, but I think that, uh, for a long time, I'm sort of not off track. I'm not really answering your question anymore, but, um, for a long time that's, uh, just not what, uh, has happened here in our unions. So yeah, it was just a different, it was very much a, a different, uh, path. What was happening here in the kind of organizing that was happening, look different from what the union leadership had been doing. Um, it was unfamiliar to them. And, um, I think it made them uncomfortable, but I mean, now I'll say that this year, um, they've been quicker to respond to it. Um, and they've not tried to tamp it down as quickly. I mean, they were quicker to call a strike vote this year. So, yeah. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Rebecca. So ours, uh, you know, our situation is very unique, uh, because of West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, you know, being our predecessors, we didn't, we didn't, we because of how it went down there, we knew we had to work together quite honestly. We saw it kind of sort of fail in Oklahoma, kind of sort of failing Kentucky, West Virginia, you guys, I don't even know if your union was involved from, you know what I mean? Like we didn't see the union in any of the people who came before us. So I think our union was right away on board. I mean, Joe Thomas, our president, he, uh, you know, in a, I don't know what you guys know about the history of red for Ed, but part of the way it started is between a conversation of one of our main leaders, Noah and our union, uh, president Joe Thomas and Joe, uh, Noah said, well, I see West Virginia going out and other people, like, do you think Arizona should do something? And Joe Thomas was like, well, why don't you try a red shirt? See how many people you can get to do that. And so it opened the door with just a tiny little tweet. And I mean, we knew that the union was going to be on board. There was no reason not to. Arizona is literally last in the nation. I mean, it just can't get any worse. Um, and our legislature is horrific. Um, so they were on board from day one. And what that looked like is in our third week is they invited us to come and we sat at the union hall and, and, you know, talked about things. And, um, I think we all just knew that it didn't matter who was driving the bus. We knew that, that we, the rank and file needed to be the voice that was out in front because that's the only way this was going to happen. The union came alongside us and provided the resources and infrastructures that we didn't have. Yes, we ended up building our own union literally from the ground up, but they had action network already set up that we could just plug in right away and start using it. They had space. They had organizers all ready to go that they could disperse throughout the state to do trainings, which we did trainings for our, our liaisons. They, they helped us train our people. They got the space, the materials, and they sent folks out. So we really became this one kind of family, if you will. Um, but it did kind of stay like this, but we worked together, right? They had, they had one thing. We had the voice of the teachers and the people power. They had the organizing structures and the funding ability and that sort of thing. And NEA came in at some point and helped us too. So it was really this beautiful relationship of understanding. And yeah, you know, it wasn't always, you know, shiny roses and glorious rainbows, but you know what? We were all in it together and we, it didn't matter who threw the touchdown. We just wanted to win. However that happened. And so I think ours is unique and we still work with them now. Like we're on weekly calls with them every Monday night. Um, so we still work together because we still all want to win. It's all about winning. And the only way you do that is if you join together and you have solidarity and you respect each other and you find a way to work together and we have, you know, AEA here, Arizona Education Association. Um, but we only have one third of members out of our teacher. Sorry. Out of all the teachers, only one third of them are actual union members. So if you think of how many people actually came to our March, which was about 75,000, we had everybody plus the community. So it didn't matter this, this union versus non union that needs to go. And you got to get rid of that. This is rank and file from the bottom up. And if your union is not doing bottom up organizing, if it's top down in any way, it's not going to work. If it's member driven, rank and file driven. If the union does the work that the members want, then you're in a good spot. And that's what a union should be doing. And I only say that because I was part of Chicago teachers union for 11 years and I have learned the ways and it works. It works. And when people voice their concerns to their union and their union listens and responds adequately, that's how you win. You work together, you figure out a path and you continue to just navigate together. That's why we worked is and with our liaison network, you know, when we went to do our strike authorization vote, it was the local presidents across the state that had the materials and disperse them, but they disperse them to our liaisons too. So we had not only union reps, we had liaisons and we filled every gap necessary. And that's why we were successful is because it didn't matter if you were a union member or not. If you were a rank and file member, which is everybody, you were in and your voice could be heard and you got to, to, to vote on everything. It was a democratic, you know, the way we should be doing organizing democratically and all of that. So that's how we were successful. All right. So one last question and I'll, I'm going to let others ask questions as well. So what do you say to folks who say, we can't do this. It's illegal. They'll retaliate against us. We'll lose the certification. You know, what do you, what do you, how do you respond to that? Me, I'll go first. I'm just laughing here because that's ridiculous. We had that same fear here and our leverage came from the fact that there's 2000 teacher vacancies. They are giving away emergency certificates faster than anything you've ever seen before. I mean, if you're a warm body, you can teach here, right? And so our leverage is there are a tough, you have nobody to fill these spots. It's not going to happen. And so that's one, you got leverage. Second is through all of this, as you escalate and you build that public support and awareness, our districts just started signing our governing boards started signing resolutions in support just like West Virginia and Oklahoma did the same thing. And they posted district by district, who signed those resolutions. So once one district started doing it, then people were like, oh my gosh, I'm not afraid. My district supporting me, my governing board supporting me. Okay. Well, maybe striking is illegal, but guess what? What are they going to do? They can't do anything if schools are closed down. We have all of the power. And so once district after district started, you know, signing these resolutions, people go, oh, I can't lose my certificate. I can't, none of this happens because schools closed. I'm not walking out of my job if schools closed, right? And that's the power of the sick out that just happened in Kentucky. If only 40% of their people called out sick and they had to shut down school, that's power. That's where your power come from. What are they going to, they tried to find us $5,000 for wearing red shirts. There's 60,000 of us go for it. I'd love to see you try, you know, to bring it on. I mean, seriously, this ridiculous, I'm sorry, I'm just so fired up about this because our legislators are trying to punish us again right now. It's hilarious. It's not going to happen. What are they going to do? The beauty of being a teacher is we, just like nurses, cannot be outsourced. We cannot be computerized even though they're trying to pull that. We can't. We are necessary. It's not going to happen. It's just like West Virginia taught us it's our labor. It's ours to get and it's ours to take away. Right? Thanks to Nicole McCormick for that amazing quote. So. It's not going to happen. They're not good. What are they going to do? Yeah, I'm totally with Rebecca on this. And I think, you know, I'm really surprised by how this really did not come up. When we, of course, when we were organizing to go out, people, I talked to lots of teachers who were scared, but this did not seem to be the thing that they were scared about. And I think that it's because we have massive shortages in West Virginia. And really, you know, when the issue of striking being illegal came up, people said, you know, what are they going to fire us? They can't fire us. We know how hard it is to get a sub to show up. We don't have enough subs. If you can't even get a sub to cover your class, how are they going to fire certified teachers? It's just not possible. It was a joke. The idea of the strike being illegal was actually a joke to people. I did scare people was losing pay. The idea of losing pay, but we talked through that with people. I mean, we didn't, we so far have not had to lose pay because schools have been shut down. However, and so it's been kind of in the back of my mind, you know, if we, if our superintendent were to leave schools open, what would that look like? And we have that happen. We have that come up in Pundam County. The neighboring County to the one I'm in, the last strike, it was the only County out of all 55 that the superintendent kept schools open. And they had not a single bus ran in Pundam County. All the bus, 100% of the bus drivers stayed on on strike for two days. And there was 80% participation from teachers and other school service personnel in the schools. So 20% of workers across the picket line, but I think for being called, you know, the strike being called literally the night before. And it being organized so quickly. I think that was pretty good participation, 80. So there you go. Great. So what we'll do is we'll take two or three questions at once. And then we'll let Emily and Rebecca response to that. So, you know, we'll, we'll try to see if we can do this in an orderly way. So who has a question? I have a question. I joined the conversation late. So I'm not really sure if you talked about this or not. But. When you, when you started talking about organizing, obviously, there's reason to organize. That's not the issue, but did you have a specific legislation in mind that you organized around like to rally people? Does that make, does that question make sense? Was that the impetus for you to actually, you know, strike or stick out or walk out? Was it based on a pending piece of legislation? Okay. That's a great question. So we'll, we'll just take two more questions and then, and then we'll, we'll let everybody answer. Who else has a question? Hi, my name is Janae and I'm just curious for both West Virginia and Arizona, you know, post striking, post walking out, six outs, you know, can you kind of elaborate on maybe how your union has been redefined or how it has changed or how it hasn't changed? I'd be curious to, to listening to that perspective. That's a great question, Janae. Okay. So does somebody else have another question? I do. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. I guess I'm from Tennessee and I want to know what is the first step? Great questions. Okay. So the questions are, what was the impetus of the specific legislation that you were responding to, to lead with the walk out? How has the union changed since then? And what was the first step? Yeah, I'll go ahead. So there, when we started organizing, you know, the first time around in West Virginia, there was not already legislation on the table because we started organizing way before the legislative session months and months before, but there was an issue that we were organizing around that everybody was, you know, upset about. And that was our health insurance. So we found out that our health care costs that are plan year, you know, that our health care costs for plan year 2018, we're going to rise dramatically. And those were changes that were instituted by the PEIA board and that basically like the legislator, legislature had not allocated enough money to keep up with rising health care costs the year before that. And in order to fix that basically the next, the upcoming legislative session, we would have to get them to allocate more money. And so we were successful in doing that, at least for, you know, we got a freeze for that plan year. But anyway, yeah, we had, we had that issue that we were, that we built our campaign around because that was the thing that just in every school, everyone was talking about. People were saying, how are we, how am I going to pay my bills? You know, this is, there, I think this goes to the other question of where do we start? Because if you have an issue that is on everyone's minds, that people are already upset about, that's a really good place to start. Because looking at where West Virginia, where we were in West Virginia last school year, it was so much easier to organize around a thing that people were already furious about compared to this year. It set us up to be able to fight something like charter schools where a year ago nobody even knew what a charter school was. And so we've got all this momentum. And then this, now this year being able to educate people around this is what a charter school is. This is why it's bad. This is why we can't allow them to come into the state of West Virginia. So I think trying to start off with like a political strike on an issue that nobody knows anything about is probably not good for your first strike. Yeah. What was the third question? How the union has changed. Oh, I think it's changed dramatically. I think people are so much more active than they were before. You're seeing people that were never involved in the union who are showing up to general membership meetings who are, you know, who are not just that, but who are like reading the news and asking like how does this local news factor into what goes on in my union. And like my coworkers are constantly asking, you know, what's going on and they're, you know, they are participating in the union. I'm building up at my school and it actually feels like a, it feels like we have a union in our school. So it's very, very different. It's a different culture now. That's excellent. Do you have anything to add to that, Rebecca? Um, first. Ooh. First step, obviously get everybody in one space. However you can do that. Like Emily went out and canvas people and, you know, sign people up at town halls. Get everybody in one space. That's the first step. Then you really got to have a team. I mean, just a really solid team that's committed and dedicated. And we set up roles from the very beginning. Like I was in charge of actions. We had someone on research, you know, research and education. We had someone making a website. We just divided up the roles and we just conquered and we stuck in those roles. That was really a critical step for us. Um, as far as legislation. I'm sorry. Uh, our governor tried to only give us, he proposed a 1% raise. And we are the last in the nation. And I think that was happening. I don't even remember like a couple of weeks before we decided to really start organizing. And so people were like, are you kidding me? We are the last. So I think just that fired people up. And then we just came up with our demands based on, uh, we're bottom in the nation for XYZ. So we're going to fight for XYZ. Um, so it wasn't one specific piece of legislation, but when your governor says that you can have a 1% raise, but gives his own staff, I think it was a 20% raise or something ridiculous. That really fired people up. Um, and then I'm just going to say, I don't know what it's like in Tennessee, but here in Arizona, the word union is like taboo, right? You're right to work. There's no unions. What are you talking about? There's no unions. And now the word union is everywhere. I mean, it just, we just completely changed the whole mindset. Everybody is talking about bills, house committees, setting education committees. We're talking about, you know, how do we organize? We need to build power. I mean, just these, these buzzwords unionism are everywhere. It's beautiful. It shifted a complete mindset to people saying, we don't have unions in Arizona. This is right to work too. Well, wait a minute, we do great. What do I do? How do I get involved? Where do I go? And so it was just total shift, just completely different. That's great. Um, okay, so I think we have two hands raised. Uh, so Susan, yours was raised first is Norwood. I think I already asked my question about how do we start? Oh, okay. Great. So I'll lower your hand then. Sorry. Uh, tequila is in your hand is raised. Hey, tequila from Tennessee. I'll just want to know what type of questions that you all ask when you were canvassing or asking individuals to join your group. What type of question? Okay. So what kind of questions you asked like when you were canvassing people to try to get them to join and get excited about the campaign. All right. So that's one question. Uh, Lauren, I see you raised your hand. Lauren, are you there? Lauren, can you hear it? Okay. Uh, does anybody else have a question? I do. Can you hear me? Yep. Um, I guess my question is how do I get people to wear red at my school and then other schools? I know it's a simple thing, but I need some talking points. Okay. So, I mean, my reaction was red Ed wearing red big deal. Who cares? Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Okay. It's how to get people to see why wearing red matters and how, how did they could feel like it's important? That's a good question. All right. So we'll take, we'll take one more question. Does anybody else have one? I have one, Chris. Go ahead, Larry. Um, I spoke with someone about these strikes from these different states and one of them was not illegal. This might have been Oklahoma. The laws prohibited them from striking against their local unions. Not against the legislature and because the strike was against the legislature, every which state it was talking about, it was not illegal. And so I haven't looked at our law in Tennessee to see exactly what it is. But when our union, uh, lobbyists is telling everybody that we're not even thinking about it, uh, like was posting the Tennessee and I think last year maybe, um, it's hard to get on board with the union and with the grassroots. And I think you know that as you've been here in our state before. So, um, is, was it illegal for Arizona, West Virginia, or was it just illegal to strike against your locals and not when you stretch against your legislature? Okay. Um, well, I can just say that in Tennessee it is illegal to strike. Um, and I think we've talked a little bit about that, but I think there's also this other question there. It's like, well, the unions already come out in response to West Virginia and Arizona and have been like, this is not a priority. We're not going to do this. So, you know, what do you do given that being the case, right? Um, so maybe, so that, what questions did you ask and how do you get people to wear red? So how do you get people to wear red? Um, that's an education piece. Um, and you use words like, um, visual presence. We need, I mean, it's let's think. So I want to say solidarity, but if people really don't understand what solidarity is, you really just need them to understand that the more we can visually see each other, the more we understand that we are together. It's a visual representation. It's like being on a team, right? You all wear the same color and when you see someone wearing the same color of you sitting in your staff meeting and there's a whole bunch of you, you're, you're sitting up a little bit straighter, right? You're going, wow, there's a lot of me. I feel good right now. And so we use words like solidarity down the road that, well, we didn't come out like union speak right away. We said, we need to show, you know, visual presence. How many people can you get? And we did some challenges, right? Like this school can get 10 people who can get more, you know, that kind of thing and make it kind of a fun little competition. It's really helping people understand the idea of solidarity in whatever way you can is how you message it and say do you want to know if you're, you know, if you're alone or not? And the way you do that is by putting on a red shirt and seeing who's with you. It's a simple thing. Okay, you don't have to get into labor history of, you know, wearing red bandanas or anything, but it's that act of solidarity. It's that who's with me. I'm not alone. And that's what really takes away that fear is to see that you're not alone. And what questions did we ask people? I don't think we asked very many questions. We were just like, people were fired up. They were like, where do we go? Okay, sign up. Here's a Google form. You want to get involved? You want to, you want to self-organize at your site? Here's our form. Sign up. We need you, right? It wasn't like I mean, we probably did a little bit of agitation. Like, are you happy with the current check you get? Or, you know, has your pay declined over the years? And, you know, are you happy about the governor's proposal? You just agitate a little bit around those questions and just see what people bite onto and what they, I mean, you got to gauge people somehow. So you find a way to agitate with the right questions that fit your situation. For us, it was, is a 1% raise good enough? If not, join our team. Here's the form. Wear a red shirt. Yeah, I'll add just a little bit that we, when I talked to co-workers in my school about, you know, red t-shirt day, I talked to them about why it's so important to all, to do an action where we're all doing the same thing and how just the act of wearing red shows that all of us wearing red shows that we can all take a coordinated action together and how much, even though it seems just really simple, like how much power that demonstrates and how, if we can take up just a picture of ourselves all wearing the shirt, you know, and make that, you know, post that, make it public, that demonstrates out into the world, you know, it demonstrates to our legislature when they see that, right, because we're tagging our legislators in it, that we are capable of organizing ourselves and getting everybody in the whole building on the same page and it doesn't have to end there, right? We can also organize ourselves to all get on the same page to maybe shut the building down, right? That's the message that it sends. Great, and so there was one more question from Lauren Sorenson, if she's still on, you just got to unmute yourself. If Lauren's not there, I have a quick question too. All right, let's just give her just a second. Lauren, are you there? I can't find her phone on here so I don't know which one of these she is. Okay. All right, we'll go ahead. I guess the last question tonight. Oh, am I the last question tonight? Okay. By the way, Rebecca, I met you in Indianapolis and it's a pleasure to see you here watching what you guys are doing in Arizona and West Virginia is really inspiring. My question is this, right now in Tennessee, we have pockets of activism. We have, you know, an ongoing effort in Nashville to wear red for Ed on Tuesdays because that's the day we have our board meetings. We have, you know, people working hard in Memphis and Johnson City in Knoxville. And my question is at what point did this become a statewide effort? And I apologize if you addressed that earlier. I'm dealing with a 10-year-old in bedtime. But at what point did that become a statewide force to be reckoned with? Like, how did it come together statewide, if that makes sense? All right, and then Lauren messaged me her question, which was how long did you plan each, you know, how long was the timeline for the strike? How long should they think that their timeline would be to be? That's two questions. Like, how long would they actually have to be out on strike? No, how long were you organizing before you went on? Go ahead, I might take it away. Okay. Sorry, I lost my train of thought there. Oh my gosh. I don't remember how I was going to respond to the question. I can go first. Sure. So to address the first question about statewide, I think from the very beginning, there was no question that it wouldn't be statewide. It was already statewide. I mean, we watched other states do it, so why don't we do it, right? And it wasn't one district doing something. It wasn't a rural district versus an urban district. It was legislators doing it. And how do you organize against your legislators? Well, the governor is the state, you know, it's the state. So let's do a state. I think that was our mentality. Is everyone else did state? We're doing state. The problems are with the legislators. So, you know, it would be different if it was, you know, back when I was in Chicago, that was a city thing. It wasn't a state thing. Here, obviously, it comes against the governor, not like the mayor and the mayor's policies, or however, you know, your city is set up. So there was no question that it was statewide is my point. So we didn't really have to think about it. It was, we keep going until, and we set goals along the way. I can't tell you how important that is. And we said, you know, we did three weeks of walk-in. So when you're thinking of the timeline, we organized a blitz in eight weeks. From beginning to end, it was eight weeks. And we escalated along the way. And I have a timeline somewhere that our union put together. I'm looking for it. And Labor Notes wrote an article about our escalating campaign, too, that I'm sure Chris could send you guys at some point. So we had eight weeks. And as we built, we took data and metrics as we went. And so what we said is like, how do you know you're ready to pull? What's the tipping point? When do you know your state's ready to pull that trigger? That's why you need data. And so we put out a goal and we said, you know, if we can get 1,000 schools walking in, we can get 1,000 schools walking out. And so that was our goal. And week by week, we ended up with 800 one week, then more than 1,000. And by the third week, we had over 1,200. And we were like, oh, I guess we go out now, don't we? Shoot. We got to stay true to our word. We told everybody if we're doing 1,000, oh, we met 1,000. Okay, let's do a strike vote. So it was this expectation. Everybody knew the expectation. So as you're organizing, setting those real goals that are tangible and attainable really gets people fired up. Oh, I better go. We got to get to this number, right? It motivates people into action. And so that really helped us in our timeline. And again, for statewide, you need a way to measure where you're at and fill in the gaps. You need a way to track your data. So that's helpful. Yeah, I'll add that I think I'm not like a policy wonk by any means, but I will say that I know that in West Virginia are like the funding mechanism for teachers like the, I don't know how to word this, but basically like are so much, it's not even funding. It's basically just like so much of education policy and funding is controlled by our state legislature, whereas in a lot of other states, it's controlled at the district level or like the county level. And I don't know why that is. I think West Virginia is actually maybe unique in that way. And so if we were going to it, well, and also at the beginning we were going out on strike over health care. This was a statewide health care system that covers one in nine people in our state. But even aside from that, West Virginia education policy is set by our state legislature and not by individual counties for the most part. So if we are going to affect change and we have to do it through a strike, it really does need to be a statewide strike, like a county-wide strike wouldn't do much. Whereas, you know, if the city of Los Angeles is going to affect change, they can do that, you know, they can put pressure on the city. So, I don't know how, I don't know if that's the case in Arizona. I'm not sure. I think we'll just set the precedent for a statewide strike because of, because that's a point. Yeah, same here. Yeah, even in Los Angeles, you know, where they had a multi-billion dollar reserve at the city level, they had a $21 billion state level, so they still were dependent on the state funding. State legislatures in every state, even in places with massive cities and strong unions, that's a major source of revenue that's really important. So, we are out of time and now it goes really fast. I really appreciate Emily and Rebecca for joining us tonight and for sharing all this great wisdom and information with everybody. This video was recorded, so we'll make sure to share out the link to folks in Tennessee and I would encourage you to share it out with others. So, thank you everybody for joining us. You know, stay tuned to Labor Notes for more opportunities to have calls like this and if anybody ever is interested in trying to organize another call or to participate in something like this again, then you feel free to contact me at chrisatlabernose.org. So, thanks everybody and I hope you have a great night. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.