Sarah Jaffe

I talk to a lot of teachers.

You know, I talk to a lot of people who are in these kinds of jobs where they are doing it because there is meaning in it for them.

And we would want that, right?

I don't want my nurse or my doctor to, like, only be in it for the money, right?

You want your kid's teacher to be engaged and care about kids, right?

I would be a terrible teacher because small children terrify me.

Like that, we don't want to get rid of that entirely, but we do want to have the understanding that like your life is more than this workplace and you get to have demands on your workplace.

And again, when you think about doctors and nurses, it makes sense, right?

I would like the hospital to be run by the people who know about providing health care rather than the people who know about, you know, counting budget numbers.

Yeah, you know, the place that I started that I think really got me, you know, going down this particular front was the Chicago Teachers Union.

And in 2012, you know, they went on the strike that was the first big teacher strike in the U.S.

in a long time.

And the argument that they made was, are working conditions or are students learning conditions?

And it was this really great way of it now, labor scholars and organizers call it, marketing for the common good.

And what they're saying is that actually...

if we are given better working conditions, if we are paid enough to actually live near the school that we teach in, if we have smaller class sizes, if there's toilet paper.

They were literally bargaining to get toilet paper in the bathrooms on the first day of school.

And so they sort of demonstrated their worth to the community by going on strike, which is the classic sort of labor tactic.

But they also really had this innovative argument that was saying to people,

You want our conditions to be better because it's actually good for everyone.