Teachers' unions in the United States hold a highly visible and formidable reputation at the forefront of contemporary political debates in public education. Research demonstrates that teacher unions are more or less influential in their respective states, contributing to variations in contract provisions on measurements of teacher quality and effectiveness, salaries and job security. Declining rates amongst teachers in voluntary union membership in right-to-work states reveal a complicated portrait of the state of stability in contemporary teachers' unions and hold implications for the future of workers' rights and education reform.
The study uses in-depth, open-ended interviews with public school educators, administrators, and members of union leadership in two right-to-work states and two non-right-to-work states to investigate the varied and complex factors that affect the decision teachers make to participate or not participate in the union. Furthermore, Bosworth and Lanser argue that the institutional spaces where teachers spend their days, both in school and district contexts, impact teachers' elective participation in union membership. Therefore, they intend to capture heterogeneity in respondent's perspectives on the union by recruiting elective members of the union and non-members, across gender lines, race/ethnicity, age and professional experience, as well as urban and suburban contexts. They will take a sequential interviewing approach to data collection with the idea that each interview provides an increasingly greater understanding of the research topic. The primary goal is to identify the underlying mechanisms that contribute to fostering union membership and understand the motivations that shape the dynamics of anti-unionism. The secondary goal is to expand research on how union leaderships' approaches to membership outreach, publicity, and political decisions impact teachers' perceptions and participation in unions. Bosworth and Lanser’s results will have broader implications for understanding the social consequences of voluntary membership on union strength and collective action.
