What Nurses and Teachers Won by Withholding Their “Feminized Labor”
“When you think about gender perspectives, being a teacher or being a nurse, what they hope is that we care so much about our charges or our patients that we’re willing to accept the bare minimum.”
by AMIE STAGER
At the intensive care unit at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, nurse Kelley Anaas has cared for a lot of people who have gotten sick with Covid-19 during the pandemic.
“I took care of plenty of people who got sick at their work,” said Anaas, who has been a nurse for 14 years and is a steward with the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA). “I remember taking care of a woman five years older than me, who didn’t make it, who got her job working in a liquor store. Her family’s not gonna get a dime for the sacrifice she made and the choice she didn’t have. I saw the ramifications of that in a much more real way than, you know, lawmakers.”
The surge of collective actions by workers in 2022 indicates momentum in the labor movement. Much of this resurgence has been led by workers on the front lines of the pandemic, who have been most at risk when it comes to health and safety.
Of the hundreds of strikes that began last year, two historic ones occurred in Minnesota, where teachers and nurses withheld their labor to demand better working conditions, hold their employers accountable, and stand up against greed. It is no surprise that workers in teaching and nursing, feminized professions tasked with running institutions on which communities depend, have been militantly raising their voices and risking their jobs to alert their communities to the problems they are facing.
Jobs typically associated with women are considered to be “feminized labor.” Of course, not all teachers and nurses are women, but all workers in these professions still perform labor that’s devalued, because “women’s work” has historically not been rewarded and recognized in the way male-dominated work has. It’s not exactly blue-collar or white-collar work, but a third category often referred to as pink-collar work, a term coined by social critic Louise Kapp Howe.
“Many presume the skills women have in occupations like teaching or childcare work or nursing are innate and that women are naturally good at caring for people,” University of Vermont economics professor Stephanie Seguino told The 19th. “Therefore, there’s a sense that we don’t really need to compensate for that. So, it’s gender stereotyping that really holds down wages.”
Teachers and community members rallied at the Minnesota state capitol on March 9, 2022. A DFL trifecta in the Minnesota state legislature is looking to pass education legislation this year utilizing a $17.6 billion surplus. Photos by Amie Stager.
When women, who make up the majority of essential workers, belong to a union, they see improved wages and health benefits, and are more likely to work in safer and healthier environments. According to the National Women’s Law Center, women are 77.2% of the workforce in the education and health services sector, which saw union membership increase by 6.3% between 2000 and 2020.
Workers in both healthcare and public education are essential, yet they’re being pushed out of their jobs by burnout, poor pay and conditions, and political attacks. However, tight labor market conditions, alongside public support, can give workers more power at the bargaining table. Workday Magazine spoke with one teacher and one nurse, who both went on strike this past year, about the struggles they’ve been facing as frontline, feminized workers during one of the bleakest times in history.
Teachers come prepared
“The groundwork for our historic strike had been laid by our leadership and membership in previous years getting more organized and mobilized,” said Marcia Howard, who has been an English teacher at Roosevelt High School for 24 years and is also the first vice president of Minneapolis Federations of Teachers Local 59 (MFT 59). “Because we are such a feminized profession, I believed that we would also be complacent, that we wouldn’t have the chutzpah to stand for ourselves. But something happened on the way to the strike—Minneapolis rose up in defense of Black lives.”
In March, around 3,500 teachers with the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers went on a 14-day strike over the span of three weeks (teachers in St. Paul with the St. Paul Federation of Educators Local 28 also voted to strike but were able to reach a deal with their district). This was the first walkout in Minnesota since teachers went on strike illegally in 1970. It also followed the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, which inspired the largest political demonstrations in global history. By the time it came to the teachers’ strike, working people had already been practicing standing up for their community.
A sea of protestors donning blue hats and jackets moved through North Minneapolis on March 8, 2022.
Public sector workers are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), so whether or not they have the right to organize, bargain, or strike is determined by the law in their state. Public sector workers in some states do not have these basic protections. After teachers in Minnesota went on strike illegally in 1970, the state passed the Minnesota Public Employment Labor Relations Act (PELRA), providing the right to bargain and strike for public workers in the state (though, to this day, certain workers deemed “essential employees” do not have the right to strike). In public education across the United States, women make up 76% of school teachers, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics in 2018.
Forced to flee the workforce
Labor journalist Sarah Jaffe wrote in Rethinking Schools that the right has targeted teachers for urging the closing of schools during a deadly pandemic, and for teaching racial justice and sex education, and this has created a “pressure cooker” for teachers.
The Economic Policy Institute, a pro-union research organization, reports that the teacher shortage has only worsened since the pandemic, not because there is a lack of qualified teachers, but because the job offers low pay when compared to other professions requiring college degrees, and the work environments are stressful.
The system is breaking teachers faster than they can replace them, according to former Twin Cities teacher Katie Niemczyk, who was a teacher for 11 years before leaving the industry during the pandemic.
“It’s not an outlandish conspiracy theory,” Howard said of right-wing campaigns against teachers. “This capitalist society would find a way to squeeze every dime out and make public money go in private pockets. There are people making decisions that anybody from the outside would say it’s like they want people to flee the district.”
A disproportionate number of women left the workforce to care for family and children during the pandemic (child care and home care are also frontline and feminized industries in crisis). Gender roles are changing, but women are still largely made responsible for the health and wellbeing of our families and communities, through paid and unpaid labor and care.
The strikes by teachers and nurses also occurred during a time when the right to reproductive freedom and access to abortion has been under attack across the United States and denied by the Supreme Court, negatively affecting worsening economic situations brought on by the pandemic. And while more and more women are being represented as leadership in institutions such as elected offices, corporations, and unions, gender bias and inequality across the globe is pervasive. Having women in positions of power does not necessarily improve material conditions for all women.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Howard taught from her front porch. “It was during that time, when on May 25 of 2020, within 253 steps of my front door, George Floyd was lynched. It was filmed by a former student of mine, and my life dramatically changed,” she said. Howard took the next year off in a leave of absence. She’s been a leader at George Floyd Square, where the intersection of 38th and Chicago is still occupied in protest since Floyd’s murder, more than two and a half years later.
Weeks before the strike began, teachers rallied on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. day in 2022 in front of the U.S. Bank Stadium, where Howard addressed the crowd: “Minneapolis has been the epicenter of a global social justice movement and what we have discovered is how interconnected all of it is.”
A world on fire
The last movie Howard showed in class in 2020 was Contagion. “When it became just me and a computer, and disembodied voices, with an icon of their initials, I had to reach back into my bag of skills. How do I get their attention? How do I keep it? How do I make sense?” said Howard. “In a world that seemed to have gone bad, the very first thing that I had to convey to them is that we were in a time outside of time. Between March and May 25, we have a pandemic, after May 25, our world is on fire. My job was to be their teacher, which meant I would turn on Google Classroom and keep it on all day, and make sure that they knew that they have somebody there, while my neighbor has had four of her family members die of covid.”
She returned to the classroom in the fall of 2021 after the teachers’ contract expired in July, and then her union went on strike in March 2022. Demands included raises for education support professionals (ESPs), recruitment and retention of teachers of color, and more mental health support for students.
The teachers knew ESPs, who are predominantly people of color, were receiving poverty wages and often had to work multiple jobs to survive. Howard said she would leave work, go to the grocery store, and see an ESP she worked with during the day working behind the counter.
After striking for three weeks in the Minnesota cold, teachers won raises for ESPs. They also won contract language prioritizing teachers of color over seniority in the event of a layoff, which Howard and MFT 59 president Greta Callahan defended on Good Morning America in response to criticism by conservative local media.
Mitchell Hamline University law professor and Bureau of Mediation Services arbitrator Joseph Daly told the Minnesota Reformer that the protections for teachers from underrepresented communities represents “landmark language” in collective bargaining.
Howard said that to be Black in education is to see the ways her identity is punitively used when teachers and students fail.
“You can bring up Black people and say they’re being failed by public education, or they are inherently failures, for anything you need it to be. It’s pliable,” she said. “Anyone who’s a teacher, the first thing you want to do is self-reflect. Any teacher can think about the ways in which they could have been better, the ways in which they could have changed the curriculum to reach every kid.”
Many students supported the teachers during the strike and walked picket lines, and their parents cooked food for the striking teachers. “I believe that our district did not expect us to get that breadth of support,” said Howard. “That gave us leverage in negotiation, because we knew that they could not bludgeon us with, ‘parents are upset that you’re on the line’.”
What is collective good?
According to the Gender Policy Report by the University of Minnesota’s Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy, worker-led actions are vital for improving the economic situations for those in public service. But when teachers and nurses go on strike, they can be criticized for harming students and patients. One of the main reasons for the strikes this year was to bring attention to working conditions that make it difficult and sometimes impossible for workers to do their jobs safely and efficiently, which hurts students and patients.