Organizing a millionaire's tax
I went to an amazing workshop on radical pedagogy at Yale a few weekends ago. It featured a mixture of discussion, report backs, and analysis of the present moment from a broadly educational perspective. All the presentations were outstanding, but one in particular stood out to me as being perfect for this newsletter. Eve Weinbaum from the University of Massachusetts's Labor Center gave a report back on the organizing history behind Massachusetts' recent millionaire's tax.
The policy itself is a 4% tax on individual yearly income over one million dollars and redistributes $2 billion more a year for education and public transportation across the state. There's plenty of coverage on the tax itself. Lots of the things that come up when you search for it are pages for law firms and wealth management websites telling rich people what to expect now that they'll be taxed at this rate--and plenty of fun pearl-clutching from the ruling class.
While you can get basic information from the headlines and some technical details from the analyses, what you don't get is the story of how public educators and organizers across the state fought bitterly for twenty years to win this redistributive tax. Here I'll tell a condensed version of that story based on Eve's presentation (I asked her permission to do this).
Merging departments, closing programs
The story starts in the early 2000s. Massachusetts had a string of conservative governors (most famously Mitt Romney) who at various points pursued austerity agendas for public programs, like the university system. UMASS faculty and staff faced a wave of this austerity at the time, notably threatening the existence of the Labor Center, cutting certain programs, and merging departments like languages and literature.
In the face of those cuts and mergers and threats, Eve and other colleagues at UMASS-Amherst got together and agreed something had to change. Being labor organizers they wondered why their union didn't do much about these kinds of cuts. They thought to themselves, why not take over the local chapter? They got their own folks elected to leadership under the banner of a caucus called Educators for a Democratic Union and started watching the old sclerotic Massachusetts Teachers Union gears grate and grind.
As a professor at a public university that's currently undergoing cuts and mergers, I can relate. You see the changes happening around you, and while many feel the pressure and bad outcomes of this, they don't look up and look around and ask what exactly to do about it. I can also relate to being a part of a higher education union that moves a little slowly.
The original purpose of their taking over their local chapter of the MTA at UMASS-Amherst was to respond to the cuts, which of course were cuts in funding. The problem as always came down to money. Where did the money come from and how could they get more of it to prevent the cuts? And would the union be able to do anything about it? Their answer was to tax the rich.
Flat
Until the millionaire's tax passed, Massachusetts had a flat tax written into the state constitution. A flat tax is when every resident of the state pays the same percentage of taxes, rather than a tiered income where the rich pay their fair share. Pennsylvania has a similar policy in our constitution called the uniformity clause.
It's really annoying because, as I mentioned, you can't tax different stuff in the same category differently. If there are richer people, you can't tax them more because you have to tax all people uniformly, or flatly. In Pennsylvania, the uniformity clause also means we can't tax commercial property differently than residential property because it's all property, so huge facilities run by corporations with a lot of money don't pay higher rates.
The important strategic point here is that getting a millionaire's tax in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania not only requires legislative victory. You don't have to just pass a law. Since the flat tax and uniformity clauses are written into the constitution itself, you actually have to amend the state constitution to tax the rich. In Massachusetts amending the constitution requires a two-part process including a ballot initiative as well as a two-part legislative assembly where representatives in the state government form a constitutional convention and vote to make the change.
Changing the constitution is different than changing laws, so the battle the little band of unionists faced was daunting. But it didn't stop them. They took a step-by-step approach, scaling up, getting lucky, fighting and winning smaller battles, maneuvering internally, and finally taking on the big fight and winning.
The caucus strategy
A group of faculty in the Massachusetts Society of Professors (MSP), the UMASS-Amherst local of the huge teachers union in Massachusetts, the MTA, got together to take on the funding problem. Union organizers interested in taxing the rich to generate more money for public education in the state had to get in the driver's seat of the whole union, not just the part of the union covering public higher education. While doing more organizing, a parallel effort to organize the whole union into a more fighting stance to take on the rich emerged in the Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU).
The EDU is a progressive caucus within the MTA. Typically, the left struggle in unions to develop these kinds of formations in the union with the goal of changing the union's leadership, to ultimately get the union to do stuff for the members that existing, conservative, and business union leadership won't do.
I can't write a proper history of EDU here, nor do I really want to try. What's important is that there was a relationship between MSP and EDU and the connection was oriented towards getting into the MTA's driver seat. But the sprawling bureaucracy was intimidating to say the least. One common method to build up a caucus's power is to run candidates for leadership, whether individuals for top positions or slates of candidates for every position. The election creates an opportunity to clearly articulate your program, have conversations with rank and file members, and make a concrete ask: vote for us.
MSPand EDU wanted to get the union to fight for more money for public higher education. They needed to build up their strength to eventually get their candidates into those positions. So Eve and her fellow organizers thought about who they could run for a top leadership position to create some consciousness and take a first step towards winning places in the union the leadership. They wondered: who could we run for a long-shot presidential run?
They knew they wouldn't win. The point would be to articulate their position, get their ideas out there, and start the long process of eventually winning. Someone popped up on their radar: Barbara Madeloni.
Enter Barbara
When I was a graduate student at Teachers College, Columbia University in the 2010s, one of the controversial issues we organized around was to stop TC from supporting the privatization of teacher certification. At the time, the education conglomerate Pearson had developed something called edTPA, a service it could offer colleges of education to certify its teachers as public school teachers. Traditionally, state governments developed their own programs for certification rather than private firms. But neoliberalism was in full tilt and Pearson was making moves to grab the certification process.
So when we heard the story of Barbara Madeloni at UMASS-Amherst, we were in awe. Madeloni was a former high school teacher--who, it turns out, had been fired from a teaching gig in the early 2000s for her outspoken lessons against the Iraq war--responsible for teaching teachers. In 2012, she was part of an effort, led by student teachers working towards certification, to reject UMASS-Amherst's use of edTPA. She made national headlines when the students refused to take the assessment on principled grounds and was fired.
MSP and EDU saw these headlines and thought maybe Madeloni would be their long-shot candidate. Madeloni agreed. They all knew what they were in for: a zig-zag slog across the state, visits to towns and boards of education and union chapters, talking about making the MTA a democratic union, a fighting union. Madeloni would be the first step and hopefully at some point they'd win leadership two or three or four election cycles later.
But they won! In a huge upset, Madeloni beat the anointed candidate. It was the first time in decades that the sitting vice president of the union didn't succeed the president. It was a big win. But it was a mixed victory since the EDU hadn't won other leadership races, leaving Madeloni alone at the top. I've heard from Barbara about this situation since and it sounds extremely tense and difficult.
But the organizers kept going. They kept their eyes on the prize: fighting for more money. But before they could get the millionaire's tax they had to protect public schools' existing resources from an incursion by charter school operators. Madeloni showed her prowess as a leader in adverse circumstances by heading up the opposition to Ballot Measure 2 in 2016, which would have increased the number of charter schools in the state.
The MTA came out staunchly against this measure and beat the odds, defeating the measure, creating a glimmer of light in an otherwise dark landscape on election day in 2016. During this process, EDU did more organizing to shore up support across the state. Finally, they were in a position to go for the millionaire's tax.
Struck down
They put together their proposal for the millionaire's tax, calling it the Fair Share Amendment. Apparently, the MTA leadership spent tons of money on polls to make sure there was support for such an initiative. But these expensive polls kept coming back positive (EDU kept telling them it was popular but they didn't listen). So in 2019, they took their shot under the banner of Raise Up Massachusetts.
After getting tons and tons of signatures, the state supreme court struck down the ballot initiative. The judges said the initiative was illegal because of a policy on the books stating that such initiatives can only be about one single issue rather than multiple related issues. They determined in their legal wisdom that the Fair Share Amendment actually was about two issues: taxing and spending. Organizers had made sure that the amendment they proposed would go to public infrastructure like schools and transportation. But a ballot initiative can't both make demands about taxing (millionaire's tax) and spending (on public stuff).
Sigh. But as the Worcester legislator who'd proposed the amendment said at the time, "this gets us on the right path." They knew what to do next.
A second way
The other way to amend the Massachusetts constitution started with a legislative process where the legislature itself writes the amendment. Then a majority of lawmakers had to pass the amendment in two consecutive sessions. That means that the House and Senate have to vote for the proposal twice. Importantly, the Supreme Judicial Court could not rule the ballot initiative illegal if it came from the legislature itself.
So the organizers all got working again. They had a huge coalition behind the first tax that failed so they leveraged that strategic infrastructure towards the legislative path. They got their first up vote in the house in 2019 and then they got the other one. Technically, this second path through the legislative assembly approves another ballot initiative. The legislators approved the new ballot measure, that went up for a vote at the end of last year in 2022 after a bitter fight against Massachusetts' ruling class who didn't want to pay more taxes for public education and transportation. It was a squeaker: 52.3% of voters approved the measure.
From the classroom to the constitution
In her presentation, Eve emphasized throughout the constant pressures and tensions both within the union with more conservative unionists and between the union and the ruling class throughout Massachusetts. The former was against taking on the latter and the latter was against anything that would take their money away. Despite these challenges, the band of union organizers forged ahead, "doing the work" of power analysis, campaign strategy, and the gruntwork of thousands of conversations, spreadsheets, emails, and meetings. And they prevailed.
What was novel to me in her presentation was the arc of the story. She started it in the classrooms of UMASS-Amherst, with the immediate impacts of austerity in the departments and programs at her university. The discontent born from that experience galvanized a small group that snowballed itself into larger and larger formations, keeping the eventual target in mind and jostling over the various vicissitudes of the Massachusetts balance of force until the formation was big enough, strong enough, and well-formed enough to take on its original target successfully.
You don't get many stories like this in school finance organizing, not to mention social justice union organizing. But they're out there. Recounting them in terms of organizing highlights the uneven dialectic in which we're all working and the stop-start ways that victories can eventuate with enough focus, commitment, energy, will, agency, and luck.