In 1990, over 3,000 of 4,500 New Orleans public school teachers refused to enter their classrooms over a contract dispute with their employer, the Orleans Parish School Board. For three weeks, teachers picketed while the negotiating team for their union, The United Teachers of New Orleans, worked to reach a contract agreement. Using interviews with striking teachers and union leaders, this paper aims to tell this story from their perspective. The interviews shed light on the ways that minorities and women used UTNO, with the incorporated ideologies and strategies of civil rights and feminism, as a platform to combat economic, political, and social inequalities in New Orleans at the end of the 20th century. An analysis of this strike also aims to complicate the current historiography of the union—filling the gap between its activism in the 1970s to its near dismantling after Hurricane Katrina.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uno.edu/oai:scholarworks.uno.edu:td-3271 |
| Date | 13 May 2016 |
| Creators | Long, Emma |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UNO |
| Source Sets | University of New Orleans |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations |
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