Mobilizing Teachers by Christopher Chambers-Ju explores teacher unions’ political action from a comparative and historical perspective. The book finds meaningful variation in the form that teacher unions engage with politics. Focusing on Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia, the book proposes that the internal organization of these unions shapes their political strategies regarding education reform and public policy more generally. In the final chapter, the author briefly discusses the cases of Chile, Peru, and Indonesia to underline potential similarities with the original cases, making the case for the argument’s ability to travel to other countries or even regions. The book should also be read as part of a new wave of labor studies, particularly linked to a perspective that underlines their effects on public policy, in Latin America.
The main takeaway of the book is that how a union is organized internally determines how it acts politically. Two structural features are signaled as essential in the book: the degree of hierarchical control within the union and the extent of internal factionalism. These factors, as the analysis proposes, influence whether unions choose to build relationships with political elites, focus on mass mobilization, or align with ideological movements. Interestingly, the book shows how these organizational factors are more salient than ideology for explaining political action, albeit ideology is a key part of the explanation alongside factionalism in the Colombian case. The book analyses the cases historically, which is also interesting for scholars working on issues like corporatism or the region-wide education reform period under the Washington Consensus. To this regard, the analysis of the Mexican and Argentinean cases builds into a traditional literature of the study of corporatism in the region, but adding the novel perspective of understanding how corporatism shaped teacher unions. The Argentinian case illustrates the effects of administrative, political, and fiscal decentralization in the 1990s.
The book is grounded in solid and extensive fieldwork, for which the author should be praised. The analysis is the result of interviews with key social and political actors and archival research based on press and official document research, in the best comparative historical tradition. This research is grounded in months of fieldwork, visits to schools, and talking to relevant actors. Chambers-Ju’s deep knowledge of the cases is learned from reading the empirical chapters.
In Mexico, Chambers-Ju analyzes the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), arguing that its highly centralized character enabled its leaders to strike pragmatic alliances with governments to advance the union goals regarding policy and salaries. Chambers-Ju argues that the form of political mobilization of the SNTE maintained a stable character over the years despite the changing political environment of the last four decades. Chambers-Ju refers to this pattern as instrumental politics. This is highly consistent with the non-competitive character of Mexican politics for most of the past century and again in recent years. Under instrumentalism, unions act as strategic partners to governments within formal power structures.
The Confederation of Education Workers of the Republic of Argentina (CTERA) stands as a contrasting case for the author. Differently from SNTE, CTERA developed a decentralized structure, with strong grassroots participation at the provincial level. In the overall mood of Argentinian politics since the mid-20th century, Chambers-Ju pictures this teacher union as historically mobilized and seeking to build broad-based support. This collective-action based strategy is labeled by the author as movement-oriented unionism. This grassroot strength, Chambers-Ju argues, has allowed CTERA to pressure governments from all political ideologies with independence, particularly in the last four decades, after democratic restoration.
In Colombia, the Federation of Colombian Educators (FECODE) organization is marked by competing factions, which helps maintain political activism but damages its efficacy. In reading the book, it is unavoidable to think of this organizational dynamic in parallel to how politics have evolved in the country since the mid-20th century. As observed above, in the Colombian case, which Chambers-Ju labels as leftist strategy, ideology—and factionalism—played a more salient role than in the previous two cases.
As stated previously, the book ends by broadening its scope to examine similar patterns in other countries: Chile, Peru, and Indonesia. This final empirical effort aims to suggest that the same organizational dynamics can be found across diverse contexts. While these are explicitly treated as shadow cases, Chambers-Ju makes an enviable effort to underline the parallelisms with the three main cases.
This comprehensive analysis makes the book a valuable resource for scholars studying the political economy of labor movements and their interactions with political actors and the state in comparative perspective. It can also be argued that the book may enlighten the thinking of present day policymakers. I think that the historical part of the analysis is also relevant as a secondary source for scholars working on how organizations—particularly those strongly linked to the public sector—evolve, how corporatism shaped labor in the past, or even how organizations react to changes in the administrative, fiscal, or political environments.
As with every good research piece, Chambers-Ju’s book opens new questions and points to some new avenues for future research. In this vein, I put forward some potential new research paths in the region inspired in this excellent book. First, teacher unions being historically strongly linked to the public sector, the relationship between the state and the unions is a salient cleavage of analysis that will enrich our understanding of the relationship between unions and parties or governments. The state is a source of resources, and being an employee in the public sector, as most teachers are, usually provides important benefits related to labor stability, which the literature has extensively analyzed in terms of the effects on their demands and levels of mobilization. Therefore, it is important for future research on this issue to explicitly unpack this factor in teacher unions’ organizational dynamics.
This line of inquiry may also enlighten questions like how the organization of the education system or the structure of political competition in a given country are relevant in shaping the two factors Chambers-Ju underline in the book as relevant causes for political mobilization, the degree of hierarchical control within the union and the extent of internal factionalism. Another dimension that merits future attention is how these teacher unions relate to the labor movement as a whole in terms of their relative power and influence. While the focus of the book is on comparing teacher unions across countries, future research on teacher unions should attempt to understand the relation between teacher unions and other unions in the tradable sectors as the latter may influence their overall effectiveness when mobilizing. We know from previous studies that the political interests of workers in the tradable and non-tradable sectors are not always aligned. Public workers do not confront a trade-off between wages and employment as private workers do in Latin America.
Overall, Mobilizing Teachers makes a novel contribution to the study of labor and politics, advancing our knowledge on an actor that has been highly relevant for education policy deliberation and also in budgetary debates. Chambers-Ju answers important and relevant questions at the time that opens other interesting doors for future research. Reading the book is stimulating to think forward on how to understand better labor unionism and political activism in the decades to come.
