Associate Prof. Jon Shelton is in the news again, this time in The Washington Post story, “Teacher strikes made 2018 the biggest year for worker protest in a generation.” “It’s a return to prominence for a profession that took the lead in the late 1960s and ‘70s, when educators fought for basic bargaining rights and, later, against budget cuts stemming from an economic downturn,” said Shelton … author of “Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order.”
He ranked the 2018 strikes among the most important labor victories in more than a century. “Perhaps the only time in history we’ve seen things of quite that magnitude was in the late nineteenth century when you had spontaneous revolts of working-class people,” Shelton said.