National Education Association cancels annual convention and locks out striking employees

Last Friday, the National Education Association (NEA) canceled its annual convention scheduled for July 4-7 in Philadelphia after just one official day. The closure of the Representative Assembly (RA) was in response to a strike by the union representing NEA employees, the National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO).

NEA workers at the union’s Washington headquarters had planned a three-day strike for the convention and greeted delegates arriving at the Philadelphia Convention Center with picket lines. NEASO’s contract expired on June 30, and the employees’ union staged the strike as a measure against unfair labor practices.

The NEA told media it had decided to end the RA, which would cost $12 million, because delegates would not break staff picket lines. It said the main topic of the convention – New Business Items (NBIs), which are submitted by local organizations and require at least 50 supporters each – would not be debated but voted on an undisclosed date. Voting would take place online.

The abrupt closure of the RA meant the cancellation of a scheduled speech by President Joe Biden’s keynote speaker. After his disastrous performance at the June 27 debate, Biden had decided to speak at the convention instead of the previously scheduled speaker, his wife Jill, hoping that a friendly working-class crowd would help his flagging campaign. Biden, who famously banned a railroad workers’ strike in 2022, declared he would not break a picket line. Instead, he spoke to a much smaller crowd at a nearby church.

Members of Educators for Palestine and other antiwar educators had also gathered at the convention before the shutdown, urging union members to support pro-Palestinian NBIs. The chapters called for digital communication tools to “educate members about the Nakba” (the violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the U.S.-backed Zionist regime in 1947-48), the union should defend educators’ and students’ free speech “in defense of Palestine,” and the NEA should “hold a secret ballot to withdraw its support for President Joe Biden until he stops funding the Israeli military, denounces Israel’s war crimes, and brings about an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.”

The dissolution of the RA underscores that the country’s largest union, with nearly three million members, is in enormous crisis, as is Biden and the Democratic Party. It is also clear that the organizers of the event, which the union touted as “the largest democratic deliberative assembly in the world,” were not only hostile to actual democratic input from members, but fearful of it.

The NEASO strike was met with vindictive hostility by NEA decision-makers, even though most of the striking union members are union officials at the lower levels of the NEA apparatus. The NEA bureaucracy immediately cancelled the strikers’ return flights and accommodations and locked them out of pay and work indefinitely “until an agreement is reached.” The NEA also cut off health insurance benefits for employees, effective July 31.

NEASO has about 350 members and is made up mostly of lower-level bureaucrats and administrators, many of whom “assist in negotiations” or “perform analysis.” NEASO members earn an average of $124,000 a year, nearly triple the average teacher’s salary but far less than top-level union bureaucrats. Current NEA President Becky Pringle earned $495,787 in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, $64,000 more than the previous year.