Learning from a progressive labor victory in DC

An interview with Laura Fuchs, recently elected president of the Washington Teachers Union

This past June, the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) held its union elections. Laura Fuchs beat the incumbent to become the new president of the WTU. I recently interviewed Laura about the steps she took to win in order to add to the literature about social justice caucus members winning union leadership elections, including the many books (such as Labor Notes (2014) How to jump-start your union: Lessons from the Chicago teachers) and articles written about the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).

Social justice caucuses are composed of union members who believe the union must be democratic, transparent, and committed to social justice causes. This stands in stark contrast to the political reality in the United States, which undermines democracy, justice, and empathy (see Lois’s contribution). For example, the 2025 CTU contract put in protections against Trump’s policies, including “revers[ing] the privatization of key positions like tech coordinators and nurses while vastly improving staffing for librarians, case managers for students with disabilities, and teachers who support English Language Learners. And for the first time, it includes protections for academic freedom, Black history, and culturally relevant curriculum. It calls for the continuation of Sanctuary Schools, and creates LGBTQIA+ safe spaces in schools.” Right now, unions need social justice educators more than ever.

Laura is one of the founding members of the DC Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (DC-CORE), the social justice caucus of the WTU and the only caucus within the union. While Laura did not run as DC-CORE, she had the support of the caucus, and many members of her slate are caucus members. Laura ran on a slate called Educators Taking Action (ETA) whose platform includes member engagement to “ensure that members are getting the information they need to take action and opportunities to provide regular feedback” and transparency to “give all [members] an opportunity to evaluate what’s working and what’s not.” ETA also supports open negotiations, making bold demands through organized collective action, and social justice causes that support school communities. The WTU is one of the most powerful unions in Washington, DC; the nation’s capital and an easy target for Trump and his MAGA followers as DC doesn’t have representation beyond local politics. Laura won in DC “in the mouth of the dragon” offering the possibility of hope in these extremely demoralizing times (see Keith’s contribution).

Laura has been a social studies teacher for 18 years in Washington, DC at HD Woodson High School. In her second year of teaching, she started getting involved in the union through building level committees that were mainly focused on the budget because her HS saw massive budget cuts, 10 to 20% at a time, for multiple years in a row. Laura also started going to DC Council hearings, community meetings, and community education council meetings to better understand the budget. As she learned more about the financial inequities in DC Public Schools, she began testifying frequently at DC Council hearings about budget issues. In 2014, the then President of the WTU asked Laura to restart the WTU’s Committee on Political Education (COPE) committee and make it more democratic. Laura and the WTU president had similar politics and worked together on making the union stronger. Laura read Labor Notes’ (2014) How to jump-start your union: Lessons from the Chicago teachers, went to Labor Notes that summer, and began to report frequently to the WTU board while building COPE into a democratic decision-making space in which the union’s Representative Assembly would have the final say in the union’s political decisions. For the next three years, Laura also became a member at-large for High Schools for the WTU and then the union Secretary for the next six years. Laura has been a part of the WTU’s leadership team for the past 9 years. Laura believes in the importance of democratic processes within the union and is passionate in her role in organizing and advocating for members' rights.

Some questions this interview addresses: Why and When should you form a caucus? Why, When, and How should you run for union elections?

Chloe

When in that [experience in WTU] did you decide that DC-CORE was necessary?

Laura F

We tried to form a caucus more than once, and we were kind of building one pre-COVID that was going to be CORE aligned. But people were still hedging and weren't entirely convinced it was necessary. I was, but a lot of people were still like we still haven't tried to work with [the WTU president]. Like, okay, this doesn't have to be anti- [WTU president], but I also understood, like, we hadn't done something like this [before] in the WTU, and so we knew it would be viewed that way whether or not that was the intent. We'd kind of gotten a team of about 10 people together that, you know, agreed that we'd move [the caucus] forward. So then, of course, the pandemic happens, and we pivot all that energy into basically an organizing committee in the WTU. So we were running it with all the people trying to form the caucus. We would hold meetings and do actions, but it was under the WTU banner. But that's what people wanted. We decided we dropped the caucus thing for now. We knew we had a very big COVID fight on our hands.

Chloe

You got a huge amount of people to show up to those COVID meetings?

Laura F

Yeah, no, there'd be like 40 people in like a committee meeting, and then we kind of just broke into groups people plan the actions they wanted to do. We really just tried to run interference as much as possible, like protect the members from any anger from leadership that was coming out of the work we were doing [when WTU leadership didn’t like one of the actions members planned]. …And our goal was to get members to do the actions they wanted to do, and support them, and then we were just going to protect them in that and protect [the WTU president] and the union, because she's the face of the union at the time. Like, so she then made a mistake. She came to a committee meeting, and she really kind of showed her hand. There weren’t a ton of people at that one, probably like 12 or 13. A lot of them were the people who'd been working on forming CORE, who'd been, you know, integral to pretty much all these actions. They had been front and center, doing a ton of work for the union, and essentially [the WTU president] said that we were doing more harm than good, and that we were harming the negotiations process, and that, you know, that we needed to back down and stop planning all these actions. And oddly enough, members didn't take that well, and that's kind of when CORE got back off the ground. Members finally saw behind the curtain. Saw that this, you know, we were essentially being told no. … We can, you know, compromise on things, but it's not for [the union president] to say what a member can or cannot do, and so that's when I think that core group of people decided we're going to need to form the caucus. We still weren't going to, like, we didn't want that to become a story when we had other things we needed to make sure the media was focusing on like all of our work around COVID protections, so we still weren't going to launch. But the work to building the caucus to getting everything we thought we would need to be ready, like really, you know, people started digging in and spending more time on that as well. Then the sick out vote round one was very successful, and we got a lot more people involved as we were doing that work. I think more people started to see that the union was obstructing their movement towards greater and greater action, because it'd be those big meetings, and it was just very clear that, you know, [union leadership] were using delay tactics and making us vote and re-vote and vote again.

Chloe

And this was the sick out because it wasn't safe to go back to work?

Laura F

Right. This was when the mayor was trying to bring elementary educators back to the classroom, like, right before Thanksgiving. We knew now that we were going to get the vaccine, like, starting December-ish, but [the mayor was] sending a group back to the classroom right before we're about to get these [vaccines], you know, and then back to our homes before anyone is vaccinated. Like, it just made no logical sense why they would try it at that moment when we had a plan that basically would get us back in the classroom late January, which is the beginning of the new semester, right? Like a natural starting point, and that [teachers] were largely agreeing, if they had the vaccine, they, you know, would do some type of going back. Not everyone loved that, of course, but there was at least more consensus that this was acceptable, and that people who still couldn't for various reasons, could still opt out. And it wasn't gonna be every day. So we had that sick out that was successful. And I think, you know, people were feeling good about that. We tried for another one in January, just to buy us a couple more weeks till the vaccine was supposed to take full effect. That one got thwarted, and that's when just about everyone on the WTU organizing committee quit. And that was officially when DC-CORE launched.

Chloe

So it is really was like [the Labor Notes training] when the union breaks your heart.

Laura F

Exactly, they thwarted our second vote. I think a lot of messaging had become very clear that what we were doing was unwanted by leadership, and that they were going to use their official channels to shut us down, and so we needed to move outside of that system.

Chloe

And so then DC-CORE forms.

Laura F

It's that summer. We still waited.

Chloe

2021 or 2020?

Laura F

I'd say yes 2021.

Chloe

Was the caucus super active with continuing COVID events that put it on the map? Or was it mostly focused on internal union politics?

Laura F

We were mostly still pretty hyper focused on COVID and just trying to ensure mitigation methods were still being used, that that kind of stuff was getting followed… We had motions that we were making and bringing to representative assembly meetings …

Chloe

And at what point did you decide you wanted to run? Or had you had that in the back of your mind for a while already?

Laura F

Three years ago. I mean people have asked me to run for a long time.

Chloe

You think because of your work with COPE and COVID activism?

Laura F

I was very known on the political side for just being extremely to the point. All the politicians, and they all know it, and I was very prolific on Twitter. And back when the Twitter algorithm wasn't completely awful, I actually got quite a bit of play. [Laura received an award from the Metro Labor Council for her political activism defending unions].

Chloe

So you were known enough with the focus of your political work and Twitter and so then people were asking you to run, but you didn't.

Laura F

Three years prior [2022], we talked a bit about it … I didn't do it the three years prior in part because we hadn't started early enough, in my opinion. I didn't want to win another low turnout election. You know, this [election] wasn't a ton better, but it was better. And I knew I wanted to use the campaign to try to do what we always talk about with being the union we wanted to see the best we can. I wanted to then demonstrate what a campaign should be if you're taking it seriously and are trying to really be about building the union and not just winning an election…

Chloe

So you waited.

Laura F

Yeah, I mean a group of people decided to run as the Unity slate, many of them were DC-CORE members. I just wanted to experiment a little bit, so I decided to run as an Independent candidate, just to see if it was even possible to win anything in that column.

Chloe

So then this time around, when you decided to run, what are the different things that you did?

Laura F

So I started a year and a half in advance. My first meeting with people who I thought possibly might want to be on the slate, or at least be very involved, was in December of 2023. Let's begin talking about what we're trying to do, and just kind of the overall vision, and to begin to get to know each other and hear from each other. There's really good people in this union. We need to get to work building a slate and building a vision. I started working with a long time organizer who does like kind of consulting type work around power building, and so started working with her to get the goal to make sure that while, yes, I was going to do a lot of the campaign managing and building the slate and all those things, it shouldn't just be about my ideas and what I want. It should be about, you know, the team and our vision together. So I wanted a neutral party to kind of run that process of setting our platform. And so we worked with her to interview the members, find our commonalities, and then in September 2024 we all met and had our big vision planning session led by [the organizer] to come up with our platform. And essentially, kind of map out a general strategic three year plan that obviously would need to be greatly filled in with a lot more detail, but you know, say, here's where we are, here's where we want to be, and here's why we're running. I've been involved in politics a long time, so I just treated it, frankly, like a DC Council race, as far as I was concerned, obviously on a very baby scale. But I was gonna use the political tools that people use: sending out lots of emails, having a database, building a website that's member forward, having your ground game so gathering volunteers, identifying them by school, beginning to build up our membership database. I think what I could have done better was really trying to get the volunteers in place sooner. I kind of struggle with how much to try to ask of members when they're in the middle of also trying to do their jobs. So we waited till the spring to really start trying to push like, hey, we want you to do this, we want you to do that. And that probably is waiting a little late. So, in the future, probably try to get that going more quickly. Especially the last couple of weeks, we really pushed the need to have to go door to door, just talk to the members in your school, make sure they got their ballot. And even though it wasn't, maybe to the level I'd hoped, I do think that can really be credited with that final big jump in turnout. People really just went to their members to make sure they've gotten their ballot and cast their vote fully, helped them out. And I think it just really energized the schools that did it, and I know it wasn't all of them, but like, it was more than just the people running. Probably had about 40 to 50 schools reporting like a decent amount of data.

Chloe

And you also did a lot of listening sessions.

Laura F

That’s true too. We did a lot, which is great. And I had an open kind of one-to-one call set up for people who didn't want to talk in these small groups. Also I visited schools pretty regularly right after school. I went to a lot of different schools. We had a few happy hours. Those were not super high attendance, but it was nice just to be in a different space. We tried to just give people a lot of different modalities to be in touch; really encouraged a lot of communication. And then our big thing was, I mean, in terms of our only kind of campaign discipline, was that we weren't going to be negative about the past. It was about focusing on the future, on our vision, on our beliefs, on why we're running, and just really try to keep things positive. I mean our goal is to build up people wanting to be involved, and we know negativity, especially for those who aren't deep in it, it's not going to make them want to be so it's really just trying to vision for the future, like what is possible, trying to get in front of as many people as we could. I think our union has a communication problem. So we too struggle with trying to figure out, how do you get in front of a member who doesn't want to read their email? Which is fine, no criticism on that. I get it. I don't read all the campaign emails I get, including from campaigns I like, I get it. It's like, trying to figure out, well, how do you reach this person that you know is there? You know, they care about what's going on in their workplace, but they don't see the union as a viable path. And I do think we got in front of many. There are a lot of people who communicated this was the first time they'd ever voted in a union election, and they've been in the union a long time. But I know we got a ways to go. We’ve got to rebuild all that trust, but I do think we set ourselves up for a pretty positive start by staying positive, and we're just going to try to keep that momentum.

Chloe

Did DC-CORE play a role in your elections?

Laura F

I think the caucus was integral because it's just been a place where I could demonstrate my leadership, where others could demonstrate theirs, where we get to find out we have these things in common. I met a lot of the people who are now on the slate, through CORE, through that organizing work and just figuring out what works and what doesn't. Learning, of course, from UCORE (United Caucus of Rank and File Educators- a nationwide network of social justice caucuses). It has been integral to everything, and I hope it'll be integral for others. Also, hold me accountable to just learn how to be a leader and a different space moving forward.

It is the current political moment that makes Laura and the ETA slate’s victory important. As president, Laura wants to rebuild trust and engagement with the WTU membership. She aims to professionalize the WTU's membership and representative assembly, providing training and support to empower members as decision-makers. She will decentralize leadership and give more authority to area vice presidents and committees to hold listening sessions and bring motions forward. She believes that the representative assembly should be the decision-making body of the WTU. In the midst of the chaos of US politics in July 2025, we need to pay attention to what happens next in the WTU.

Some questions for future consideration:

What is the role of a social justice caucus when progressive leadership wins?

How will DC-CORE hold Laura and the ETA slate accountable to their vision and their goals for the WTU?

How does a social justice caucus remain active after the caucus or a majority of the caucus members become union leadership?

How will Laura and the ETA slate navigate a progressive teachers union in DC during the Trump administration?