For Milton Pincus, the decision to call off the November 7th strike in return for Mayor Robert Wagner’s promise of a fact-finding committee loaded with the leading lights of the city’s labor movement, was a no-brainer. From where he stood — outside...

This award-winning series of articles by Jack Schierenbeck originally appeared in the New York Teacher in 1996 and 1997.

Nat Levine will never forget the time his principal made the mistake of tangling with a young union organizer.

Within months of the end of World War II the country was convulsed in the greatest wave of strikes in its history, before or since. With the memory of the Great Depression still fresh in their minds, many workers saw the huge post-war layoffs as a...

The Big Bang theory may be right about the origin of the universe, but it isn’t much help when it comes to explaining the making of a union. Like other unions, the UFT didn’t just explode onto the scene in 1960.

Ever the agent provocateur, Al Shanker reminded the large UFT Teacher Union Day audience last fall that in the 1950s there was no shortage of naysayers who said teachers would never get their act together: “Can teachers ever be organized? Well, no...

The UFT turns 36 this year [1996]. As unions go, that makes us a fairly new kid on the block. But the reality is that our labor roots stretch back to 1916 and that most of our founding mothers and fathers have either retired or passed on. Even those...

Fifty years have passed since the UFT was first founded and secured collective-bargaining rights for New York City’s public school educators. Speaking with a single voice for members, parents and children, the UFT quickly became a true champion of...

Sensing in the civil rights movement a natural ally with shared goals and values, the early leaders of the UFT and its predecessor, the Teachers Guild, threw their support behind the movement and its objectives of racial equality and individual dignity, and forged a strong alliance with black leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. UFT President Al Shanker encouraged New York City schoolteachers to attend the 1964 March for Jobs and Freedom co-organized by Rustin, and the union subsidized travel to the march for participating UFT members.

All photos courtesy: UFT Photo Collection, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University

Like a lot of other very talented people Bill Woolfson got into teaching because the alternative was the unemployment line. When Woolfson walked into Boys HS in 1937 he was already 34 years old.