While the National Education Association is used to being behind teacher strikes across the country, it has been gripped by the effects of a strike from its own staff for nearly two weeks as labor negotiations unfold.
The NEA locked out its professional staff, represented by their own union called the National Education Association Staff Organization, beginning on Monday, and employees at the union’s Washington, D.C., headquarters demonstrated outside.
The beginning of the strike that preceded the staff lockout at the nation’s largest teachers union disrupted the organization’s national conference and forced President Joe Biden to cancel a planned speech there earlier this month.
The intraunion strike comes just a few months before the election, and teachers’ unions, often more noteworthy for their outsize power in Democratic politics than actual education advocacy, are facing down a Republican Party that has in recent…
