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Teachers unions have long bargained for better pay and benefits. In recent years, though, some locals have expanded their advocacy to push for broader progressive causes — a strategy now widely known as common-good bargaining. This summer, the Chicago Tribune asked whether the approach could spread beyond that city, where the Chicago Teachers Union reform caucus pioneered the approach in 2012.

So far, common-good advocacy has been concentrated in big, Democratic cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. In a study of 772 teacher strikes between 2007 and 2023, researchers found that most job actions centered on pay and classroom issues, with just 1 in 10 featuring common-good demands on issues such as housing, immigration or social safety nets.

What would it take for suburban and rural locals to take these issues on in contract talks? Part of the answer may lie in whether unions believe that doing so will help them win over the public.

To better understand public opinion, I embedded a survey experiment in the 2024 Cooperative Election Studya large, nationally representative survey of U.S. adults. In the experiment, respondents were randomly assigned to read about one of two hypothetical teacher strikes in their community — one common good, the other focusing on bread-and-butter issues.

In the bread-and-butter version, respondents were told that teachers unions “went on strike to fight for higher salaries and more generous benefits for their members.” In the common-good scenario, teachers walked off the job to “fight for more affordable housing and better mental health services for the local community.” Although almost all unions make salary demands during real-world strikes, the experiment deliberately highlighted a single set of issues to see how these two different kinds of appeals resonated with different segments of the public.

The results showed a striking partisan split. Respondents who identified as Democrats were overwhelmingly supportive of both types of strike campaigns, with more than 7 in 10 backing teachers. Those who described themselves as Republicans, however, drew a sharp distinction: Nearly 4 in 10 said they would support a strike in their community for higher teacher pay, but when the union’s rationale for striking shifted to broader progressive policies, GOP support collapsed — fewer than 1 in 5 respondents approved of the hypothetical strike in their community.

What’s more, the framing experiment carried over to people’s broader opinions about teachers unions when they were asked a different question later in the survey. Specifically, Republicans who had been primed to think about common-good strikes were 11 percentage points more likely to say teachers unions have a “generally negative effect on schools” than were Republicans whose hypothetical strike vignette was focused on pay and benefits alone. Democrats, by contrast, grew even more enthusiastic when they were primed to think about the union’s broader progressive advocacy: 1 in 3 strongly agreed that teachers unions “have a positive effect” on schools after reading the common-good vignette, compared with just 1 in 5 when unions were described as striking for pay and benefits.

Two implications stand out.

First, unions in progressive cities face little risk in embracing common-good bargaining. Their members and voters are aligned, and the strategy can energize their base. For instance, United Teachers Los Angeles rallied in August for protections for immigrant families — building on its 2019 strike that placed common-good demands front and center.

At the same time, these efforts are unlikely to work in politically mixed communities. With Republican voters repelled by common-good strike campaigns, unions would command less community support in negotiations with local school boards if they leaned into common-good rhetoric.

Second, these findings are consistent with one explanation for why, at the state and national levels, unions have doubled down on progressive political advocacy despite the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus v. AFSCME decision. Janus made it harder for unions to raise revenue by requiring them to persuade non-members, who no longer paid fees, to join. In theory, that could have encouraged moderation, leading them to appeal to teachers who are moderate or conservative by focusing on bread-and-butter issues.

In practice, however, unions may see greater returns from mobilizing their most progressive members, since those are the ones most likely to contribute time, money and energy to unions that champion a broader political agenda like common-good bargaining.

The National Education Association’s 2025 Representative Assembly illustrates this shift. Delegates voted to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League, citing its “weaponization” of antisemitism. The move reflected the growing clout of progressive caucuses such as Educators for Palestine and underscored how unions are staking their futures on being credible champions of progressive causes. Post-Janusthat may be a rational base-building strategy. But it also risks making teachers unions ever more isolated and partisan — stronger in blue enclaves, weaker outside them.

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