What Distinguishes Us? 

Organizing. Member-Led. The Schools Our Students Deserve. By now, these are familiar phrases to members across the MTA, and for good reason. Years of work by members and elected leaders have transformed the MTA into a union led by members and ready to fight and win at the local and state level. 

We should celebrate the fact that these ideas have become so widespread within MTA. At the same time, we believe it is critical that they do not become hollow slogans.

Matt Bach and Deb Gesualdo have the experience to put these words fully into action, and we want to tell you why. In a couple days we will follow up with an email about what it means to be a member-led union, and shortly after that we will share our vision for the schools our students deserve. 

Organizing is more than mobilizing, which turns members out to send emails or attend a rally. Organizing transforms our union into an active, democratic organization. For example:

• Matt Bach and Deb Gesualdo led successful strikes. In Andover they raised ESP salaries by over $12k. In Malden, members won 6 weeks of paid parental leave, health and safety language, provisions for the city to respond to the needs of homeless students, and a raise to ESP salaries by an average of 30%.

• Matt Bach cofounded the Merrimack Valley Bargaining Council, a regular meeting space for elected leaders and rank-and-file members to establish regional standards on wages and working conditions and set goals that every local will strive for at the bargaining table.

• In February 2026, Matt modeled an organizing approach to stop the governor’s proposed cuts to the GIC. Discovering that the North Andover town manager is a GIC commissioner who would cast a deciding vote, the Merrimack Valley Bargaining Council called MTA members to a North Andover town meeting to demand a “no” vote. Faced with pressure from organized educators, the GIC Commissioner flipped her vote and rejected the governor’s proposed cuts.
  
  

These are just a few examples of what Matt Bach and Deb Gesualdo mean when they say organizing: Building power through democratic decision making. Trusting rank-and-file members to make decisions. Unifying across locals and job titles. Taking collective action that directly confronts the boss and the state house. And winning big, all across the state, pre-K through higher ed. 

When we say member-led we mean union democracy, from worksites to locals, bargaining councils to the MTA leadership. Members in conversation with each other, identifying and debating issues, deciding on plans and taking action collectively. Union democracy builds trust, solidarity, and collective power.

Matt Bach and Deb Gesualdo have the experience to extend union democracy across the MTA:

• The Bach and Gesualdo campaign invited MTA members at the 2025 Annual Meeting to give input about their top concerns and priorities, and then met with more than 80 members of Educators for a Democratic Union to build our campaign platform based on what we heard. That platform emerged from a broad swath of members from every position within the MTA. Specific and spelled out, our platform allows MTA members to hold Matt and Deb, other elected MTA leaders, and MTA management accountable.

• At the MTA Board of Directors meeting in July, Matt and Deb voted yes on a new business item empowering rank-and-file members to petition MTA to send an organizer to their local—because union democracy requires that members are free to make their own decisions, and to organize themselves. Matt and Deb are the only two candidates running for MTA President or Vice President who voted yes, even though three of the four other candidates are also MTA Board members. (A majority of the MTA Board voted with Matt and Deb and, in a victory for union democracy, the measure passed!)

• When leading their successful strike campaigns, Matt and Deb engaged every member in their locals about what they wanted from their next contract and what they were ready to do to win it. They brought members into conversation with each other to build unity and trust across differences. They opened up bargaining sessions to rank-and-file members. They trusted that the members, and only the members, would decide what action to take, from the strike vote to the tentative agreement. No one can make a worker go on strike. Strikes—if they are to be successful—can only happen with the full commitment of the membership.

• At this year’s Annual Meeting, bylaw amendments will be put forward that clarify the role of elected leaders in ensuring that the MTA is being led by members and their elected officers, not by management. We endorse these measures, which affirm that the democratic voices of members lead the MTA.
  
  

Union democracy that grows from the bottom up. Trust in members to discuss, debate, decide, plan, and act collectively. Unity and power through deep, democratic practices. That is what member-led looks like for the Bach/Gesualdo campaign.

• Our vision for public education is grounded in liberatory educational practices: schools and universities as sites for critical thinking, imagination, creativity, and exploring the breadth of human experience, including literature, history, the arts, career and technical education, and the sciences.

• That vision depends on the autonomy of education workers and workplace democracy: Teachers, faculty, and professional and classified staff, taking charge of their work and their time. Educators choosing their curriculum and pedagogy. Staff determining how best to meet the needs and goals of their school or college. Matt Bach’s local, the Andover Education Association, is raising the bar for autonomy and workplace democracy by applying for an Innovation School grant to establish a union–run school on the model of the Boston Teachers Union Pilot School. In Malden, Deb Gesualdo’s local, the MEA won contract language promising continuous, uninterrupted, and self-directed prep time, and protecting academic freedom. 

• We also recognize that our schools and colleges exist within a broader community, and that as education workers we face challenges beyond the classroom or university campus. We know that we cannot isolate some struggles for freedom from others. Freedoms must be widely and broadly shared for any of us to be truly free. That’s why in our campaign platform, Matt Bach and Deb Gesualdo commit to supporting fights to win living wages for all workers; Medicare For All; debt-free, high quality, public higher education; a wealth tax; and rent control; and joining struggles to defeat fascism, war, imperialism, and genocide.

• Our campaign looks to expand our vision of what is possible. We refuse to narrow our demands by bowing to false ideas of austerity or accommodating the forces that undermine public education through charter schools, privatization, canned curriculum, and restrictions on our academic freedom. Public education should be cherished, fully funded, and democratically run. We are committed to asserting this vision and supporting education workers to act together, and with our communities, to fight for this vision.

• If you are experiencing the tyranny of a bully principal or administrator, drowning in top-down directives and initiatives, enraged at the forced use of corporate ed tech and AI to de-skill and de-professionalize our work, threatened by limits to academic freedom, worried for your and your students’ safety at school, suffocating under a scripted curriculum, or just sick of being asked to do more and more work with less and less time, resources, and autonomy… and if you are ready to use our union power fight back… we want to hear from you!