The Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG) approach has identified the period when unions bargain with employers as a key moment for movement work. Building on this strategy, at the beginning of 2020 the BCG network undertook an ambitious project to map contract expiration dates across the entire U.S. in as many industries as possible. The resulting map and the underlying data are an important tool for those interested in building out common good efforts with local unions.  

Starting in January 2020 and continuing into the present, we have collected over 9,000 contracts that we estimate cover 5 million workers. The contracts cover a wide range of industries, with a concentration in education, reflecting BCG’s origins in the incredible work of K-12 teachers’ unions.  The current version of the map includes contracts that expire starting in 2022 and continue through the end of the decade.The vast majority of the contracts are for 3 to 5 year terms. 

For each contract, we sought to collect details beyond the day, month and year of the contract, including the name of the local union(s) and associated national/international union(s), employer(s), number of members covered and type(s) of workers, as well as the city, state, and zip codes relevant for the contract for mapping purposes. Unfortunately, this information was not accessible for all contracts.

Methodology

Sources

We collected contract data from a variety of sources, including local, district and state union staff and elected leadership, union websites, union and community members, government data, news reporting and research, paid and publicly available databases. The frequency of the updates for these sources varied widely. Some rely on government agency data, while others have direct connections to union documents.

Membership numbers 

Many of the contracts do not include membership numbers. As you might expect, these numbers change frequently and vary, sometimes widely, over time and are often not readily available.

Location of contracts on the maps 

For over three fourths of the contracts, determining where to locate them on a map was clear – that is to say, we had a single city and state, or zip code connected to the contract. However, some contracts cover workers in multiple locations – national, multi-state and/or multi-city. For those contracts, we did our best to research where workers were located and concentrated. When appropriate, we have placed a dot in multiple locations for a single contract, i.e. locating it in a number of cities and/or states. This decision was rooted in the purpose of the map: to reflect where workers can collaborate with each other and community partners to create common good demands. However, some state and national contracts are not included on the map as there is not a single location where workers are concentrated (for example, letter carriers with the USPS are located throughout the country). We maintain information on these contracts on our internal database and can provide information about regional, state, and national contracts on request.

Sharing Updated Information

We recognize you may have more up-to-date and/or detailed information than what we have included on this map for one or multiple contracts. If you would like to share information on a new or an existing contract, please fill out this form.

The BCG network would like to recognize and express our deepest gratitude to the many unions, community organizations, and individuals who volunteered their time and assisted in putting together this map and the network’s database of union contracts. 

In particular, we’d like to acknowledge the work of the following individuals who were integral in making this tool a reality:

• Sara Myklebust, BCG’s Research Director
• Lily Ryan, BCG’s Organizer 
• Hannah Woodford of Georgetown’s Kalmanovitz Initiative and Spencer Shimek of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization, who spent countless hours helping clean data for the current version of the maps
• Patrick Dixon and Chad Frazier of Georgetown’s Kalmanovitz Initiative, who worked on cleaning data for previous versions of the maps
• Becky Schneider, a GIS consultant based out of Washington, D.C., who volunteered at least a hundred hours to put together the original version of the maps
• Nearly a dozen volunteers from Philadelphia and across the country who donated dozens of hours cleaning data

We cannot thank you enough for your time, dedication and commitment to this work and the common good movement.