This chapter analyzes the historical legacies of union-founding to establish whether these legacies had enduring consequences for subsequent patterns of teacher mobilization. It examines the development trajectories of teacher organizations, from 1900 to 1979. It analyzes several themes: church–state conflict over mass public schooling in the early twentieth century; contrasts between the political incorporation of industrial workers and teachers; patronage politics in public schools and the education bureaucracy; teacher struggles for labor codes and professional autonomy; and restrictions on political rights under nondemocratic regimes. It is shown that corporatist legacies set unions on different paths, but these legacies do not fully account for contemporary patterns of teacher mobilization.

These reflections adopt a macro-historical perspective on the “new inclusion,” comparing it to the more restricted, “initial” inclusion of the labor movement in the early twentieth century. The earlier inclusion, which introduced mass participation, founded and structured two arenas of popular sector participation: the interest and party-electoral arenas. The second inclusion not only encompassed previously omitted groups but also restructured those two participatory arenas. After situating both inclusionary episodes in a wider historical framework, I compare them in terms of four traits: 1) the form of popular organizations, 2) problems of collective action, 3) salient cleavages and issues, and 4) access to policymaking. The restructured arenas represent a move from the centrality of unions, corporatism, and productionist economic issues to a structure of participation that is more fragmented and pluralist, with multiple cleavages and a set of issues that now include a range of identity-based rights and consumption-based demands. While these changes are positive gains, an important question is the degree to which this restructuring has effectively demobilized the popular sectors on important macro and micro economic issues. These are important areas of policymaking, which remain salient in the politics of the elite and have consequential economic, distributional, and political consequences for the popular sectors.