MTA President Max Page delivered the following testimony to the Special Joint Committee on Initiative Petitions on Monday, March 30, 2026:
Good afternoon. I am Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, a diverse union of education workers, representing 117,000 educators in public schools and colleges across the Commonwealth.
The organizations represented here, along with dozens of other organizations, spent the past decade; their members, tens of thousands of hours; and their unions, $25 million in hard-earned members’ pay; in order to win passage of the Fair Share Amendment in 2022.
That victory – asking the wealthiest 1 percent to pay a little bit more – allowed you, the Legislature, to pass budgets that have included the following life-changing investments for Massachusetts residents:
- Universal, free community college, which has spurred a 40 percent growth in enrollment.
- Universal school meals for every school, every child.
- Hopefully, very soon, a $3 billion BRIGHT Act bond bill for public higher education.
- Billions of dollars for the T, roads and bridges across the states, and free regional transportation.
- Money for vocational schools, for literacy, for special education, and much more.
The investments you voted to make are truly remarkable. You should be proud. The Fair Share Amendment is one of the finest pieces of legislation that has gone through this General Court and to the people in the past generation. You should be proud of these investments and your part in making them reality.
As I spread the word about what Fair Share has made possible in meetings within my national union, the three-million-member National Education Association, people always applaud. They consider Massachusetts a model for their own efforts – as in Washington state, which just passed a Fair Share look-alike bill, as in Illinois, which is heading to the ballot with a Fair Share look-alike bill, and as in Oregon, and Vermont, and elsewhere. My colleagues are envious, especially now, as states battle their own budget crises.
The proponents of revenue-cutting ballot initiatives will tell you that their goal is to help working people.
Well, I just came back from a conference of Education Support Professionals. Our entry-level paraprofessionals – making barely minimum wage in the state – would get back about $42 a year from the income tax cut proposal. An ESP near the top of the scale in most districts, making all of $46,200, would get a grand total of $307. By contrast, many leaders of companies in the Massachusetts Competitiveness Partnership and the Massachusetts High Tech Council, who don’t need it, would likely receive 100 times that – more than $31,000 each. That’s the average tax cut for the top one percent.[i]
Listen closely and you’ll hear the great sucking sound of the super-rich continuing to steal from the poor.
And what would working people lose?
- For many, it would be their jobs, as devastating cuts would make the fiscal crisis we are watching unfold right now look like a summer whale-watching excursion out of Barnstable.
- Forget free public higher education, that pathway toward new opportunities.
- Gone would be the investments in better child care and universal early education.
- Roll back the improvements on the T.
- Neuter the progress on building more affordable housing.
- And make it virtually impossible to protect health care for the neediest when the Trump Medicaid cuts come raining down next year.
Working people don’t need a tax cut. They need investments in public goods that make their lives more affordable and more livable.
Working people don’t need a tax cut. They need investments in public goods that make their lives more affordable and more livable.
What I am supposed to say, very politely, in a legislative hearing is that “this proposal is bad public policy.” Or maybe, a little more combatively, it is “irresponsible.”
I’m turning 60 this year. I intend to get my AARP card. But I think I’ll also take the privilege of age, which is dropping my respectability filter.
I refuse to play into the MHTC and MACP’s lies.
This is not a legitimate proposal.
This is first and foremost about revenge for the Fair Share Amendment, despite all the good it is doing, and how it is making Massachusetts a fairer and more prosperous state.
It is also pure and simple blackmail.
As you read the other day in the Boston Globe, many in the business community know these initiatives would be disastrous – for the Commonwealth, as well as their own corporations’ bottom lines. But the members of MHTC and MACP are willing to risk human suffering and economic catastrophe in the hopes of strong-arming you, the Legislature, into giving them a billion or two in tax cuts for the rich.
The purveyors of this attack on the Commonwealth should not be considered respectable business leaders when they try to inflict this on our state.
They are gangsters willing to augment Trump’s war on our state in order to secure even more wealth for themselves, and to become the masters of the state’s fiscal policies.
If you give them a deal, they’ll come back again in two years and play the same game. They will own this building. We urge you instead to kick them out of the People’s House.
We, who represent working people, will protect our Fair Share Amendment. I hope and believe you will join us.
Reject these ballot initiatives. Cut no deal. Tell MHTC and MACP to pull the plug on these toxic initiatives. And if they refuse, urge voters to go to the ballot box and reject the billionaire and corporate assault on the Commonwealth.
[i] Proposed Income Tax Cuts in Massachusetts Would Benefit Households with Highest Incomes and Force Deep Public Cuts - Mass. Budget and Policy Center
