Strike for America

by Micah Uetricht

  This kind of fight is uncommon for the major US teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the AFT (the CTU being a member of the latter), and the majority of their locals. The period of militant teacher unionism around the Great Depression or amid the upsurges of the 1960s and 1970s—including illegal strikes, jailed leaders and occasional street battles—is a distant memory. Few teachers unions are legally permitted to strike during contract negotiations, and those few are rarely willing to strike, fearing that the tactic will be viewed as too alienating—indicating a lack of concern for affected students. Likewise, few teachers unions have created intimate relationships with students’ parents and the communities where they teach, at times using their unions more like insurance companies with which they occasionally file claims rather than as organizations aimed at advancing mutually beneficial struggles.

  And few leaders of teachers unions are willing to push back against free market education reformers. Some are comfortable publicly expressing distaste for their more zealous adherents, like former Washington, DC, Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, but not many take on the “vulture philanthropists” at large foundations like the Walton or Gates Foundations or liberals in the Democratic Party championing their agenda. Even fewer have put forward their own vision for what progressive education reform should look like, linking a strong critique of free market reform with their own proposals to shore up education as a public good.

  Much of organized labor finds itself in a position similar to that of the national teachers unions—afraid to engage in industrial action or even viewing the strike as an outdated relic—without clear principles guiding what a positive agenda for changing society could look like. Instead, it sticks to a timid insider strategy, hoping to wait out the storm that has decimated so much of the movement over the last four decades while utilizing top-down organizing techniques that do not engage broad sections of its membership and ignore the world of workers and communities outside its own union.

  This “business unionism” has a long history in American labor. Since its birth in the mid-nineteenth century, American labor’s leadership has fought against demands for broad-based organizations that address concerns of wider swaths of the working class; it has opposed more leftist politics in favor of a conservative agenda and narrow mission.11 This style of unionism is suicidal. During a time of austerity in particular, it is unable to succeed even on its own parochial terms of delivering better pay and benefits to its members. That is made clear by the declining living standards over the past four decades of even the unionized American working class.

  The CTU opted instead for a more militant unionism with close ties to communities to build a broad educational justice movement in Chicago—“social movement unionism.” Unlike business unionism, which views unions’ power as coming from their officers’ ability to negotiate and win concessions, the CTU’s style of unionism sees its power as coming from its members as well as other unions and communities outside the union. For the CTU, that has meant a democratic, bottom-up organizing style that engages the entirety of the union’s membership; it has also meant widespread coalition building with organized communities throughout Chicago. The CTU’s program under CORE offers an example of what a fighting left-unionism, rather than the kind of centrist unionism so prevalent throughout American labor history, can look like in a time of austerity. And although it is far too early to tell whether the union’s victories are harbingers of a genuine radical politics triumphing over the centrism of recent decades, the possibility that the CTU might blaze such a trail does exist.

  The American labor movement is in shambles, teetering on the brink of extinction. The CTU, meanwhile, can be credited with a major defeat against a powerful neoliberal mayor, a newly energized and mobilized membership, and a setback for the free market education agenda. If other sections of the labor movement were to take some cues from the CTU about militant, bottom-up, democratic left-unionism, unions’ extinction might become less of a certainty.

  1 National Center for Education Statistics, “Charter School Enrollment,” nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=30.

  2 Ben Joravsky, “Stacking the Odds in Favor of Charter Schools,” Chicago Reader, April 13, 2011.

  3 Ted Cox, “Charter Schools Ring Up Fines, More Public Funding,” DNAInfo, January 2, 2013.

  4 Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Basic, 2010, pp. 275–76.

  5 Will Johnson, “Lean Production,” Jacobin, Fall 2012; Anastasia Ustinova, “Charter-School Growth Fuels Chicago Teacher Fears,” Bloomberg, September 12, 2012.

  6 Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City, Routledge, 2011, p. 19.

  7 Becky Vevea, Linda Lutton, and Sarah Karp, “Map: 40 Percent of Closed Schools Now Privately Run,” Catalyst Chicago, January 15, 2013, catalyst-chicago.org.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke, “Public Schools, Private Budgets,” Chicago Reader, July 21, 2011; “Chicago Public Schools Fiscal Year 2013 Amended Budget,” cps.edu/fy13budget/pages/Schoolsandnetworks.aspx; Becky Vevea and Sarah Karp, “Mapping Chicago Public Schools Priorities,” WBEZ, June 13, 2012; Ben Joravsky, “Fighting for the Right to Fire Bad Teachers—And Good Ones, Too,” Chicago Reader, September 26, 2012.

  10 “Lessons of the Chicago Teachers Strike: Matthew Luskin.” September 30, 2012, YouTube.

  11 Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor, Monthly Review, 1999.

  1

  CORE

  When the slate put forward by the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) won the 2010 election for the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), it made few headlines. Some Chicago media covered it, as did a few prescient bloggers, but most ignored it. Stories about labor get short shrift in the mainstream press these days, and stories about internal union battles are almost entirely off the radar. But if local journalists had examined the 2010 CTU leadership election closely they would have realized that, in many ways, a referendum on two starkly different visions of teacher unionism by Chicago’s 26,000 educators had just taken place.

  There was the incumbent United Progressive Caucus (UPC), which had little to say about school closures in poor neighborhoods of color, attacks on teachers, and the advance of free market education reform. While its early roots were in rank-and-file racial justice caucuses within the union, by 2010 the UPC leadership had long atrophied. They paid themselves massive salaries and pensions, used expense accounts questionably, and were entrenched enough to fend off challengers. Down from its once-lofty ambitions, the old guard came to represent a stale top-down business unionism. And there was CORE—rooted in an organic community-teacher coalition against school closures, a broad left politics, and an uncompromisingly combative and democratic unionism whose raison d’être was in a perceived need to end union capitulation to neoliberal education reform.

  The rise of CORE indicated not only a leftward shift in Chicago teachers unionism but also a rejection of a labor model that mandated progressivism from on high. CORE was born out of rank-and-file struggles against unresponsive, regressive leadership; immediately upon taking power, CORE began working to train its members to lead the way in the union. Without CORE’s victory, the 2012 Chicago teachers strike would never have come to pass and Chicago teachers unionism would not have appeared on the national radar as a model for struggle. In two years, the caucus’s left-wing leadership built on relationships with community organizations that had been years in the making to mobilize in support of its strike. It assembled an incredibly efficient organizing apparatus centered around identifying activist teachers, giving them leadership and organizing training, and having them organize every single teacher in their schools. It formed formal and informal relationships with other organizing campaigns throughout the city, tying the teac
hers’ visions for education reform to broader campaigns for social justice.

  At a time when teachers and their unions find themselves under assault, the story of CORE offers some practical lessons for how teachers can take over their unions to defend public education and how radical democratic unionism of all types can spread.

  Chicago is the birthplace of American teacher unionism. The multiple unions that existed in the early 1900s and eventually merged in 1937 to become the CTU were forerunners of teacher unionism throughout the country. The city has also been home to activism by rank-and-file teachers dissatisfied with their union’s leadership on issues ranging from general education reform, to pay and benefits, to racial inequity between white teachers and teachers of color. During the Great Depression, for example, after repeated attempts to engage union leadership to help garner months of back pay owed to Chicago teachers by the Board of Education, high school teacher John M. Fewkes led mass demonstrations through the city’s downtown—which included the ransacking of multiple banks and pitched street battles with teachers hurling textbooks at mounted police. Teachers were soon given the back pay owed them.1

  In the 1960s, progressive white teachers formed Teachers for Radical Change in Education, emboldened by the radical climate at the time and dissatisfied with the union leadership’s lack of action on racial justice and educational inequity. At the same time, multiple independent African American teacher organizations were formed to pressure leadership to advance a broadly progressive agenda and defend black teachers—they included the Black Teachers Caucus and the Teachers Committee for Quality Education. Among their grievances was the fact that the union refused to campaign for the full certification of “full-time basis substitutes” (FTBs)—an almost entirely black group of teachers who worked for years as substitutes because of the racist tests and evaluations required for full certification. These teachers were junior members of the union without full voting rights; they therefore organized a group called Concerned FTBs. After a 1968 FTB strike, which the CTU leadership had officially opposed and begged Concerned FTBs leaders not to go through with, the CTU eventually prodded the Illinois State Legislature into action to allow a path for FTBs to become regular teachers.2

  These independent efforts have always terrified union leadership. Men’s Teachers Union President C. L. Vestal wrote in a 1932 letter that “the leaders of the teacher organizations wish to do their part to keep our common boat on an even keel in spite of the storm, but the rank and file are becoming even harder to quiet.… They are putting more and more pressure on their leaders to ‘do something.’ ”3

  The union thus has a long history of rank-and-file members battling calcified, conservative leadership, pushing them to both represent the best interests of teachers and the communities in which they teach.

  The United Progressive Caucus is a study in the tension between the poles of conservative and confrontational, staff/leadership-led and teacher-led, self-interested and community-centered styles of unionism. It was formed as an amalgamation of several racial justice caucuses in the early 1970s and held power for nearly four decades. Like much of the labor movement, the union under the UPC eventually lost its broad social justice vision but was willing to occasionally use militant tactics to win gains for members: the caucus led the union through five strikes over the course of a decade and a half, including one in 1987 that lasted nineteen days. UPC leadership negotiated some large economic gains for CTU members, particularly under Jacqui Vaughn, who became president in 1984. After Vaughn’s death in 1994, Vice President Tom Reece took her place. Vaughn had what her obituary in the Chicago Tribune referred to as “cult-like adoration” from the union’s membership; Reece, however, was seen as too prone to capitulation to the Board of Education.

  Jesse Sharkey, the CTU’s current vice president, who was a high school teacher at the time, saw the UPC leadership negotiate a contract in 1998, a full ten months before it expired, “without so much as a single rally. It was pitiful.” He and other reform-minded unionists were drawn to a reform caucus that would go on to challenge the UPC.

  In 2001, the ProActive Chicago Teachers (PACT) caucus unseated the UPC, promising progressive reform. Debbie Lynch, a white elementary school teacher who previously directed the CTU’s Quest Center for teacher development, had run as an oppositionist within the union for years, drawing on the discontent of varied groups of rank and filers. She ran on a platform of ending corruption, increasing the union’s role in training teachers, and restoring bargaining rights over noncompensation issues that had been lost in the 1990s—a kind of liberal reform in a union that had drifted into conservatism and lost ground for its members.

  PACT’s election brought a shift from the conservative UPC. But Lynch’s tenure at the helm of the union would be brief, and the 2003 contract fight would seal her fate. She negotiated a contract that, by many accounts, included decent raises but also entailed increases in health-care costs. She sold it, however, not as an imperfect recesssion-era agreement that included some wins and some losses but as a nearly flawless contract; and she attempted to ram approval through the union’s House of Delegates. She hired an outside public relations firm to produce several videos to be shown to the union’s membership, trying to market the contract as a good deal.

  “You asked me to bring home the bacon,” Lynch said at the time, in words that almost any CTU activist and staffer can still repeat today, “and we brought home the whole hog.” Members from both outside and within her own caucus disagreed, feeling that they had been sold a bill of goods, and revolted against the proposal, voting overwhelmingly to reject the contract. Lynch, not wanting to face the press and the Board of Education with the news that her membership had attempted to overrule her, tried to ratify the contract despite the house’s disapproval. It was a fiasco; Lynch’s autocratic behavior contrasted sharply with the reform mantle she had claimed. Supporters like Sharkey, who favored democratic reform efforts, left the caucus.

  The contract was eventually approved, but Lynch’s fate as president was largely sealed. In addition to the members’ discontent around the contract, she was unable to neutralize the virulently antireform efforts of much of her staff, many of whom were members of the UPC and were engaging in what Norine Gutekanst, a teacher and PACT executive board member at the time, referred to as a “sabotage movement within the union.” Just weeks before PACT took over the union, the lame-duck UPC president worked with the union’s staff to form another independent union—one that would protect the staff from firings while it tried to sabotage efforts to reform the union.

  “We erred on the side of having open arms,” Gutekanst, a former bilingual education teacher who is now CTU organizing director, said of the unionized staffers. “And we shouldn’t have, because these folks were trying to destroy us.”

  “And it was those of us who were on the Left who tended to take those positions,” said Debbie Pope, another former PACT member and current CTU staffer who had taught for several decades.

  Lynch, one of the few constant voices of critique of the UPC, had maintained an opposition caucus for several years. But her vision of reform for the union did not entail a radical shift in how the union operated. “Her critique of the old guard wasn’t that it was a service model. She just felt that she could be more competent, hard-working, and honest than them,” said Sharkey.

  “She was a classic liberal reformer—a technocrat,” said Jackson Potter, who became a teacher during the Lynch administration.

  She didn’t think she’d have to have a program about union democracy, or engagement of members in entirely different ways, or resistance at the school level, or establishing a culture of solidarity. She thought bringing in ethical people would be enough to engender a cultural change in the union and increase our leverage over the Board of Ed and the corporate forces against us. But that vision wasn’t going to stop this tremendous attack on our profession and on schools.

  Without shifting the way the union eng
aged with its members, introducing a new culture of union democracy and member-led governance and action, and preparing for the inevitable counterattack from the union’s conservative elements, the limits of PACT’s liberal vision were quickly reached and the group was sunk.

  In 2004, the year after the contract’s negotiation, the UPC returned to power, with Marilyn Stewart assuming the presidency for the next six years. Like Reece, Stewart failed to capture the imagination of the union’s members and would oversee the negotiation of another particularly unpopular contract in 2007—one that saw Stewart ask for the yeses at a House of Delegates meeting, then run out of the meeting before the no vote could be called. She then declared to reporters that a contract had been settled and a strike averted, while a crowd of several hundred angry union delegates, including CORE members, chanted “No! No! No!” (with some actually burning physical copies of the contract) outside of Stewart’s press conference.4

  Amid the chaos, a group of activist teachers who had learned from the failures of the Lynch administration were beginning to get organized.

  A former history teacher, Jackson Potter is a slender, bearded man who grew up in Chicago yet somehow gained a mysterious accent that much of the city’s labor movement finds untraceable. He grew up in a family of radical activists, including a leftist Teamster father and an activist lawyer mother. He began teaching in 2002. Soon, he found himself and his students on the receiving end of neoliberal education reform: His school, Englewood High School on the city’s South Side, was facing closure. A union delegate, Potter gave multiple speeches at meetings of the union’s House of Delegates to try to drum up support from the union and its members to fight the school’s closure. The union, however, continued to do little.

  After one meeting, Potter was approached by Sharkey—another delegate and a teacher at Senn High—whose school was threatened with conversion into a public military academy. The two had seen each other at past union meetings, and Sharkey wanted to discuss the possibility of collaborating. In 2004, CEO Arne Duncan and Mayor Richard M. Daley introduced Renaissance 2010 to Chicago Public Schools; it was a plan first to shut down and later “turn around” low-performing and underutilized schools by firing all the former staff and converting the majority into charter schools run by private operators. Sharkey began traveling around the city to talk to groups of parents, educators, and other activists to publicize the upending effects that Ren2010’s closures and turnarounds would have on teachers and neighborhood schools.