Strike for America

by Micah Uetricht

  This was accomplished in part by shifting resources away from representation and toward a new union organizing department, which had never previously existed. And to fund that department and other union projects, staff cut their own salaries and benefits significantly. In years past, union staff’s pay and benefits were far greater than union members’; staff pay would now be pegged to classroom teachers’ pay.

  Leadership broadened the rights and responsibilities of members in the governing House of Delegates. Fourteen member-led committees, from political action to media, were tasked with central roles in the union’s day-to-day functioning. A new training program prepared delegates and members for union organizing and governance. The department began a summer organizing internship program that trained several dozen activist teachers to go out to organize their coworkers, many of whom had no prior involvement in their union.

  Contract committees made up of activist teachers and delegates were set up at each school, and each committee member was responsible for communicating with 10 other educators face-to-face, including school employees like cafeteria workers, who were members of other unions. Those committees were encouraged to develop their own actions and engage with parents and community members—a kind of organizing that had never been done in the union previously. Members of the House of Delegates, the union’s representative body of teachers, received training in bread-and-butter issues like contract enforcement but also, beyond the classroom, in how to fight against school closures. The union also made publicly funded corporate subsidies, most notably through the city’s Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) system, a major issue and worked alongside community groups and other unions to expand the CTU’s organizing beyond even educational justice to include the issue of inequality and austerity for poor neighborhoods of color throughout the city.6

  Soon after CORE’s victory, the Board of Education demanded that the union either give up a contractually negotiated pay raise or face layoffs while, around the same time, it was demanding a longer school day, meaning that the board wanted more work for less pay. When the union refused, 1,500 teachers were laid off. The necessity of a strike to beat back the board was becoming clearer, and the union used the layoffs to continue mobilizing members internally.

  Charlotte Johnson, a paraprofessional, became an activist in the union when she was recruited by CORE members to the summer internship program, knocking on doors and having conversations in teachers’ homes, and organizing community forums for parents about educational inequality in the city. During her two decades as a parapro, no union official had reached out to her to try to involve her in the union. “I can’t even remember what the president’s name was,” she said, referring to the UPC era. As she became more involved, her view of the union shifted: “I want to empower [other members] to do more on their own, not just to wait around for the union to tell them to do something.”

  Brandon Johnson, a middle school history and reading teacher, knew nothing about the union’s internal politics for years. Like many teachers, he was overwhelmed by his responsibilities inside the classroom; although he came from a union family, the CTU was nowhere on his radar.

  “When the union doesn’t require you to be active outside of your own issues as a teacher, you don’t know what to demand of your union,” he said.

  A colleague who was a CORE member reached out to him in 2010 about that year’s election, encouraging him to vote for the caucus and explaining that CORE would push a kind of teachers’ unionism that dealt with issues beyond the classroom. Johnson was teaching at a school that seemed a potential target for closure, and the union’s potential for fighting the closing soon dawned on him.

  “This [CORE] leadership sees itself as a vehicle to stop those closings,” he remembered thinking. The UPC did not.

  CORE has played a key role in shifting teachers’ consciousness about their roles as educators. For years, Brandon Johnson paid little attention to issues beyond his own group of students and his ability to help a few of them gain admission to selective high schools.

  “You get isolated in your classroom, and that causes you to focus on individual students,” Johnson said. “You begin to judge your accomplishments as a teacher by your ability to help a handful of individual students.”

  The work of CORE eventually helped him realize that the unionized teachers’ work needed to be collective liberation.

  “The previous administration maintained that all we can do is help individual students. To challenge a system that does not provide quality schools for all of its students was not on the table.” With CORE, “it became a collective struggle rather than an individual struggle.”

  Since winning control of the union in 2010, CORE has continued its work. Unlike many rank-and-file caucuses that mount successful leadership challenges and then disband after winning—like the briefly successful reform attempts among the Chicago Teamsters in the 2000s—CORE has stayed active, recruited new members, trained new leaders in the internal structures of the union, and discussed and debated the nature of education reform and how to confront it through study groups and book talks. The caucus serves as a space where a radical vision of teacher unionism can be advanced.

  “It gives us opportunities to talk more explicitly about the role of people who have left tendencies in the union,” Potter said. “Within CORE, we can be unabashedly clear about those politics.”

  CORE members currently hold power within the union, but members who are now leadership and staffers in the union have stepped down from the caucus’s executive board. While union leadership still exerts a strong influence in CORE, formal power has been given to a new layer of leadership.

  In many ways, the caucus serves a role similar to the one served by organized left groups during upsurges of radical unionism in the United States, as during the 1930s or 1970s, when leftists played key roles in workplace activism, strikes, and challenges to union leadership. It forms a principled political base that guides the union’s work and serves as a check on union officials. The caucus brought an insurgent leadership into power, but has acted independently of it, mounting criticisms when CORE members felt that it was succumbing to the tendency for union leaders to embrace bureaucracy and top-down governance.

  “People saw the potential for going down a path of traditional business unionism,” Potter said. “CORE has served as a corrective during those moments.”

  The fight over Senate Bill 7 (explained in full in Chapter 2) serves as an example. In 2011, a bill designed to strip the CTU of much of its power was being pushed in the state legislature by the free market reform group Stand for Children, and the union was to be at the table in Springfield, the Illinois capital. It was the first foray for Lewis, the newly elected president, who a few months earlier had been teaching chemistry and contemplating retirement. In fact, much of the entire leadership of the union would be involved in high-stakes negotiations opposite seasoned machine politicians and shrewd, billionaire-funded education reformers.

  As Stand for Children CEO Jonah Edelman explained bluntly during a discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June 2011,7 the bill was designed to severely limit the CTU’s power. It included new rules on teacher layoffs, evaluations, tenure, and other issues that corporate education reformers had long hoped to impose on Chicago’s teachers. But most important, by setting the bar for a strike approval far above a simple majority, the bill’s sponsors aimed to make a teachers’ strike impossible.

  “The union cannot strike in Chicago. They will never be able to muster the 75 percent threshold needed to strike,” Edelman smugly stated.

  The leadership team sent Lewis to the state capitol with only a union lawyer who had little experience in such negotiations; she went into battle without a large portion of the union’s membership to back her up (largely because the stakes of the bill and the intentions of its backers like Edelman were not fully understood at the time) or significant member input into the terms of the bill. Lewis herself later called
the bill’s passage “a steamroll job” by reformers, saying she was bullied by state legislators into accepting their terms of the law. But not knowing the full details of the law and its designed intent, Lewis gave the union’s official endorsement to Illionis Senate Bill 7 (SB7).

  When union members in Chicago heard of the bill’s details, many were incensed. Members recognized that the bill was devastating—true to its designers’ intent, among other things, it seemed to make a strike effectively impossible. Rather than uncritically backing the leadership they had just worked for years to elect, CORE members began an internal discussion between the rank and file and union leadership. Sarah Chambers, a Chicago elementary teacher and activist in CORE, remembers the internal discussion in CORE’s steering committee as having been “heated.” After an internal debate that Chambers remembers having lasted for several months, the caucus insisted that the union would need to reopen negotiations on the bill. At a House of Delegates meeting, a CORE member introduced a motion to overturn the union’s endorsement of the bill.

  Chambers says Lewis was not defensive about the move. “I am not the union—you guys are the union. You’re saying that we need to remove our name from this, so I’m going to listen to my members,” Chambers recalls Lewis saying. “Other caucuses and other leadership would have never done that.”

  Lewis returned to Springfield and reopened negotiations on SB7, where some of the bill’s most draconian provisions were scaled back, including an actual lowering of the strike authorization threshold to 75 percent of union members.

  Faced with the potential to go down a path of top-down unionism and uncritical support of leaders, CORE members balanced backing their leadership while ensuring its fealty to its left, bottom-up principles.

  Successfully capitalizing on members’ discontent with centrist unionism by mounting a leadership challenge from the left is a monumentally difficult achievement in its own right. If radicals wrest control of their union, they are faced with endless problems of running a massive union bureaucracy, for which years in a factory, hospital, or classroom have not prepared them. The natural impulse for the supporters of such a group is to close ranks around their leaders, against whom attacks from the boss and the reactionary elements within the union never stop. CORE has managed to simultaneously defend and support its leadership in power and to maintain an open environment to criticize that leadership, to ensure it does not succumb to the conservative forces facing any union.

  The Rank and File

  While CORE activists based their caucus on the lessons of failed attempts to reform the CTU and the objective conditions faced by Chicago educators in the early twenty-first century, they were also drawing from a long lineage of labor radicals who had transformed their unions into militant, democratic organizations—not just through leadership challenges to replace conservative leaders with progressives but through the building of rank-and-file worker power independent of the union bureaucracy.

  Adherents to this strategy see the stratum of labor leadership, the “bureaucracy” highly prevalent in American unions, as having its own set of interests separate from those of the union members, leading leadership to often act on behalf of their own interests rather than those of the workers so as to reproduce their power and prestige—and, often, their wealth. Thus it is often necessary for labor radicals to fight both the boss, attempting to extract more and more profit from them, and the union bureaucracy, who will attempt to clamp down on any kind of worker activity that could loosen its grip on power and threaten its privileged position as the “working-class aristocracy.”

  Such organizing has often been carried out by socialists throughout American labor history, from the pitched union battles during the Great Depression up to the twenty-first century. In 1934, facing conservative union leadership at the international and local levels, radical Teamsters in Minneapolis organized workers independently of official leadership to—in the words of socialist leader and rank-and-file organizer Farrell Dobbs—“aim the workers’ fire straight at the employers and catch the union bureaucrats in the middle.” (Some CTU staffers and activists held a study group on Teamster Rebellion, Dobbs’s book, in the lead-up to the 2012 strike.) Eventually the strategy led to not only a string of organizing victories headed by rank-and-file workers but also the Minneapolis general strike of 1934—an event that never would have come to pass if the dissidents had simply attempted to gain leadership rather than transform their local from the bottom up.

  In 1976, members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters formed the reform organization Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). Its aim was to capitalize on rank-and-file anger at corrupt and inept union leadership by posing repeated challenges like no votes on dismal contracts and forming independent worker committees on issues facing long-haul truckers and other members of the union. Nearly two decades after its founding, after years of organizing workers independent of the union bureaucracy, the TDU played a key role—in the first democratic election in the union’s history—in electing Ron Carey as the Teamsters’ international president. This was the election that led to the successful national United Parcel Service strike in 1997 and eventually tipped the balance of power in the AFL-CIO, kicking out Lane Kirkland, its deeply conservative president, in 1995.8

  Such rank-and-file efforts today are often associated with the organization Labor Notes and have been carried out by everyone from New York City transit workers in the mid-2000s to New York State nurses today. The key is the recognition of rank-and-file workers themselves as the real movers of reform rather than any individual contender for leadership, no matter how charismatic or politically principled. The CTU is firmly within this tradition of organizing, which helped lead to the overwhelming majority of the union’s membership (79 percent in the 2013 union election) backing CORE’s confrontational, member-led, leftist style of unionism.

  The CTU has grown into a dissident, radical caucus of rank-and-file teachers in strong partnership with community organizations; this is the vehicle that brought its signature brand of confrontational unionism into being. But there were no shortcuts to building the kind of fighting union that the CTU has become in the last three years; many of the caucus’s leaders had been fighting this fight for a decade, others far longer. CORE transformed the CTU by educating and agitating teachers about school reform and its place in a broader neoliberal project to dismantle public education, and these now-radicalized rank-and-file teachers would eventually provide the sober vision of what the union was up against—and the kind of confrontational unionism needed to fight it.

  At the same time, the union’s left leadership positioned the union as a representative of CPS students and their families. Even parents who weren’t actively involved in union fights knew of the devastating effects that neoliberal education reform had had on their children, including those due to widespread school closures, particularly in poor neighborhoods of color. When the CTU presented itself publicly as an organization actively and uncompromisingly opposed to such reforms—in an explicit way that had not been done by previous union leadership—and made the case for why they hurt students, CPS parents began to back them. In the public battle over who actually represented the interests of poor and working-class schoolchildren, the union won out over the neoliberal education reformers.

  Because education reformers are pushing the consensus on education reform to the right by making their case directly to liberals (the traditional backers of teachers unions), effectively splitting those unions apart from the Democratic Party, teachers unions must appeal directly to the American public, on both local and national levels. This must be done not simply through slick public relations campaigns but through genuine partnership with communities. Teachers unions, guided by a vision of education equality and defending education as a public good, should bargain for improved conditions for all students.

  While the blame heaped upon teachers unions for the dismal state of much of the urban education system is ce
rtainly disingenuous, used as a justification for a project to dismantle public education, it is also true that teachers unions have largely failed the parents of public school students over the years. Too many teachers unions have pursued agendas of self-interest for decades, focusing solely on bread-and-butter issues even at times of great upheaval among communities outside of schools, from 1960s and 1970s-era conflicts in Newark and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn to the CTU itself throughout its history.

  Where teachers unions could have played key roles alongside community members fighting for better schools, they often remained neutral or actively hostile to activists’ demands, pursuing an agenda that advanced their own interests. The long history of such actions has given the neoliberal reformers a clear opening for attacks.

  Teachers unionism without social justice concerns might have been able to survive during the peak of the Keynesian consensus. Now, however, there is a societywide sense that reform requires tacking hard to the right. The only way that collective bargaining in public education can withstand the neoliberal attacks it now faces is to pursue a social movement unionism that genuinely sees its central purposes as fighting for teachers and students and preserving public education as a public good.

  Otherwise, parents confronted with crumbling schools and unresponsive bureaucracies will continue to see the freemarket reformers as the only ones seeming to be seriously concerned about their children’s education (disingenuous though they may be); the reformers, meanwhile, will have free rein to continue their attacks on teachers unions, likely with parents’ backing.

  In short, the only way teachers unions can survive in the twenty-first century is to adopt the kinds of broad social justice concerns—alongside parents, communities, and others—that the CTU has come to stand and fight for.