Strike for America

by Micah Uetricht

  1 John F. Lyons, Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929–70, University of Illinois, 2008, pp. 38–42.

  2 Ibid., pp 183–93.

  3 Ibid., pp. 37–38.

  4 George N. Schmidt, “Hundreds of Teachers, YouTube Video, Contradict Press Reports on Chicago Teachers Union August 31 Meeting,” Substance News, September 2007, substancenews.net. Footage of Marilyn Stewart’s press conference announcing the approval of the contract and explaining that she made “a parliamentary decision” to not hold an official vote on the contract while a crowd of angry teachers outside can be heard chanting, then seen tearing up and burning the contract: “Chicago Teacher’s Union Chaos Part 1 of 2,” YouTube.

  5 Ramsin Canon, “Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) Takes Over Chicago Teachers Union,” Gapers Block, June 12, 2010, gapersblock.com.

  6 For an overview of the shifts in the union after CORE took power, see Norine Gutekanst, “How Chicago Teachers Got Organized to Strike,” Labor Notes, December 2012. For another assessment of CORE, see Rob Bartlett, “Creating a New Model of a Social Union: CORE and the Chicago Teachers Union, Monthly Review, June 2013.

  7 As Edelman said repeatedly during the speech, he did not expect his comments to ever reach anyone from the CTU or much of anyone beyond the Aspen Festival. His comments were first highlighted by Chicago education blogger Fred Klonsky, whose initial post led to widespread mainstream media coverage and an eventual apology from Edelman. Highlights of the video can be viewed at YouTube: “Stand for Children Co-founder Describes Illinois Take Down of Teachers and Their Unions.”

  8 Dan La Botz, “The Tumultuous Teamsters of the 1970s” in Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s, Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, Cal Winslow, eds., Verso, 2010.

  2

  STRIKE

  In the year leading up to September 2012, most Chicagoans familiar with the battles between the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the Board of Education thought a work stoppage would never take place. Neoliberal reformers had worked to pass new laws in the state legislatures attempting to make a strike impossible. Many observers assumed that while the fight between the board and the union would continue at public hearings, in the media, and in the streets, the legal barriers to more militant action were too great.

  What’s more, common understanding about the use of strikes as a tactic, particularly by public sector workers and especially by teachers, suggested that even if a strike were possible, it would be far from prudent. The public, so the narrative went, had turned so far against public workers that a strike could only hurt the latter’s chances to win their demands.

  Yet on September 9, 2012, Chicagoans turning on their TVs to any local nightly newscast were faced with the very thing the free marketers had tried to make impossible: the sight of CTU President Karen Lewis announcing to the world: “We have failed to reach an agreement that would prevent a labor strike … In the morning, no CTU members will be inside our schools. We will walk the picket lines.”

  As Lewis and the other union leadership left the press conference and walked back through the doors of their downtown offices, a single union member in a red CTU T-shirt stood behind, holding a sign that read “ON STRIKE.”

  It wasn’t supposed to be this way. A strike was supposed to be off the table. And, for most other teachers union locals around the country, it would have stayed there. But over the preceding two years CORE had created an organizing apparatus that blanketed the city’s schools, turning a previously unprecedented number of teachers into activists. The newly trained educators then worked to educate and agitate the membership about the gravity of the threats facing teachers and public education broadly, and helped teachers become comfortable with the decision to strike.

  The union’s leadership was comfortable with industrial action, guided by a left politics and an embrace of confrontational tactics. But given the new legal restraints foisted on the union, intended to make such an action an impossible, a strike would never have come to pass without a previously unprecedented level of development of the union’s membership as activists.

  Images of Chicago streets overflowing with teachers dressed in red circulated in mainstream media worldwide during and after the strike. But at the time CORE took power, such actions were completely foreign to the union—even under reform leadership.

  Jesse Sharkey recalled the union leadership signing a contract in 1998, ten months before its expiration, “without so much as a single rally.” A rally to oppose Renaissance 2010 during the UPC administration drew only a few hundred teachers—a tiny percentage of the union’s total membership and far from enough to convince any politicians that they were a threat. (Bizarrely, a video from the rally shows the crowd chanting not anti-Ren2010 slogans but the president’s name.) If CORE were to take leadership, it would be critical to build an organizational culture in which members felt comfortable with taking control and staging confrontational actions in the streets.

  In May 2010, a month before the union’s election, CORE organized a mass protest at City Hall. Caucus activists plastered schools with 30,000 fliers, with giant CORE logos on the bottom to make sure that union members knew who was behind the rally. Four thousand showed up, halting traffic in the heart of downtown Chicago at rush hour; there, teachers joyously defied the order of several police officers by leaving the sidewalk and taking to the street. Union officials tried to claim credit for the action, but it was clear that CORE had actually organized it. It was the first time most teachers had engaged in such a mass action. CORE, an independent group, was pushing the kind of action the union leadership itself should have been organizing.

  After winning the election, the union needed to make sure that their membership developed a large swath of rank-and-file leaders. This was done principally through the union’s new organizing department, as previously described. Contract committees at each school set up a massive infrastructure enabling members to engage other educators as well as members of other unions working in CPS schools; educators working as summer interns were trained in organizing tactics and fanned out through the city to contact members.

  As more members became trained and active in the union, it amped up its actions in the streets: community members took over and eventually shut down a school board meeting with a “mic check” action borrowed from the Occupy movement, where one person yells out a phrase at a time and the gathered group then yells it back; the union joined a coalition of labor and community organizations to march on a Cadillac dealership in a posh neighborhood that had received $7 million in public money through TIF funds, leading to two arrests; parents occupied a school on the city’s Northwest Side to protest its designation as a “turnaround;” community groups led a silent march of hundreds on the mayor’s home.

  These actions were led by community groups, but the CTU supported them, deepening relationships in the lead-up to the strike. There was both a quantitative increase in the number of union members willing to take militant action and a qualitative shift in CTU members’ consciousness beyond individual antagonistic politicians and disinvestment in schools. Members were beginning to connect the dots between city-level policies benefitting corporate elites, the crumbling and economically devastated schools in which they worked, and the broader neoliberal push in Chicago and beyond. They became increasingly willing to push the envelope and take action against the forces behind these policies.

  Community organizations were the first to fight against school closures in the city, with rank-and-file teachers later joining on. Similarly, those organizations took a lead in pushing the union toward forming stronger community-teacher coalitions and staging more militant actions.

  The Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, which had been fighting closures for years, was in the vanguard of the march on Mayor Emanuel’s house. It was the kind of risky, confrontational action—a descent en masse, with hundreds of community and union members on the mayor’s residential
block taking their demands to his front door—which, according to some union staffers, the union would probably never have done on its own, for fear of alienating the public, had it not been pushed by an outside group. (A sign of the shifting political winds was an article in the Chicago Tribune—a normally reliable outlet for conservatism—where a columnist wrote that she had initially seen the march on the mayor’s house as unacceptable but had changed her mind: “the protesters are rightfully frustrated … They’re within bounds to do what they can, peacefully, to take their views directly to him.”9)

  Similarly, parents with Blocks Together, a community organization in the largely Puerto Rican neighborhood of Humboldt Park, occupied Piccolo Elementary School after the board announced that it would become a “turnaround” school. This occupation, supported and attended by the CTU, was successful in that it led to a meeting with the Board of Education. Organizers from Action Now, the former ACORN group in Chicago, encouraged the union to be more ambitious in its organizing and use the cachet it held within communities to expand the scope of its organizing, suggesting a joint organizing campaign with the union against foreclosures in areas near public schools.

  The Grassroots Collaborative, an alliance of eleven community groups and unions, insisted that the union tie the crumbling conditions of CPS schools to the TIF program, a public financing method supposedly intended to alleviate blight in poor neighborhoods.10 Criticizing TIF and its centrality to defunding public education later became central to the union’s organizing: Teachers were educated about TIF during the union’s summer organizing program, where teachers worked as organizing interns and knocked on the doors of union and community members, engaging in thousands of conversations about the role of corporate tax breaks in defunding education. The union’s education reform proposals included strong critiques of TIF; billionaire Hyatt Hotel heiress and school board member Penny Pritzker was targeted after a South Side Hyatt received over $5 million in TIF funds. The CTU’s focus on TIF, at the Collaborative’s encouragement, ended up activating a number of members and became the focus of multiple public actions—including the previously mentioned action at a Cadillac dealership (a TIF recipient) where a union staffer and community member were arrested—and one mass march during the strike. Focusing on TIF helped make the issue of massive public subsidies to wealthy corporations at the expense of schools and other public institutions a much-discussed public issue in Chicago.

  Community organizations pushed the CTU to broaden its focus to issues that affected the entire working class and to take more militant action—two aspects of their organizing that were central to their ability to win the strike, gain the trust of average Chicagoans, and build power as a union.

  While the union built its membership capacity, however, free market reformers were working to eliminate the union’s ability to strike through SB7.

  In June 2011, Jonah Edelman, CEO of Stand for Children (SfC), gave an afternoon talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival,11 an annual gathering of “thought leaders” specializing in empty sloganeering masquerading as the cutting edge of critical intelligence. (One quote, featured on the website’s home page, reads “If you’re stuck, innovate yourself out.”)

  During the talk, Edelman, whose organization initially came to Illinois at the invitation of billionaire former private equity manager Bruce Rauner, spoke with astonishing candor; he explained calmly the backroom politicking necessary to “jam the proposal down [teachers and their unions’] throats.” Soon after its beginnings in Illinois, his organization donated $600,000 to nine state legislative races in an attempt to curry favor with State House Speaker Michael Madigan and to show Madigan that his organization “could be a new partner to take the place of the Illinois Federation of Teachers” after the speaker had passed a pension bill highly unfavorable to teachers in 2010.

  Edelman explains that SfC had attempted to gut collective bargaining rights for teachers entirely in a previous lame-duck session; therefore, when he approached teachers union leaders like Karen Lewis—whom he describes as a “die-hard militant”—with new restrictions on teachers union rights that appeared less drastic, he seemed conciliatory. Although Lewis signed onto the bill, she soon faced a revolt from members in her own caucus, who overturned her endorsement and forced her to return to Springfield to renegotiate parts of the law, as previously described, and Senate Bill 7 eventually passed.

  Two of the legislation’s principal accomplishments were to significantly limit the issues over which Chicago teachers could legally strike (wages, benefits, and some aspects of evaluation) and to require a seemingly unachievable vote margin to permit a strike. Instead of a simple majority of member votes being required to authorize a strike, a 75 percent majority of all members was now necessary—a percentage chosen, as Edelman explains in the video, after the SfC examined percentage breakdowns of past strike votes and which it deemed unachievable.

  “In effect, they wouldn’t have the ability to strike,” Edelman says matter-of-factly in the tape. “They will never be able to muster the 75 percent threshold.” Outlawing a teachers strike outright was not yet politically feasible; maintaining a chimera of that right while making it all but impossible to achieve was the next best thing.

  Edelman knew that teachers would not be able to win the public’s support if they were seen as striking over compensation issues. Particularly at a time when the national discourse had turned so sharply against teachers, the CTU would not be able to publicly frame its strike as anything but a public temper tantrum of overpaid workers whose greed had driven them out of their classrooms and onto picket lines.

  SfC wanted to deprive the CTU of its right to strike because they knew that the union’s ability to withhold its labor was its most powerful tool. With the union, the only body with enough institutional resources to fight back, effectively defanged, SfC could continue apace with their efforts to transform public education.

  Jonah Edelman came to the conclusion that the CTU would never be able to achieve a strike because he had parsed the data from the tallies of strike votes in years gone by and—because of the large number of teachers who abstained from voting—had seen that the union had never mustered even a majority of all voting members; three quarters, then, seemed well beyond the realm of the possible. But a slate had never entered the union’s leadership with a plan to engage and educate the union’s membership the way that CORE did.

  Much of the membership had become warmed up in the streets, but, given the new constraints imposed by SB7, the union would have to expand its organizing program if it was going to be able to achieve a strike vote. With a new 75 percent threshold to reach, the union decided it could not go into such a vote without a practice run—both to test its logistical capacity to pull off a strike vote and to indicate to members that a strike could be coming.

  The union held that practice vote in January 2012, asking four questions about the board’s proposals for teachers’ contracts. It garnered 80 percent participation from members, with 98 percent rejecting the proposals.12 The organizing the union had done since 2010 had paid off.

  The practice vote indicated that there was significant momentum within the union for a strike, and they sought to capitalize on it. On May 23, the union leadership called for a huge rally inside one of the city’s largest auditoriums, the downtown Auditorium Theatre. Four thousand union members packed inside, with another 1,500 rallying on the street outside. An iconic picture of the event shows Karen Lewis from behind at the podium, addressing a mass of teachers in front of her, all in red. As Lewis spoke, a chant of “Strike! Strike! Strike!” went up.

  Teachers left the auditorium to join a mass march with other unions and community organizations. The crowd of several thousand slowly moved south on LaSalle Street, approaching the heart of the city’s financial district, where Occupy Chicago had set up shop several months earlier. A small group of young Occupy activists jumped in place, chanting, “Go, go, go teachers!” as waves of educators marched by.
The teachers appeared ecstatic, both to be taking the streets en masse and to have the support of onlookers.

  Just a few years earlier, the union had been unable to mount any kind of effective pushback against a neoliberal education agenda. Now, with thousands of teachers marching through downtown Chicago at rush hour, days after a practice vote revealing a strong willingness to walk off the job, the CTU looked like a union that could pull off a successful strike.

  On June 6, the union held its strike authorization vote. Union staff and activists tracked down teachers and staff wherever they were during the summer vacation and, over the course of several days, 92 percent of the membership participated in the vote. The results, announced June 11, were stunning: 90 percent of the entire membership voted to authorize a strike; among those teachers who voted, 98 percent voted in favor of strike authorization.

  Teachers went far beyond the vote total deemed impossible by Jonah Edelman and the state legislators who, a year earlier, thought they had prevented a teachers strike from ever happening in Chicago. A strike had now been authorized, allowing for the union leadership to call a strike when it saw fit.

  By the time of the strike authorization vote, the board and the union had been in negotiations over the contract for the better part of a year and seemed to be going nowhere. The board wanted to implement a longer school day without a pay raise (on top of a contractually negotiated 4 percent raise that had been summarily taken from teachers the year before), scrap the “steps and lanes” section of the contract (by which teachers received raises for additional education and years worked), and increase teachers’ health-care costs, among other concessions. The union rejected these proposals and demanded increased protections for teachers displaced by school closures and better working conditions, like smaller class sizes. In July, a neutral fact finder, brought in to attempt to mediate the negotiations and make suggestions as required by state law, issued a report on the state of contract talks; it was rejected by both the union and the board.13 With the fact finder’s report rejected and a strike authorized, the union leadership could call a strike when it wanted.