Strike for America

by Micah Uetricht

  Negotiations continued, and the board continued to offer unsatisfactory contract proposals. On August 29, the union issued a ten-day notice, saying that if no satisfactory deals were reached with the board, teachers would strike. No deals were reached.

  So on the night of September 9, Karen Lewis and a crowd of solemn-faced teachers gathered outside the union’s downtown headquarters to announce to the world that the next day, the union would be on strike, for the first time since 1987.

  “We demand a fair contract now,” she said. “Until there’s one in place, one that our members will accept, we will be on the line.”

  The CTU called for pickets at local schools to begin at 6:30 a.m. on September 10. Lacking the discipline instilled by more demanding professions (like say, teaching), I couldn’t drag myself out of bed at that time. By the time I was on my bicycle heading downtown from the far North Side on Ashland Avenue, a main thoroughfare, picket lines were well under way.

  The six-mile ride from my apartment to the Board of Education included scene after scene of teachers chanting and marching outside their schools. The city was blanketed with striking educators, all clad in red union T-shirts. I passed one school with forty or fifty teachers picketing in front, rode a few more blocks, then passed another.

  I stopped at the second picket line I saw, at Lakeview High School, with several dozen teachers a few blocks from the mayor’s home, to take in the scene. A slim, middle-aged African American teacher in charge of the bullhorn started chanting, “We’re going to Rahm’s house!” He stopped after chanting it a few times, giggling. But an early-forties white woman, who looked stunningly similar to my ninth grade American history teacher, wasn’t laughing.

  “No, seriously. It’s right over there,” she yelled out, pointing west toward Emanuel’s residence on Hermitage Avenue. “We should go.” Later in the week, those teachers and others in the vicinity would march over to the mayor’s house and picket and chant outside of it.

  The entire city felt transformed. Teachers were engaged in highly visible, militant mass action, and there was a widespread sense throughout the city of the legitimacy and necessity of such actions—for educators and for other workers.

  Rather than having teachers picket at their schools for a few hours in the morning and then head home, as had occurred in previous strikes, the union held mass rallies downtown nearly every day with tens of thousands of teachers and their supporters. After one such march on the strike’s first day, I walked into a chain coffee shop and grabbed a yogurt cup. The young cashier sized me up, taking stock of my red T-shirt.

  “Are you a teacher?” she asked me.

  I looked down at my shirt, stuttering for a moment.

  “Oh, uh, I’m actually …”

  “Go ahead,” she interrupted, waving me through the line while other customers behind me watched. “You all are amazing. We support the teachers 100 percent.”

  The moment of solidarity between a nonunion cashier making minimum wage and a perceived unionized public school teacher on strike seemed too beautiful for me to interrupt with the reality—that I was not, in fact, a teacher, but rather a leftist who enjoyed the teachers’ marches—so I started to thank her profusely. The two other cashiers stopped their transactions to turn to me and tell me that they too hoped to see the teachers win.

  “I’d be out there, too, if I could,” the twenty-something woman told me.

  Leaving the café in a rising class-consciousness—induced daze, I put my bike on a bus back to the far North Side and hopped on behind a few other passengers. When my turn to swipe my card came, the driver waved me on.

  “Go ahead, sir,” he said nonchalantly.

  Oblivious, I gestured toward the card reader.

  “Oh—is it broken?”

  He shook his head. Like the cashier minutes earlier, he gestured to my shirt before waving me to move along without paying.

  “We gotta support the teachers.”

  Such support felt almost universal. I visited nearly two dozen picket lines during the strike and was astounded at the number of supportive honks filling the air at all of them. Friends told stories of walking around the city in red T-shirts and pedestrians stopping them, telling them that the teachers’ cause was just. The strike was all the city could talk about.

  Where was the atmosphere of hatred for teachers that the free marketers had worked so hard to encourage over the last half-decade or so? Where were the enraged Chicagoans contemptuous of the cushy jobs bankrolled by the hard-earned money sucked out of their checks every other week, publicly confronting teachers on the picket line, or at least flipping them the bird from their cars as they drove by? They were nowhere to be found.

  There was a generalized sense throughout the city, whether on picket lines or public transit or on the street, that this group of workers was right to go on strike; that struggle and militant action were justified and to be supported.

  The city felt like it belonged to the teachers.

  The effects of cadre development within the union soon became clear during the strike: Teachers began organizing actions themselves, largely independent of the CTU leadership.

  Kim Walls, a science teacher who had never been active in the union before becoming involved in CORE, attended the union’s summer organizing program. It was there that she first heard about TIF and the program’s effects on public schools. She was appalled at what appeared to be deliberate starvation of the city’s public schools of resources in favor of redistributing wealth upward to some of the city’s richest corporations.

  On September 14, the union and the Grassroots Collaborative coalition planned a rally against TIF downtown, focusing on billionaire hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, appointed by President Obama to Secretary of Commerce in 2013 and a former appointed member of the Board of Education. Her company, Hyatt Hotels, had received $5.2 million in TIF funds to build a new hotel in Hyde Park, where Walls lives.

  Walls received a call from union staffer Matthew Luskin days prior to the action. “I said, ‘Matthew, I’m not going downtown. There’s a Hyatt right here.’ ” She told Luskin she would organize her own protest against Hyatt in Hyde Park. “He just said, ‘Go for it.’ ”

  Walls called Hyde Park–area teachers and told them to “call their people” to come out to the action. When the day came, 300 teachers and supporters marched on the hotel—with little to no support needed from union staff.

  Teachers throughout the city organized similar actions without the aid of union staffers. No union staffers planned the small marches on the mayor’s house during the strike; teachers planned those themselves. After thirty-three of the fifty city council members (all but one of whom were Democrats) signed a letter to Karen Lewis at the strike’s beginning, begging the union not to strike, rank-and-file teachers, livid at their aldermen for publicly chastising them and siding with the mayor, independently organized protests in their neighborhoods against them. All were Democrats and several self-identified as progressives, but the teachers didn’t care—they had been insulted and were unafraid to organize their own actions to call out those aldermen publicly through street actions.14

  Mayor Emanuel, the Board of Education, and corporate reform groups like Stand for Children and Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) had worked to try to turn Chicagoans against the teachers union long before the strike began. DFER funded a number of radio ads in the months before the strike, targeting African American and Latino neighborhoods in particular, attempting to preemptively turn parents against the strike. And nationally, of course, the mainstream media had been pushing against teachers unions for years.

  But during the strike, polls showed that the public—and parents of color in particular—supported the teachers union by overwhelming numbers. The first poll released showed that among registered voters in Chicago, 47 percent supported the strike while 39 percent did not. By the fourth day, another poll showed similar numbers but noted that 63 percent of African Americans and 65 percen
t of Latinos—in a city where 91 percent of the public school district is made up of children of color—supported the strike.15

  The numbers were proof that teachers could win the public to their side and against free market reform despite the hostile climate locally and nationally. Reform groups funded by billionaires could not convince Chicagoans that the teachers were acting against CPS students’ interests because the CTU had made their case directly to those working-class and poor communities of color through its genuine partnerships with groups based in them, and by engaging with and organizing in those communities for years before the strike.

  The consensus in Chicago and around the country seemed to be that teachers unions’ very existence was hated by most; going on strike was not even an option, since doing so would only serve to further widen the gap between the public and the unions. But the CTU had managed to convince the public that the strike was not reflective of selfishness—it was the very means by which the union would accomplish a progressive education agenda. Neoliberal forces had long attempted to turn average people against public sector unions’ struggles by framing any public workers’ demands as coming at individual taxpayer’s expense; in Chicago, that attempt failed.

  After the strike’s first week, many Chicagoans assumed that teachers would return to class on Monday. Emanuel had clearly lost the public relations battle. Polls showed strong majorities, especially among CPS parents and Chicagoans of color, backing the teachers by large margins. The union had the upper hand in bargaining, and through the tentative agreement CTU leaders brought to the House of Delegates meeting that Sunday was rumored to contain a number of harmful provisions for teachers, given the broader assault on teachers unions and the austerity generally, it seemed as strong as possible.

  But on Sunday, September 16, the House of Delegates did not vote to end the strike. They extended it by two more days.

  The union had wrung significant concessions out of a Board of Education that seemed bent on levying a number of significant blows against them. But delegates said their membership had not had enough time to fully examine the proposed deal. The agreement would not be “shoved down our throats,” as delegate and first-grade teacher Yolanda Thompson put it.

  After the first week, at the Sunday-night House of Delegates vote over whether or not to extend the walkout for two more days, Lewis made no attempt to sell the idea of ending the strike based on the contract’s strength. Some of the union’s staff were worried that the union would squander the goodwill it had built up among CPS parents, but the leadership did not try to dissuade the membership from extending the strike.

  So instead of forcing the membership to decide on a contract they had not read and did not fully understand, delegates extended the strike for the sole purpose of allowing rank-and-file members the full opportunity to comprehend the contract that had been negotiated in their name.

  The vote was a victory for union democracy. But union democracy does not always make for good PR: favorable coverage in the mainstream press evaporated. The city’s major newspapers and nightly newscasts ran top stories about parents’ patience running thin with the union. But on Monday morning, teachers arrived at picket lines outside their schools at 6:30 a.m., eager to review the proposal but lacking a formal process to do so.

  Becca Barnes, a ninth-grade history teacher on the South Side, said teachers at her school made photocopies of the contract, stood against a fence, and spent an hour reading through it line by line, circling key sections and commenting in the margins—as though they were grading papers. As they began picketing, the contract was still on their minds. So Barnes and her fellow teachers—about a hundred of them—decided to walk to a nearby park and read it together.

  “None of us planned in advance to comb through it collectively,” Barnes says. “We were going to just go over highlights,” Barnes remembers, “but then someone said, ‘No—we need to read the entire contract.’ ”

  So, sitting together at a park, they read through every line, debating the victories and concessions hashed out at the bargaining table.

  “It was very emotional,” says Barnes. “Some people were sick of striking. Others said, ‘This isn’t good enough. This one line is reason enough for me to stay out.’ ”

  Similar scenes took place throughout Chicago. For the first time, teachers were studying every word of their contract, the principal document governing their work lives.

  “We were genuinely interested in what each other had to say—even the people who wanted to go back,” Barnes says. The union voted to ratify the contract October 3, with 79 percent of membership in favor.

  The union’s decision to extend the strike by two days can be traced in part to practical concerns by the leadership. The membership has a history of punishing leaders who tried to force contracts upon them. For example, there was the time in 2003 when former president and reformer Debbie Lynch lost her reelection bid, having told members that her contract had not just brought home “the bacon” but “the whole hog.” And again, there was the angry impromptu rally in 2007, in which some CORE members participated, where members burned copies of the proposed contract. These memories undoubtedly weighed heavily on Karen Lewis and other leaders’ minds.

  But there was also a clear concern for democratic process that is incredibly rare among American unions—particularly in a situation like contract negotiations, which are almost always seen as battles between union leaders and management negotiators in which the general membership has little part. The strike’s extension showed that rank-and-file teachers were firmly in control of the union.

  9 Mary Schmich, “Mayor’s Home Turf Is Fair Game for Protesters,” Chicago Tribune, February 22, 2012.

  10 In practice, Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) has robbed public institutions like schools of hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding by giving those funds away to wealthy corporations. TIF is one of the key economic development programs in the city; it has been widely criticized as a slush fund for the current and former mayors of Chicago, who have doled out much of the funds (at least $1.7 billion in 2013) to wealthy corporations. See Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke, “The Shadow Budget,” Chicago Reader, October 22, 2009.

  11 The talk can be found on YouTube. Edelman clearly did not think his talk would go far beyond the conference participants in the room, laughingly saying that he did not think his comments would get back to CTU President Karen Lewis. The video was initially picked up by Chicago education blogger and former Chicago-area teachers union president Fred Klonsky.

  12 Norine Gutekanst, “How Chicago Teachers Got Organized to Strike,” Labor Notes, December 2012.

  13 Lorraine Forte, “For the Record: Details on the Fact-Finder’s Report,” Catalyst Chicago, July 19, 2012, catalyst-chicago.org.

  14 Later, several such aldermen—clearly jarred by the swift organizing against them—would change their tune, signing onto letters demanding a moratorium on school closures and supporting other union-backed proposals. The teachers’ willingness to confront the Democratic city council members directly paid off.

  15 Kara Spak and Fran Spielman, “47% of Chicago Voters Back Teachers,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 11, 2012. Second poll data from independent polling organization We Ask America, “As Chicago Teachers Strike Enters Fourth Day, a New Poll Proves Majority of Parents and Taxpayers Approve of Fair Contract Fight,” Chicago Teachers Union, September 13, 2012, ctunet.com.

  3

  THE FUTURE

  On the chilly afternoon of September 18, 2012, the parking lot of the union hall housing the CTU’s House of Delegates meeting, usually forlorn, was packed with teachers’ cars and local and national news trucks. A few days earlier, teachers had voted to extend their strike for two days, so all union members would have the chance to fully digest and debate the proposed tentative agreement between the Board of Education and the CTU; a second vote would now be held to determine whether to call off the strike.

  When I arrived, jour
nalists had been milling about for several hours. Local television reporters spoke into their BlackBerrys, informing their editors of nothing; a newsman in a trench coat, perhaps out of boredom, tried holding his ear up against one of meeting room’s exit doors multiple times, futilely hoping to catch any words uttered inside. A normally mild-mannered union staffer seemed to be so incensed at this that I worried the strike might see its first casualty in the form of a well-tailored journalist. I somehow allowed myself to be sucked into an argument with an out-of-town pamphleteer accusing the union’s leadership of selling out its membership and not holding out on the picket line for the immediate establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or something like that.

  Without warning, the doors flew open and a sea of educators in red half walked, half ran through the gauntlet of news cameras and pouncing journalists, some looking terrified as members of the media chased after them rabidly for a quote. In what would become a front-page picture in the Chicago Tribune the next day, one teacher in a bright-red sweater emerged through the glass doors clutching copies of the contract in one hand and a raised fist in the other, a look of pure elation on her face. Off to the side, I struck up conversations with several delegates who weren’t fleeing; they told me that the members had voted overwhelmingly to go back to work the next day.

  I expected these members to share details about the tentative contract’s specifics: what they had gained, what they had no choice but to give up on, joys and disappointments about the collective bargaining process. But all of the teachers I spoke with had little interest in discussing the details of bargaining. They wanted to talk about how the union could capitalize on its energized, tightly organized membership to continue leading a fight for broader educational reforms. One teacher, Eric Skalinder, said he wanted to “focus [the union’s] energy on fighting privatization, advocating for neighborhood schools, all of it”; clinician Kristine Shanley said that the union now needed to prepare a campaign against charter school expansion through closures, so that “every time [CPS] announces a school closing to turn it into a charter, we’re ready to mobilize and fight back.”