CHICAGO—In a strong show of rank-and-file
unity, close to 90% of the membership of the Chicago Teachers Union authorized
the union to strike if the union’s leadership is unable to negotiate a contract
with Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s handpicked school board. The strike vote was
conducted as the mayor has conducted a union-busting campaign against Chicago teachers.
Last year,
citing budget concerns, the mayor’s school board unilaterally cancelled a
negotiated 4% raise for teachers. The union countered that much of the
budget shortfalls in The Chicago Public Schools are due to the city’s diversion
of property tax revenues to Tax Increment Financing funds, which are largely
used to give handouts to politically influential developers and major
corporations. These TIF funds divert hundreds of millions of dollars from the
schools, as well as parks, libraries, and the general city budget.
Past
recipients of the city’s corporate welfare fund include war-profiteer Boeing
(to help them move into a downtown corporate headquarters) and the Chicago
Mercantile Exchange, who received a generous donation from the city for the
worthy cause of helping renovate the bathrooms at the stock exchange.
Adding insult
to injury, the mayor, President Obama’s former chief of staff and close ally,
has been blaming teachers for the poor performance of Chicago schools. Emmanuel has called
for more non-union charter schools, school “turn arounds,” in which all
teachers in a given school are fired, and has pushed to eliminate tenure and
step increases in pay based on seniority.
Emmanuel’s
school board has proposed in negotiations that teachers receive “merit” pay
increases based on students test scores. Teachers and their unions have
responded that the over-emphasis on test scores has resulted in teachers being
forced to “teach to the test” instead of responding to the real education needs
of their students.
Teachers
point out that there is a shortage of social workers and teachers aides in
schools; class sizes need to be reduced so teachers can realistically work with
all their students; curriculum in schools has been deadened to simply teach to
standardized tests; and 25% of CPS schools lack a library.
Mayor
Emmanuel was a major backer of SB 7, an Illinois state law that severely weakened
teacher unions. Written and proposed by tea-party-type educational
“reformers” in the misnamed group, Stand for Children, it was passed with
almost universal Democratic and Republican support and then signed by the
Democratic governor of this “blue state.” The law also won the backing of the
mayor for its restrictions on the Chicago Teacher Union’s right to strike.
The law
stipulated that CTU would need 75% of the membership to vote in favor of
authorization to strike. Typically, unions need only 50% plus one of members
who vote to authorize a strike. One of the right-wing backers of the law
boasted that SB 7 would make it impossible for CTU to strike. He was
proven wrong when the CTU organized the all-out vote mobilization that resulted
in 90% of the active membership to not only vote, but vote in favor of strike
authorization.
Part of
that law gave the mayor the power to impose a longer school day, starting next
year, without negotiations with the union. In contract negotiations the
union has proposed a proportional increase in pay for longer hours
worked. The union has also proposed smaller class sizes and more resources
for them to do their jobs properly. But such reasonable demands have not
stopped the corporate press in Chicago from waging a campaign to blame
“greedy” teachers for putting themselves in the way of “educational reform.”
The
leadership of the CTU, elected in 2010, was born from a rank-and-file movement,
Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), who waged a several-years-long
struggle against school closings and other fights, as the previous leadership
of the union did next to nothing. Since being elected, the CORE leadership has organized the
membership of the CTU around several fights culminating in the recent contract
campaign. Evidence of this is the fact that not a single one of the 615
schools in CPS voted against strike authorization.
In May, CTU organized an indoor rally, followed
by a march in downtown Chicago, as a show of strength. About
6000 teachers rallied and marched to show the mayor that he could not bully Chicago teachers anymore.
> The
article above was written by David Bernt, and is reprinted from the July 2012
print edition of Socialist Action newspaper.
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