The Chicago Teachers Union strike: beyond mythology - Earl Silbar

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike of 2012 is widely believed to be a major success, a big win for progressive, member-driven leadership. Indeed, there were big successes won by the strike preparation and from support for the strike among members, the wider public, and especially by parents during the strike. However, there were major problems both in strike strategy and the settlement itself. I write this to bring out some of both aspects for consideration and to learn from. The 2012 CTU strike had the potential to accomplish far more than it did. By choosing not to fight over school closings, the leadership undermined its stated goal: “Defend and improve our schools! Don’t close them!” What’s more, major concessions greatly enhanced management’s freedom to terminate teachers with satisfactory ratings.

This account discusses some features of the strike preparation and the settlement without going into the strike actions and how the contract was finally ratified. Educators, as part of the wider workingclass, face unending and increasing corporatization of America and capitalistinspired attacks. By sharing oft-hidden facts about the strike settlement, I hope to dispel rose-colored myths in order to assist in the pressing challenge of our days: help develop our capacity to effectively resist these corporate attacks.

Fifty years of left activism have taught me that facing hard facts is more useful than building on the sand of comforting myths. My hope is that this article contributes towards creating that resistance. And that growing, effective, working-class solidarity and resistance will itself lay the basis for the people-first, sustainable world that so many of us want.

Organizing for the Strike Vote

The CTU leadership, its staff, dedicated activists (especially in the progressive Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators [CORE]) and allies conducted a classic and creative campaign to win the strike authorization vote. They expressed long-held teacher resentment and frustration, with decades of deteriorating work conditions and no union resistance. Building on the promise of an effective fight, this leadership team developed active contract committees in hundreds of schools. Through these committees and individual efforts, they did outreach to parents, held local school-based rallies, and engaged many students around the theme “Improve our schools, don’t close them!” Facing a legal hurdle they had to win—75 percent of all members’ votes—the CTU members shocked everyone with a spectacular 92 percent (of all members) strike authorization vote in late spring of 2012.

Even before the strike began, this unprecedented and massive strike vote shocked the city’s elites and won major concessions from corporate-backed Mayor Rahm Emanuel: the CTU won 500 art and music jobs (if for only one year), forced the mayor to drop his proposal to replace teachers’ pay schedules with “merit pay,” and broke the mayor’s strategy of isolating the CTU as “just greedy and selfish teachers.”

This internal organizing campaign deserves close study; it set the stage for all the gains, including winning strong support for younger teachers—people who often see unions as conservative obstacles to educational innovation. The focus on “improve our schools” and “our kids deserve the best” set the terms of the fight, creating public support while energizing the members. The CTU leadership essentially defined the fight, taking it to the mayor by contrasting his kids’ education (in the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools) with the sorely-lacking public schools. In effect, they made the fight appear to be over class privilege and fairness—a winning PR campaign that energized members and won parents’ crucial support.

Strike Contract Settlement: Hidden Defeats and Lessons

Following four days of a spectacularly supported strike with mass marches filling sections of Chicago’s downtown with striking teachers in red union t-shirts during working hours, CTU President Karen Lewis recommended that the union accept the negotiated settlement, which members eventually did. Make no mistake; there were real gains that were won before the strike, some improvements in contract language and a small raise. However, at the same time, most accounts have ignored several important concessions by the union (visit http://www.ctunet.net for contract provisions):

1) The CTU accepted student “achievement” as 25 percent of teachers’ evaluation, effective fall 2013. The contract began implementation two years before state law required it and before any state standards were set for student achievement.

2) The CTU contract stipulates that two consecutive years of acceptable evaluations shall constitute the basis for termination should management wish to do that. This further undermines what little job security remains and further opens members to school board and management bullying, intimidation and discrimination.

3) No limits were set on the mayor’s proposed closing of 50 neighborhood schools, perhaps the largest focus of the union’s outreach and public support (“Improve our schools! Don’t close them!”). This is legally a “permissible” subject of bargaining, meaning that management can and did refuse to bargain over that and the union could not legally strike over that issue. Being “permissible” also opens the door for other forces—such as parents, community groups, students, and religious and union organizations—to have intervened and pressured the school board to negotiate over the closings. The truth is that there was no CTU member education or mobilization to promote such pressure. Public relations rhetoric? Yes. Effective action? No.

“Save and improve local schools, don’t close them!” was the CTU’s theme before and during the strike. At the end of the day, there was no fight to stop the closings (49 of those schools were in fact closed in the spring of 2013 after a very weak response to the CTU-sponsored marches across the city in protest). This failure left the union and its members vulnerable to the charge that it was all about narrow selfinterest despite the successful PR rhetoric. The CTU’s refusal to prepare for this fight also left some teachers wondering if the CTU was serious about this fight.

In actuality, the mayor publicly gloated over winning his key corporate agenda in the contract: closing 49 local schools while increasing charter schools, winning the longer school day with no proportional pay raise, and tying teachers’ evaluation to student “achievement.” He was so visibly exuberant that the CTU leadership had to publicly ask him to stop gloating because that made it hard to “sell [the contract] to the members.”

“Yes, there is a class war, and my side is winning!” -Warren Buffett.

Our Alternative?

Was there another road to have taken? I think so, but that would have required a different vision and strategy. Forcing the school board and mayor to negotiate over the threatened closings would have meant facing down certain court injunctions with mass action. In fact, a local judge did issue an injunction against the strike even without such mass actions. It was withheld until the Monday following CTU President Lewis’s recommendation to accept the contract.

Preparing to actually force the closings issue would have meant preparing members for normal consequences facing unions and workers who refuse to obey court injunctions: leaders can get arrested and jailed; unions face huge fines; individual teachers can face charges, fines, and firings if they lose. Winning strikes erases these actions.

Forcing the fight to save the schools and turn the tide means serious consequences for which people must be prepared with cold facts and effective organizing to gather determined allies. Making this fight would have required winning parents, students, community groups, other unions, and wider working public support for mass direct actions like marches, strikes, and occupations to back it up and make it happen. These are examples of organizing our side in the really-existing if one-sided class war.

To make such a serious challenge to the corporate agenda and power requires, in essence, an approach that understands and acts on the common interest in quality education for the masses, not just the few. And the common threat posed by corporate agenda to working people’s jobs, pay, benefits, our environment, continuing racism and sexism, etc. In short, it requires organizing based on working-class solidarity around everyday, real-life issues.

This CTU leadership team had no such plan or vision. They never initiated discussion among the membership of what such a fight would take or the stakes and potential ramifications. With its choices, the CTU leadership rejected waging such a fight in the strike of 2012. Instead, it relied on deeply moving rhetoric, meticulous and even brilliant organizing, and carefully controlled militant tactics. Adopting a strategy of class-based organizing is no guarantee of success, but it does allow us to see how far we can go. Ultimately, we saw again the road-most-taken union strategy of limiting the fight while making and then masking major concessions. We must do better.

Transcribed by Juan Conatz