The contract approved by the teachers blunted the worst of the school board proposals, included painful takeaways
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Morning picket lines in the neighborhoods were followed by afternoon mass rallies downtown, where on three consecutive days more than 10,000 teach ers flooded the streets. Picket lines were greeted with a constant chorus of honks in support of their strike. Honks came often from CTA bus drivers, fire engines, squad cars, and other city vehicles whose unions have also been in the sights of the union bust ers in City Hall and whose rank and file clearly saw the teachers’ fight as an extension of their own struggles.
Other unions in the city showed support. Teamsters Local 705 provided their union hall for CTU strike headquarters. Officers and members of the Firefight ers Union, SEIU, AFSCME, ATU, and other public-sec tor unions joined teacher picket lines. Teachers unions across the country showed support, including UTLA of Los Angeles, which donated $10,000 to the union’s strike fund. SEIU Local 1, which represents mainte nance and cleaning workers in CPS, honored picket lines. UPS drivers also honored the picket lines, refus ing to deliver to CPS.
Working people in this city stood with the teach ers despite an avalanche of anti-union editorials and news reports from the corporate media. Although the strike caused major inconveniences for working-class parents, over 50% of city residents, and an astounding 66% of parents of CPS students, supported the teach ers in the strike.
The union won popular support by emphasizing that they were fighting for better schools. The union demands for smaller class sizes, more social workers, more libraries, and other resources to help students resonated with Chicago’s working class, who have experienced eroded public services across the board at the same time City Hall hands out hundreds of mil lions each year to corporations and politically con nected developers. A popular sign at teachers’ picket lines and rallies read, “my working conditions are your child’s learning conditions.”
The attack on public education in this city esca lated when Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff for President Obama, took office in 2011. Emanuel has made breaking public-sector unions, especially the teachers union, the cornerstone of his mayoral ty. Emanuel packed the Chicago School Board with bil lionaires—including Penny Pritzker, an heiress of the Hyatt Hotel Chain and Obama fundraiser—who have advocated breaking unions in order to replace public schools with privately run charter schools in Chicago and across the country.
The board cancelled a previously negotiated 4% raise for 2011. Emanuel, with the support of other Demo crats in the Illinois legislature, pushed a new state law that required school districts to develop teacher evaluations that are highly dependent on unreliable standardized tests and undermined teacher senior ity, and limited the Chicago Teachers Union’s bargain ing rights, among other anti-union provisions. The law had several new regulations aimed specifically at the Chicago Teachers Union, including a require ment that 75% of the membership, not just those who 12 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2012 vote, authorize a strike. One of the bill’s proponents, Jonah Edelman, head of the anti-union Stand for Chil dren, declared that the new law would make a Chicago teacher strike impossible.
Union offered vision of how to fix the schools The Chicago Teachers Union, led by a reform lead ership elected in 2010, decided from the beginning that Rahm Emmanuel and his billionaire friends’ “re form” agenda was an outright attack on their union and public education generally. Unlike in other big city school systems, where teachers unions have not put up a fight and even become willing collaborators in the undermining of public education, the CTU refused to be “partners” with the union busters. Instead, they offered a competing vision of how to fix public schools and prepared the rank and file to fight for it. CTU de nounced the “blame the teacher” reform proposals, calling instead for more resources for neighborhood schools.
As bargaining stalled, the teachers union mobilized members in a contract campaign. The teachers and al lied parent and neighborhood organizations distribut ed leaflets in Chicago’s neighborhoods explaining what the struggle was about and how the union was fighting for better schools. The union held a mass indoor rally followed by a march of 5000 teachers through down town Chicago near the end of last school year.
The union than held a strike-authorization vote. An astounding 92% of the bargaining unit voted to autho rize the strike. Not a single one of the 615 CPS Schools voted against the authorization. Two weeks before the strike, a rally of over 10,000 teachers and their sup porters flooded downtown Chicago on Labor Day.
In addition to the public contract campaign, the union also organized itself internally. Each school assigned a picket captain to organize logistics. The union also had a strike headquarters, where teachers and supporters could pick up and distribute leaflets, picket signs, and other strike materials. A daily strike bulletin was pub lished to update members on negotiations and daily strike activities.
As the strike entered its fifth day, the unions’ negoti ating team and the CPS board came close to a tentative agreement. CPS quickly leaked to the media that a deal had been agreed upon and the strike would soon be over. CTU responded that although a deal was close it had not been agreed upon, and in any case the strike could not be suspended until a vote of the union’s House of Delegates.