https://socialistaction.org/2019/11/08/chicago-teachers-divided-over-strike-settlement/
Chicago teachers divided over strike settlement
Socialist Action / 1 day ago
By Jeff Mackler
Twenty-five thousand Chicago teachers, affiliated with the American
Federation of Teachers Local 1, AFL-CIO, returned to work on October 31
following a divided vote of the Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU)
700-member Delegate Assembly (DA) to end the union’s 11-day strike. The
vote to accept the five-year tentative contract was 60 percent in favor
and 40 percent opposed. Despite the DA’s “tentative” settlement approval
and its authorization to return to work immediately, the union’s
rank-and-file will also vote on the contract on November 20, the date
when the Chicago Board of Education is expected to approve a final
settlement term recommended by the Board’s negotiating team, headed by
Mayor Lori Lightfoot, wherein five make-up days are to be proposed for
approval.
The school district’s 7,500 non-teaching staff of custodians, special
education assistants and school aides represented by SEIU Local 73,
which supported the striking teachers, voted to accept their separate
contract on October 31.
The divided teachers’ vote reflected sharp disagreements among Chicago
teachers who took seriously the union’s stance to fight for a series of
demands that the school board considered “out of scope” of the union’s
collective bargaining agreement and state law. These included the
district’s support for affordable housing for teachers, students and
support staff through Section 8 voucher programs and use tax increment
financing funds, an expansion of sanctuary for immigrant students, the
addition of community schools that provide a myriad of social services
for poor students, and an extension of the city’s moratorium on new
charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated. Few,
if any of these demands were incorporated in the final contract. The CTU
also demanded sharp and enforceable reductions in class size and the
hiring of additional counselors, librarians and nurses.
CTU president Jesse Sharkey announced at the strike’s outset—after Mayor
Lightfoot had promised to include unspecified staffing and class size
provisions in the contract—that parents should be prepared for a “short
term” strike, implying that perhaps the remaining issues could be
settled post-haste. Sharkey was a founding member of the left-wing
Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, which took over the union’s
leadership in 2010, promising to take CTU beyond the politics of
bread-and-butter unionism and fight for the city’s broader working
class. Ninety-four percent of the CTU’s ranks voted in late September to
authorize a strike in a school district of 300,00 students, the third
largest in the nation, that is largely re-segregated, poor and
historically underfunded. Like many of the nation’s large urban school
districts, forty-seven percent of Chicago’s students are Hispanic, 37
percent are African-American and 10 percent are white; some 76 percent
of students are economically disadvantaged and 16,000 are homeless.
Terms of the new contract
The CTU did achieve enforceable gains in class size and staff support,
with the new contract including capping elementary school class sizes at
28 and secondary schools at 31 and guaranteeing at least one counselor,
nurse and librarian at every Chicago school. The contract also included
a 16-percent salary increase to be phased in over the course of five
years. Little or no progress was made in the myriad of other important
issues where the union had pledged to fight for community interests.
Rank-and-filers who voted No! on the contract insisted that the CTU
press on for significantly lower class sizes, for an elementary school
teacher preparation period, for additional support for special
education, for a three-year contract and for the restoration of the full
number of school days.
With regard to the latter, dissenting teachers sought to both guarantee
students a full school year and to allow teachers to recover the full
eleven days lost in pay over the course of the strike as opposed to the
five make-up days tentatively approved in the final contract. Teachers
fully understood that the pay lost in their salaries was to be used by
the board to settle the contract at teachers’ expense. Said President
Sharkey at the final media conference, “There are some things we didn’t
achieve; it’s not a day for photo ops and victory laps.”
Indeed, regarding photo ops, the final settlement was announced at an
awkward press conference where Sharkey demonstrably declined to stand
beside Lightfoot as she reported on the contract agreement. This was
sparked by an incident in the hours preceding the final agreement
wherein CTU’s Vice President Stacy Davis Gates was stopped at a City
Hall elevator by Mayor Lightfoot’s security team and barred from
participating in the final round of negotiations that ended the strike.
Davis Gates told the Chicago Sun Times, “I couldn’t even go with Jesse
[Sharkey] or our attorney to complete the return-to-work agreement. I
was stopped at the elevators by her security and [told] that I couldn’t
go to the fifth floor and be a part of those return-to-work
negotiations. I’ve been at the table for everything, [including] the
meeting we had with her … earlier in the week, but was refused entry. It
was kind of shocking.”
In separate statements, Mayor Lightfoot alternatively stated that Davis
Gates’ exclusion was merely a technical matter concerning the final
agreement terms being resolved by herself and Sharkey, plus their
respective attorneys. Said Lightfoot, “This was intended to be a
principal-to-principal discussion. He’s the president of the union. I’m
the mayor of the city.” But in a separate statement Lightfoot made
public her personal dissatisfaction with Davis Gates’ sharp criticisms
of the Mayor and the Chicago School Board over their refusal to bargain
over critical contract terms. This closing incident was an indication
that the far from overwhelming Delegate Assembly vote had its
reflections in the CTU’s top leadership.
AFT president Weingarten intervenes
In the course of the strike the AFT’s national president Randy
Weingarten visited Chicago teachers several times, on each occasion
touting the AFT’s dedication to not only fighting for teachers’ rights
but for simultaneously fighting for the needs of students and parents
for quality education. Weingarten cited the examples of the successes of
last year’s “red state” strikes in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma and
elsewhere, where teachers won major gains following militant strikes
that inspired broad community support. For Weingarten and the top
bureaucrats who preside over the AFT however, their advocacy of teachers
fighting for the broader rights of students, parents and working class
communities is tragically a rhetorical device to win parental support in
keeping their children out of school during strikes and avoiding the
usual school district bureaucracy mantra that “highly paid,” if not
“racist” teachers are in reality striking against the right of poor kids
for a decent education. Indeed, Democrat Mayor Lightfoot freely engaged
in the fiction that her Chicago School Board’s 100 percent Democratic
Party members were the champions of students and public education but
were “legally” restricted in what they could negotiate by virtue of
extreme local and state budgetary limitations, restrictions on the
“scope” of collective bargaining and all others matters financial. They
were joined in this poormouthing by the Chicago Sun Times and Chicago
Tribune and literally all other manner of corporate institutions who
daily pilloried the teachers for demanding what the capitalist elite
deemed legally and fiscally impossible.
Weingarten’s tactical message to striking teachers is most often, “It’s
one thing to go out on strike; it’s quite another to get back in.” Any
strike that lasts beyond a week or so, the AFT leadership counsels, is
automatically threatened with disaster as working class parents are
increasingly pressed to provide childcare for their children and
financially pressed teachers begin to cross union picket lines. The
combination of these factors, according to the AFT tops, can only led to
an increasing deteriorating of the union’s bargaining position if not an
abject and humiliating defeat. That teachers produce no commodities for
the market as compared to strikes in capitalism’s for-profit industrial
sectors, is also a major consideration of local school boards who pay no
financial cost in prolonged teacher strikes and who are more than
willing to bleed teachers in lengthy strikes for no other reason than to
sometimes use the unpaid salaries “saved” in future settlements.
Lesson of the red state strikes
Weingarten’s reference to the increasing militancy of the nation’s
teachers as exemplified by the red state (Republican Party) strikes
misses the central lessons of these victories entirely. The red state
strikes in some six states broke every AFT rule in the book regarding
how to win great victories.
•They were state-wide political strikes of indefinite duration that
demanded that state legislatures return in full the precise billions of
dollars stolen from public education and social services over the course
of the past ten years that had been transferred by the states’
legislatures to the coffers of the corporate elite.
•They demanded not only the return of stolen educational funds but the
return of all funds effectively transferred from all public service
sector budgets, thus cementing the support of virtually all state
workers and their families.
By these simple demands they won the hearts and minds of the state’s
working class, indeed the hearts and minds of the nation’s working
people. The striking teachers joined with their communities to provide
food and community facilities for students during the course of the
strike. This fundamental break from the inherent limitations of business
teacher unionism is the only serious explanation for the red strike
victories.
In contrast, the CTU strike, as well as last year’s teacher strikes in
Los Angeles and Oakland, were conducted by the old rules of the game,
that is, they were local strikes of limited duration, isolated from the
city’s overall public employees and directed largely against consciously
underfunded local school districts with large communities of Latino,
African-American and other oppressed nationalities. In truth, local and
state education and most all public service budgets more generally have
been dramatically slashed, along with the federal budget, to bailout a
crisis-ridden capitalism. In all these short-duration single school
district strikes, where close to a majority of the teachers voted No! on
the final contract, the overwhelming majority of striking teachers
consciously cast their fate in magnificent acts of solidarity with their
students and their oppressed communities and to advance their own
totally justified needs only to be undercut by the vision of frightened
and “practical” union officials whose scope of strategies and tactics
were limited to the financial figures presented to them by school officials.
The CTU, along with the city’s bureaucrats, who head some seven other
public employee unions, once again proved incapable of uniting all city
workers in a common fight against the ever-deepening encroachments on
every aspect of public life. Had the CTU strike been joined with the
city’s highly unionized workers, the outcome could have been
qualitatively different.
President Sharkey’s carefully chosen words advising Chicago parents to
prepare for a “short strike” were but his hope and prayer that the CTU
might quickly extract a few more bargaining concessions to assuage the
CTU ranks and quickly end the union’s strike.
The role of the Democratic Party
Mayor Lightfoot on the other hand, a relative newcomer Democrat to
Chicago politics, had another outcome in mind. Understanding full well
the self-imposed limitations of routinely conducted teacher strikes, she
and her union-busting Democratic Party machine were well prepared.
Indeed, Lightfoot, an African-American Democrat, along with her team of
African-American negotiators had retained for contract negotiations the
same legal counsel as former mayors Rahm Emanuel and Richard Daley.
“What’s happening at the bargaining table on the management side is not
really any different than what we had under Rahm,” said CTU executive
board member Kenzo Shibata. But Shibata neglected to mention that the
CTU supported not Democrat Lightfoot but yet another “lesser evil”
Democrat in the last mayoral race.
At best the CTU strike ended with only limited gains for teachers,
tragically in significant part paid for by the lost wages of teachers
themselves. In the context of the union’s promised fight against the
ever-deepening racist, classist and anti-immigrant attacks on public
education, little was achieved.
The red state strikes of last year gained national attention and
inspired workers
everywhere that working class unity in the face of generalized corporate
plunder could wrench significant victories. But these strikes were not
without serious limitations. The leaders of the AFT and the National
Education Association pressed the leaders of these statewide strikes to
cast their future to the electoral arena. Some 400 teachers or their
supported candidates were slated to run as Democrats in the 2018-midterm
elections. As with the national AFL-CIO misleaders, the national
teachers’ unions are wedded to the Democratic Party, the historic
graveyard of all fighting social movements. Indeed, it was the Obama
administration that presided over the most extensive cuts in education
and social services in recent memory.
Breaking with the twin parties of capitalism in combination with the
class struggle strategies brought to the fore during the red state
strikes is the only road to transforming today’s moribund labor movement
into a fighting force capable of winning decisive future victories.
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November 8, 2019 in Uncategorized.
Related posts
After week-long strike, Oakland teachers’ contract falls short
Chicago Teachers Union sets Oct. 11 strike date
Chicago teachers cancel strike and accept contract
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David Hume
“ In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees
of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral
evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. ”
― David Hume,
