The best reporting on this strike that I've seen. It's interesting that Brian
Becker on the Loud and Clear podcast, never had anyone on the program
representing this specific point of view. He's a socialist and an organizer.
The only part of the article that I take issue with, is the part that
criticizes the movement of some of the successful strikers into the Democratic
primaries. The fact is, the Democratic Party is there and functioning, whether
or not we like it. So if some better people get into it, enough of them might
change it for the better. I know that's opposite to what true socialists and
communists think, but I'm willing to try anything.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, November 09, 2019 10:27 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Chicago teachers divided over strike settlement
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,