Book Review - Modeling the Education They Want To Be: The Great Chicago Teachers Union Transformation
According to labor journalist Micah Uetricht, it's high time for trade
unions in the United States to decide whether they want to wither away and
follow a "business unionism" model of concessions and shrinkage, or follow
"social movement unionism," a bottom-up, democratic organizing strategy
that is aligned with social justice movements throughout the country.
The Chicago Teacher's Union [CTU], Uetricht writes in his book, *Strike for
America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity
<http://www.versobooks.com/books/1569-strike-for-america>*, is a prime
example of the latter, a feisty, transparent, activist-led group that is
willing to fight the good fight and challenge the entrenched attitudes that
have made unions irrelevant to far too many workers. Uetricht makes clear
that the CTU was not always a beacon and charts the union's transition from
a staid, top-down organization to one that engages teachers,
paraprofessionals, students and neighborhood residents in community
betterment efforts throughout Chicago.
The shift, he writes, began in 2010, when a slate of teachers calling
themselves the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators [CORE] took the reins of
the 26,000 member CTU from CORE's predecessors, the United Progressive
Caucus. "By 2010, the UPC leadership had atrophied," Uetricht explains, and
was cowering in the face of school closures, the growth of nonunion charter
schools, and the Renaissance 2010 "free market education reforms"
championed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and supported by US Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan.
Not so, CORE. Its slogan - a union that actually fights for its members -
proved early on that it was willing and ready to challenge authority. "They
held multiple forums on cuts to public education. They built relationships
with community organizations fighting school closures. They held a study
group on Naomi Klein's *The Shock Doctrine*, which argues that neoliberal
reform is pushed by elites during times of crisis, when the population is
disoriented," Uetricht reports.
By late 2008, shortly after its founding, CORE began organizing teachers in
schools that were slated for shuttering. Then, in January 2009, it
sponsored a massive public forum on education reform that drew 500 people,
including hundreds of educators. It quickly became apparent that the
audience wanted to do something concrete and, in conjunction with a parent
group called GEM, The Grassroots Education Movement, CORE activists began
planning a visible pushback, taking to the streets and voicing their
outrage in newspapers, over the airwaves, and through social media. By May
2010, a CTU election resulted in a CORE victory, with Karen Lewis at the
helm.
The improvement in teacher morale was immediate. "In the past," Uetricht
writes, "the union had operated under a servicing model, where the union's
staff handled whatever problems teachers faced in the classroom or with an
administrator; if the teacher had no problems, interaction with union staff
was unlikely. Now, teachers themselves were going to be carrying out the
union's broad agenda for educational justice."
CORE quickly allocated the resources needed to create a CTU organizing
department, something that had never before existed. What's more, the new
regime slashed the salaries of union staffers so that what they earned was
in step with teachers' pay. In addition, they created a summer program that
trained activist teachers to organize their peers. Contract Committees were
formed in every school to ensure grassroots input and provide a ready
conduit for information sharing with cafeteria and maintenance workers, who
were not part of the CTU. Finally, the union decided to take on more than
bread-and-butter issues. "The union made publicly funded corporate
subsidies, most notably through the city's Tax Incremental Financing [TIF]
system, a major issue and worked alongside community groups and other
unions to expand the CTU's organizing to include the issue of austerity for
poor neighborhoods of color throughout the city," Uetricht notes.
Slowly but surely, he adds, the nearly-moribund CTU of the early 2000s was
becoming invigorated. This was tested, however, when the Emmanuel
administration laid off 1,500 teachers, and the Illinois legislature passed
SB7, a bill that required a strike authorization threshold of 75 percent
and limited the issues over which a union could refuse to work.
Nonetheless, by September 2012, things had reached a breaking point and the
city's refusal to offer CTU members a decent contract was the last straw.
Despite SB7, the union stunned city and state officials by taking a strike
vote that resulted in more than 90 percent of the membership agreeing that
it was time to walk off the job. It was the first teacher strike in Chicago
in 25 years.
"The entire city felt transformed," Uetricht writes. "Teachers were engaged
in highly visible, militant, mass action, and there was a widespread sense
throughout the city of the legitimacy and necessity of such action - for
educators and for other workers . . . The union held mass rallies nearly
every day with tens of thousands of teachers and their supporters . . .
Teachers began organizing actions themselves, independent of the CTU
leadership. No union staffers planned the small marches on the mayor's
house during the strike; teachers planned these themselves."
This had an enormous impact on union activists because the ability to do
what they felt was necessary - without having to jump through bureaucratic
approval hoops - gave the members a sense of CTU ownership. Eight days
later, when a tentative contract settlement was reached, they voted to
extend the strike by two days to give themselves a chance to thoroughly
digest the document rather than allow Lewis and the negotiating team to
tell them what it said. "For the first time," Uetricht writes, "teachers
were studying every word of their contract, the principal document
governing their work lives." On October 3, 79 percent of the membership
voted in favor of the accord.
And the lessons? *Strike for America* concludes that "Rather than trying to
meet free-market education reformers in the middle on their proposals to
privatize schools or increase teacher evaluations based on standardized
testing - as national teachers unions have done - the CTU was
uncompromising in its rejection of the demands of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and
corporate reform groups. Rather than allowing such groups to paint the
union as a roadblock to educational progress, the CTU put forth its own
positive proposals to reform schools, grounded in an unapologetic vision of
progressive education that would be funded by taxing the rich."
That said, the CTU and other progressive groups working to oppose charter
schools, end standardized testing and stop union busting nonetheless have a
mountain of work ahead of them as those eager to dismantle public education
continually float neoliberal plans. Indeed, privatization advocates have
received hefty grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates, Eli and Edythe Broad
and Walton Family Foundations, making the playing field extremely uneven.
Worse, Uetricht reports that both the National Education Association and
American Federation of Teachers have done little to buck these alarming
trends. He further argues that their continual pandering to the Democrats -
to the tune of $30 million in the 2012 election cycle - represents a
colossal waste of funds, money that would be better spent on improving
schools, promoting healthy communities, advocating on behalf of workers and
the poor, and planning an effective opposition to the conservative agenda
that presently holds sway in both political parties.
The CTU has shown us that it is possible to fight back and win. But as
Uetricht points out, "Nationally, strike levels are at all-time lows. Every
decade since the 1970s the number of strikes undertaken by workers has
steadily diminished; it might be an exaggeration to state that today the
strike is nearly extinct, but not by much. The number of workdays lost to
strikes in the post-World War II period, labor's heyday, was 60 million; in
2010 it was 180,000." As is obvious, it will take a radical re-imagining to
turn today's labor movement into a force for change.
Still, American workers have been on the losing end for decades, so if not
now, when?
[*Eleanor J. Bader is a teacher and freelance journalist based in Brooklyn,
New York, She writes for *RHRealityCheck.org <http://rhrealitycheck.org/>,
The Brooklyn Rail, Theasy.com <http://www.theasy.com/>* and other
progressive and feminist blogs and magazines*.]
Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission. May not be reprinted
without permission <editor@truthout.org>.