Strike for America (2 page)

Chicago is no stranger to this agenda. Education policy scholar Pauline Lipman describes the city as “the incubator, test case, and model for the neoliberal urban education
agenda. Chicago is where big city mayors go to see how to restructure their school systems.”
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Chicago's public schools are under the complete control of the mayor, who appoints the school board and chief executive officer; there are no democratic mechanisms whereby citizens can play a role or remove those they deem incompetent or damaging. Mayor Richard M. Daley used this power in 2004 to push “Renaissance 2010,” a program initially designed to close schools but later modified to “turn around” schools (which included firing a school's entire staff) it deemed “failing.” Ninety-two schools in the city are “Ren2010” schools, and three quarters of them have been converted to charter schools.
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Before 2013, the city had closed seventy-five public schools over the previous twelve years under a variety of justifications ranging from underutilization to poor standardized test performance; 40 percent of those schools were reoccupied by privately operated charter schools. In the 2013 round of school closings—the largest in American history—the city moved to close forty-nine elementary schools and one high school program, nearly all of which served majority black students on the city's South and West sides. The expansion of charter schools, however, continues apace.
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Charters are the preferred vehicle for neoliberal education reform, in Chicago and elsewhere, because they allow private
operators to receive public funding but avoid teachers unions or basic disclosure rules about how they spend that money. At the beginning of 2013, there were 110 charter schools in Chicago, nearly twice as many as in 2005. Chicago Public Schools funding for charter schools increases every year, growing from $482 million in 2013 to $570.5 million by 2014, when some 13 percent of CPS students will be attending charters. Only fourteen of those 110 charters were unionized as of mid-2013—which explains the nearly $24,000 gap in average annual pay between nonunion charter and unionized public school teachers' salaries as well as charter teachers' lack of basic workplace protections. Since the 2000s, the CTU's total membership has shrunk by several thousand owing to layoffs, while the nonunion teaching force has expanded.
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In addition to its dubious distinction as a central neoliberal testing ground, Chicago was also the birthplace of American teachers' unionism at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is fitting that a major challenge to the national education reform agenda would come from the CTU, fighting alongside communities bearing the brunt of the neoliberal agenda.

The last four decades in the Chicago Teachers Union saw nearly uninterrupted rule by one organization, the United Progressive Caucus (UPC). The UPC was formed in the 1970s as an amalgamation of racial justice caucuses in an
effort to push a conservative union leadership unconcerned about the widespread racist treatment of both students and teachers. Between 1972, when the caucus first took power, and 1987, the UPC led the union out on strike five times. But by the 2000s, when the neoliberal education agenda was in full swing, the UPC leadership had grown complacent and reluctant to fight back. After a failed attempt at liberal reform in 2001, activist teachers formed a radical caucus, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), to challenge the incumbent leadership; it to emphasized member engagement, direct action, partnership with community groups and other unions, and put forward its own progressive education reform agenda. The origins of that caucus were in organic teacher-community partnerships to oppose school closures and turnarounds in poor and gentrifying communities. Years of organizing and agitating eventually led to that caucus's victory—and with it a new organizing agenda to challenge the free market education consensus.

It was CORE's leadership that helped guide the union and its members to engage in a tactic that has become increasingly rare in the twenty-first-century labor movement: the September 2012 strike. Over 90 percent of all 26,000 teachers, clinicians, and paraprofessionals who make up the union voted to walk off the job. When the strike came, teachers were soon to be found everywhere one looked on Chicago's streets; the city's downtown was engulfed in a sea of red, the union's color, with tens of thousands of educators and their supporters shutting the city down for hours at a time. It was the most explicit and militant rebuke to the free market
consensus on education reform in recent memory, undertaken by one of the largest unions in Chicago.

Said CTU organizer Matt Luskin several weeks after the strike,

The strike came at a time of rising anger against growing inequality and fiscal austerity. Early 2011 saw the occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol in response to Governor Scott Walker's Budget Repair Bill, which gutted collective bargaining rights for public sector workers. The action was led not by union leadership but by unionized graduate students and other private and public-sector union members. Later in the year, a motley crew of mostly young activists responded to a call in
Adbusters
magazine and began Occupy Wall Street, capturing the public's attention for several months and bringing the plight of “the 99 percent” into the national discourse.

Both actions inspired people around the country. They gave voice to the widespread anger about the worsening objective conditions for everyone besides the ultrarich and
made American inequality a central topic of debate nationally. Neither, however, can list many concrete accomplishments. The Wisconsin protests failed to beat back Walker's bill—union leadership, constrained by the limits of a bill passed by a Republican Party in control of all three branches of Wisconsin state government, channeled the momentum from the capitol into several uninspiring and ultimately failed recall campaigns. For all its successes, Occupy Wall Street, hampered in part by its anarchist roots, was unable to articulate any clear demands on the state, much less mobilize public support for a new program of reform.

Neither of these observations is intended to denigrate either uprising; indeed, both played key roles in articulating the rising tide of anger around inequality. But it was the CTU strike that first identified that rising tide in the form of an angry union membership and channeled it into an effective, militant political form, winning real gains and building power both for education workers and the communities they serve. Tactics like building occupations, encampments, and other street actions changed the national dialogue on the neoliberal consensus; the CTU actually slowed the neoliberal project's forward march, wrung some concessions out of it, and positioned itself to better lead fights against that project in the future.

This kind of fight is uncommon for the major US teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the AFT (the CTU being a member of the latter), and the majority of their locals. The period of militant teacher unionism around the Great Depression or amid the upsurges of the
1960s and 1970s—including illegal strikes, jailed leaders and occasional street battles—is a distant memory. Few teachers unions are legally permitted to strike during contract negotiations, and those few are rarely willing to strike, fearing that the tactic will be viewed as too alienating—indicating a lack of concern for affected students. Likewise, few teachers unions have created intimate relationships with students' parents and the communities where they teach, at times using their unions more like insurance companies with which they occasionally file claims rather than as organizations aimed at advancing mutually beneficial struggles.

And few leaders of teachers unions are willing to push back against free market education reformers. Some are comfortable publicly expressing distaste for their more zealous adherents, like former Washington, DC, Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, but not many take on the “vulture philanthropists” at large foundations like the Walton or Gates Foundations or liberals in the Democratic Party championing their agenda. Even fewer have put forward their own vision for what progressive education reform should look like, linking a strong critique of free market reform with their own proposals to shore up education as a public good.

Much of organized labor finds itself in a position similar to that of the national teachers unions—afraid to engage in industrial action or even viewing the strike as an outdated relic—without clear principles guiding what a positive agenda for changing society could look like. Instead, it sticks to a timid insider strategy, hoping to wait out the storm that has decimated so much of the movement over the last four
decades while utilizing top-down organizing techniques that do not engage broad sections of its membership and ignore the world of workers and communities outside its own union.

This “business unionism” has a long history in American labor. Since its birth in the mid-nineteenth century, American labor's leadership has fought against demands for broad-based organizations that address concerns of wider swaths of the working class; it has opposed more leftist politics in favor of a conservative agenda and narrow mission.
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This style of unionism is suicidal. During a time of austerity in particular, it is unable to succeed even on its own parochial terms of delivering better pay and benefits to its members. That is made clear by the declining living standards over the past four decades of even the unionized American working class.

The CTU opted instead for a more militant unionism with close ties to communities to build a broad educational justice movement in Chicago—“social movement unionism.” Unlike business unionism, which views unions' power as coming from their officers' ability to negotiate and win concessions, the CTU's style of unionism sees its power as coming from its members as well as other unions and communities outside the union. For the CTU, that has meant a democratic, bottom-up organizing style that engages the entirety of the union's membership; it has also meant widespread coalition building with organized communities
throughout Chicago. The CTU's program under CORE offers an example of what a fighting left-unionism, rather than the kind of centrist unionism so prevalent throughout American labor history, can look like in a time of austerity. And although it is far too early to tell whether the union's victories are harbingers of a genuine radical politics triumphing over the centrism of recent decades, the possibility that the CTU might blaze such a trail does exist.

The American labor movement is in shambles, teetering on the brink of extinction. The CTU, meanwhile, can be credited with a major defeat against a powerful neoliberal mayor, a newly energized and mobilized membership, and a setback for the free market education agenda. If other sections of the labor movement were to take some cues from the CTU about militant, bottom-up, democratic left-unionism, unions' extinction might become less of a certainty.

When the slate put forward by the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) won the 2010 election for the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), it made few headlines. Some Chicago media covered it, as did a few prescient bloggers, but most ignored it. Stories about labor get short shrift in the mainstream press these days, and stories about internal union battles are almost entirely off the radar. But if local journalists had examined the 2010 CTU leadership election closely they would have realized that, in many ways, a referendum on two starkly different visions of teacher unionism by Chicago's 26,000 educators had just taken place.