Strike for America (6 page)

Successfully capitalizing on members' discontent with centrist unionism by mounting a leadership challenge from the left is a monumentally difficult achievement in its own right. If radicals wrest control of their union, they are faced with endless problems of running a massive union bureaucracy, for which years in a factory, hospital, or classroom have not prepared them. The natural impulse for the supporters of such a group is to close ranks around their leaders, against whom attacks from the boss and the reactionary elements within the union never stop. CORE has managed to simultaneously defend and support its leadership in power and to maintain an open environment to criticize that leadership, to ensure it does not succumb to the conservative forces facing any union.

The Rank and File

While CORE activists based their caucus on the lessons of failed attempts to reform the CTU and the objective conditions faced by Chicago educators in the early twenty-first century, they were also drawing from a long lineage of labor radicals who had transformed their unions into militant, democratic organizations—not just through leadership challenges to replace conservative leaders with progressives but through the building of rank-and-file worker power independent of the union bureaucracy.

Adherents to this strategy see the stratum of labor leadership, the “bureaucracy” highly prevalent in American unions, as having its own set of interests separate from those of the union members, leading leadership to often act on behalf of their own interests rather than those of the workers so as to reproduce their power and prestige—and, often, their wealth. Thus it is often necessary for labor radicals to fight both the boss, attempting to extract more and more profit from them, and the union bureaucracy, who will attempt to clamp down on any kind of worker activity that could loosen its grip on power and threaten its privileged position as the “working-class aristocracy.”

Such organizing has often been carried out by socialists throughout American labor history, from the pitched union battles during the Great Depression up to the twenty-first century. In 1934, facing conservative union leadership at the international and local levels, radical Teamsters in Minneapolis organized workers independently of official leadership
to—in the words of socialist leader and rank-and-file organizer Farrell Dobbs—“aim the workers' fire straight at the employers and catch the union bureaucrats in the middle.” (Some CTU staffers and activists held a study group on
Teamster Rebellion
, Dobbs's book, in the lead-up to the 2012 strike.) Eventually the strategy led to not only a string of organizing victories headed by rank-and-file workers but also the Minneapolis general strike of 1934—an event that never would have come to pass if the dissidents had simply attempted to gain leadership rather than transform their local from the bottom up.

In 1976, members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters formed the reform organization Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). Its aim was to capitalize on rank-and-file anger at corrupt and inept union leadership by posing repeated challenges like no votes on dismal contracts and forming independent worker committees on issues facing long-haul truckers and other members of the union. Nearly two decades after its founding, after years of organizing workers independent of the union bureaucracy, the TDU played a key role—in the first democratic election in the union's history—in electing Ron Carey as the Teamsters' international president. This was the election that led to the successful national United Parcel Service strike in 1997 and eventually tipped the balance of power in the AFL-CIO, kicking out Lane Kirkland, its deeply conservative president, in 1995.
⁸

Such rank-and-file efforts today are often associated with the organization Labor Notes and have been carried out by everyone from New York City transit workers in the mid-2000s to New York State nurses today. The key is the recognition of rank-and-file workers themselves as the real movers of reform rather than any individual contender for leadership, no matter how charismatic or politically principled. The CTU is firmly within this tradition of organizing, which helped lead to the overwhelming majority of the union's membership (79 percent in the 2013 union election) backing CORE's confrontational, member-led, leftist style of unionism.

The CTU has grown into a dissident, radical caucus of rank-and-file teachers in strong partnership with community organizations; this is the vehicle that brought its signature brand of confrontational unionism into being. But there were no shortcuts to building the kind of fighting union that the CTU has become in the last three years; many of the caucus's leaders had been fighting this fight for a decade, others far longer. CORE transformed the CTU by educating and agitating teachers about school reform and its place in a broader neoliberal project to dismantle public education, and these now-radicalized rank-and-file teachers would eventually provide the sober vision of what the union was up against—and the kind of confrontational unionism needed to fight it.

At the same time, the union's left leadership positioned the union as a representative of CPS students and their families. Even parents who weren't actively involved in
union fights knew of the devastating effects that neoliberal education reform had had on their children, including those due to widespread school closures, particularly in poor neighborhoods of color. When the CTU presented itself publicly as an organization actively and uncompromisingly opposed to such reforms—in an explicit way that had not been done by previous union leadership—and made the case for why they hurt students, CPS parents began to back them. In the public battle over who actually represented the interests of poor and working-class schoolchildren, the union won out over the neoliberal education reformers.

Because education reformers are pushing the consensus on education reform to the right by making their case directly to liberals (the traditional backers of teachers unions), effectively splitting those unions apart from the Democratic Party, teachers unions must appeal directly to the American public, on both local and national levels. This must be done not simply through slick public relations campaigns but through genuine partnership with communities. Teachers unions, guided by a vision of education equality and defending education as a public good, should bargain for improved conditions for all students.

While the blame heaped upon teachers unions for the dismal state of much of the urban education system is certainly disingenuous, used as a justification for a project to dismantle public education, it is also true that teachers unions have largely failed the parents of public school students over the years. Too many teachers unions have
pursued agendas of self-interest for decades, focusing solely on bread-and-butter issues even at times of great upheaval among communities outside of schools, from 1960s and 1970s-era conflicts in Newark and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn to the CTU itself throughout its history.

Where teachers unions could have played key roles alongside community members fighting for better schools, they often remained neutral or actively hostile to activists' demands, pursuing an agenda that advanced their own interests. The long history of such actions has given the neoliberal reformers a clear opening for attacks.

Teachers unionism without social justice concerns might have been able to survive during the peak of the Keynesian consensus. Now, however, there is a societywide sense that reform requires tacking hard to the right. The only way that collective bargaining in public education can withstand the neoliberal attacks it now faces is to pursue a social movement unionism that genuinely sees its central purposes as fighting for teachers
and
students and preserving public education as a public good.

Otherwise, parents confronted with crumbling schools and unresponsive bureaucracies will continue to see the freemarket reformers as the only ones seeming to be seriously concerned about their children's education (disingenuous though they may be); the reformers, meanwhile, will have free rein to continue their attacks on teachers unions, likely with parents' backing.

In short, the only way teachers unions can survive in
the twenty-first century is to adopt the kinds of broad social justice concerns—alongside parents, communities, and others—that the CTU has come to stand and fight for.

In the year leading up to September 2012, most Chicagoans familiar with the battles between the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the Board of Education thought a work stoppage would never take place. Neoliberal reformers had worked to pass new laws in the state legislatures attempting to make a strike impossible. Many observers assumed that while the fight between the board and the union would continue at public hearings, in the media, and in the streets, the legal barriers to more militant action were too great.

What's more, common understanding about the use of strikes as a tactic, particularly by public sector workers and
especially
by teachers, suggested that even if a strike were possible, it would be far from prudent. The public, so the narrative went, had turned so far against public workers that a strike could only hurt the latter's chances to win their demands.

Yet on September 9, 2012, Chicagoans turning on their TVs to any local nightly newscast were faced with the very
thing the free marketers had tried to make impossible: the sight of CTU President Karen Lewis announcing to the world: “We have failed to reach an agreement that would prevent a labor strike … In the morning, no CTU members will be inside our schools. We will walk the picket lines.”

As Lewis and the other union leadership left the press conference and walked back through the doors of their downtown offices, a single union member in a red CTU T-shirt stood behind, holding a sign that read “ON STRIKE.”

It wasn't supposed to be this way. A strike was supposed to be off the table. And, for most other teachers union locals around the country, it would have stayed there. But over the preceding two years CORE had created an organizing apparatus that blanketed the city's schools, turning a previously unprecedented number of teachers into activists. The newly trained educators then worked to educate and agitate the membership about the gravity of the threats facing teachers and public education broadly, and helped teachers become comfortable with the decision to strike.

The union's leadership was comfortable with industrial action, guided by a left politics and an embrace of confrontational tactics. But given the new legal restraints foisted on the union, intended to make such an action an impossible, a strike would never have come to pass without a previously unprecedented level of development of the union's membership as activists.

Images of Chicago streets overflowing with teachers dressed in red circulated in mainstream media worldwide during and after the strike. But at the time CORE took power,
such actions were completely foreign to the union—even under reform leadership.

Jesse Sharkey recalled the union leadership signing a contract in 1998, ten months before its expiration, “without so much as a single rally.” A rally to oppose Renaissance 2010 during the UPC administration drew only a few hundred teachers—a tiny percentage of the union's total membership and far from enough to convince any politicians that they were a threat. (Bizarrely, a video from the rally shows the crowd chanting not anti-Ren2010 slogans but the president's name.) If CORE were to take leadership, it would be critical to build an organizational culture in which members felt comfortable with taking control and staging confrontational actions in the streets.

In May 2010, a month before the union's election, CORE organized a mass protest at City Hall. Caucus activists plastered schools with 30,000 fliers, with giant CORE logos on the bottom to make sure that union members knew who was behind the rally. Four thousand showed up, halting traffic in the heart of downtown Chicago at rush hour; there, teachers joyously defied the order of several police officers by leaving the sidewalk and taking to the street. Union officials tried to claim credit for the action, but it was clear that CORE had actually organized it. It was the first time most teachers had engaged in such a mass action. CORE, an independent group, was pushing the kind of action the union leadership itself should have been organizing.