Strike for America (8 page)

The six-mile ride from my apartment to the Board of Education included scene after scene of teachers chanting and marching outside their schools. The city was blanketed with striking educators, all clad in red union T-shirts. I passed one school with forty or fifty teachers picketing in front, rode a few more blocks, then passed another.

I stopped at the second picket line I saw, at Lakeview High School, with several dozen teachers a few blocks from the
mayor's home, to take in the scene. A slim, middle-aged African American teacher in charge of the bullhorn started chanting, “We're going to Rahm's house!” He stopped after chanting it a few times, giggling. But an early-forties white woman, who looked stunningly similar to my ninth grade American history teacher, wasn't laughing.

“No, seriously. It's right over there,” she yelled out, pointing west toward Emanuel's residence on Hermitage Avenue. “We should go.” Later in the week, those teachers and others in the vicinity would march over to the mayor's house and picket and chant outside of it.

The entire city felt transformed. 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 actions—for educators and for other workers.

Rather than having teachers picket at their schools for a few hours in the morning and then head home, as had occurred in previous strikes, the union held mass rallies downtown nearly every day with tens of thousands of teachers and their supporters. After one such march on the strike's first day, I walked into a chain coffee shop and grabbed a yogurt cup. The young cashier sized me up, taking stock of my red T-shirt.

“Are you a teacher?” she asked me.

I looked down at my shirt, stuttering for a moment.

“Oh, uh, I'm actually …”

“Go ahead,” she interrupted, waving me through the line while other customers behind me watched. “You all are amazing. We support the teachers 100 percent.”

The moment of solidarity between a nonunion cashier making minimum wage and a perceived unionized public school teacher on strike seemed too beautiful for me to interrupt with the reality—that I was not, in fact, a teacher, but rather a leftist who enjoyed the teachers' marches—so I started to thank her profusely. The two other cashiers stopped their transactions to turn to me and tell me that they too hoped to see the teachers win.

“I'd be out there, too, if I could,” the twenty-something woman told me.

Leaving the café in a rising class-consciousness—induced daze, I put my bike on a bus back to the far North Side and hopped on behind a few other passengers. When my turn to swipe my card came, the driver waved me on.

“Go ahead, sir,” he said nonchalantly.

Oblivious, I gestured toward the card reader.

“Oh—is it broken?”

He shook his head. Like the cashier minutes earlier, he gestured to my shirt before waving me to move along without paying.

“We gotta support the teachers.”

Such support felt almost universal. I visited nearly two dozen picket lines during the strike and was astounded at the number of supportive honks filling the air at all of them. Friends told stories of walking around the city in red T-shirts and pedestrians stopping them, telling them that the teachers' cause was just. The strike was all the city could talk about.

Where was the atmosphere of hatred for teachers that the free marketers had worked so hard to encourage over the last
half-decade or so? Where were the enraged Chicagoans contemptuous of the cushy jobs bankrolled by the hard-earned money sucked out of their checks every other week, publicly confronting teachers on the picket line, or at least flipping them the bird from their cars as they drove by? They were nowhere to be found.

There was a generalized sense throughout the city, whether on picket lines or public transit or on the street, that this group of workers was right to go on strike; that struggle and militant action were justified and to be supported.

The city felt like it belonged to the teachers.

The effects of cadre development within the union soon became clear during the strike: Teachers began organizing actions themselves, largely independent of the CTU leadership.

Kim Walls, a science teacher who had never been active in the union before becoming involved in CORE, attended the union's summer organizing program. It was there that she first heard about TIF and the program's effects on public schools. She was appalled at what appeared to be deliberate starvation of the city's public schools of resources in favor of redistributing wealth upward to some of the city's richest corporations.

On September 14, the union and the Grassroots Collaborative coalition planned a rally against TIF downtown, focusing on billionaire hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, appointed by President Obama to Secretary of Commerce in 2013 and a former appointed member of the Board of Education. Her company,
Hyatt Hotels, had received $5.2 million in TIF funds to build a new hotel in Hyde Park, where Walls lives.

Walls received a call from union staffer Matthew Luskin days prior to the action. “I said, ‘Matthew, I'm not going downtown. There's a Hyatt right here.' ” She told Luskin she would organize her own protest against Hyatt in Hyde Park. “He just said, ‘Go for it.' ”

Walls called Hyde Park–area teachers and told them to “call their people” to come out to the action. When the day came, 300 teachers and supporters marched on the hotel—with little to no support needed from union staff.

Teachers throughout the city organized similar actions without the aid of union staffers. No union staffers planned the small marches on the mayor's house during the strike; teachers planned those themselves. After thirty-three of the fifty city council members (all but one of whom were Democrats) signed a letter to Karen Lewis at the strike's beginning, begging the union not to strike, rank-and-file teachers, livid at their aldermen for publicly chastising them and siding with the mayor, independently organized protests in their neighborhoods against them. All were Democrats and several self-identified as progressives, but the teachers didn't care—they had been insulted and were unafraid to organize their own actions to call out those aldermen publicly through street actions.
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Mayor Emanuel, the Board of Education, and corporate reform groups like Stand for Children and Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) had worked to try to turn Chicagoans against the teachers union long before the strike began. DFER funded a number of radio ads in the months before the strike, targeting African American and Latino neighborhoods in particular, attempting to preemptively turn parents against the strike. And nationally, of course, the mainstream media had been pushing against teachers unions for years.

But during the strike, polls showed that the public—and parents of color in particular—supported the teachers union by overwhelming numbers. The first poll released showed that among registered voters in Chicago, 47 percent supported the strike while 39 percent did not. By the fourth day, another poll showed similar numbers but noted that 63 percent of African Americans and 65 percent of Latinos—in a city where 91 percent of the public school district is made up of children of color—supported the strike.
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The numbers were proof that teachers could win the public to their side and against free market reform despite the hostile climate locally and nationally. Reform groups funded by billionaires could not convince Chicagoans that the teachers were acting against CPS students' interests
because the CTU had made their case directly to those working-class and poor communities of color through its genuine partnerships with groups based in them, and by engaging with and organizing in those communities for years before the strike.

The consensus in Chicago and around the country seemed to be that teachers unions' very existence was hated by most; going on strike was not even an option, since doing so would only serve to further widen the gap between the public and the unions. But the CTU had managed to convince the public that the strike was not reflective of selfishness—it was the very means by which the union would accomplish a progressive education agenda. Neoliberal forces had long attempted to turn average people against public sector unions' struggles by framing any public workers' demands as coming at individual taxpayer's expense; in Chicago, that attempt failed.

After the strike's first week, many Chicagoans assumed that teachers would return to class on Monday. Emanuel had clearly lost the public relations battle. Polls showed strong majorities, especially among CPS parents and Chicagoans of color, backing the teachers by large margins. The union had the upper hand in bargaining, and through the tentative agreement CTU leaders brought to the House of Delegates meeting that Sunday was rumored to contain a number of harmful provisions for teachers, given the broader assault on teachers unions and the austerity generally, it seemed as strong as possible.

But on Sunday, September 16, the House of Delegates did not vote to end the strike. They extended it by two more days.

The union had wrung significant concessions out of a Board of Education that seemed bent on levying a number of significant blows against them. But delegates said their membership had not had enough time to fully examine the proposed deal. The agreement would not be “shoved down our throats,” as delegate and first-grade teacher Yolanda Thompson put it.

After the first week, at the Sunday-night House of Delegates vote over whether or not to extend the walkout for two more days, Lewis made no attempt to sell the idea of ending the strike based on the contract's strength. Some of the union's staff were worried that the union would squander the goodwill it had built up among CPS parents, but the leadership did not try to dissuade the membership from extending the strike.

So instead of forcing the membership to decide on a contract they had not read and did not fully understand, delegates extended the strike for the sole purpose of allowing rank-and-file members the full opportunity to comprehend the contract that had been negotiated in their name.

The vote was a victory for union democracy. But union democracy does not always make for good PR: favorable coverage in the mainstream press evaporated. The city's major newspapers and nightly newscasts ran top stories about parents' patience running thin with the union. But on Monday
morning, teachers arrived at picket lines outside their schools at 6:30 a.m., eager to review the proposal but lacking a formal process to do so.

Becca Barnes, a ninth-grade history teacher on the South Side, said teachers at her school made photocopies of the contract, stood against a fence, and spent an hour reading through it line by line, circling key sections and commenting in the margins—as though they were grading papers. As they began picketing, the contract was still on their minds. So Barnes and her fellow teachers—about a hundred of them—decided to walk to a nearby park and read it together.

“None of us planned in advance to comb through it collectively,” Barnes says. “We were going to just go over highlights,” Barnes remembers, “but then someone said, ‘No—we need to read the entire contract.' ”

So, sitting together at a park, they read through every line, debating the victories and concessions hashed out at the bargaining table.

“It was very emotional,” says Barnes. “Some people were sick of striking. Others said, ‘This isn't good enough. This one line is reason enough for me to stay out.' ”

Similar scenes took place throughout Chicago. For the first time, teachers were studying every word of their contract, the principal document governing their work lives.

“We were genuinely interested in what each other had to say—even the people who wanted to go back,” Barnes says. The union voted to ratify the contract October 3, with 79 percent of membership in favor.

The union's decision to extend the strike by two days can be traced in part to practical concerns by the leadership. The membership has a history of punishing leaders who tried to force contracts upon them. For example, there was the time in 2003 when former president and reformer Debbie Lynch lost her reelection bid, having told members that her contract had not just brought home “the bacon” but “the whole hog.” And again, there was the angry impromptu rally in 2007, in which some CORE members participated, where members burned copies of the proposed contract. These memories undoubtedly weighed heavily on Karen Lewis and other leaders' minds.

But there was also a clear concern for democratic process that is incredibly rare among American unions—particularly in a situation like contract negotiations, which are almost always seen as battles between union leaders and management negotiators in which the general membership has little part. The strike's extension showed that rank-and-file teachers were firmly in control of the union.