There is a clear
lesson here. It is that an effective union can both organize and behave responsibly. But it must also engage its members and the
community and not allow the agenda to be narrowed down to bread and butter
because they will always then lose.
The gold standard
for unions have been gold plated contracts that eliminate financial flexibility
and ultimately drive financial failure. This has ultimately produced worse imbalances
among employees and produced unwelcome expectations of economically unearned advantage.
Worse, it has
driven the pushback that has steadily reduced unionism as a force for
improvement in society.
No one has a
balanced model in place but this is an example of a better outcome that needs
to be taken to heart.
Modeling the
Education They Want To Be: The Great Chicago Teachers Union Transformation
Sunday, 02 March 2014 00:00By Eleanor J Bader, Truthout | Book Review
Micah
Uetricht's "Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity"
relates the stirring transformation of the Chicago Teachers Union into a
democratically organized force for social justice.
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, 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?
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