Collective Bargaining for the Common Good
The CTU had made gains for students a central part of its public rhetoric around its fight with the mayor and the Board of Education and a core reason for the strike. At the bargaining table, however, the union also negotiated gains that extended far beyond teachers’ compensation. It employed what labor strategist Stephen Lerner has called “collective bargaining connected to the common good.”21
A key provision of SB7 was to significantly limit the scope of legally strikeable issues for teachers. Under the law, teachers could strike only over wages, benefits, and some aspects of evaluation. This provision was pursued by the union’s enemies because they recognized the union’s potential to use the strike as a referendum on the state of public education as a whole and, particularly under the union’s new left leadership, as a weapon to extract contractual gains on noncompensation issues that affect students.
That these neoliberal groups would not only attempt to outlaw a strike but also keep a strike’s legality limited to extremely narrow parameters is an explicit recognition of Lerner’s argument: “Expanding the goals and demands of organizing and collective bargaining is the key to winning individual campaigns, a stronger labor movement, and a more just society.” In effect, groups like SfC recognized not only that teachers’ ability to withhold their labor was a powerful weapon but also that a strike which made an issue of the conditions under which children were being educated would be extremely difficult to discredit and defeat.
Mutually Beneficial Achievements
Yet the union did expand its goals and demands during the strike. It took the proposals it had put forward in documents like “The Schools Chicago’s Children Deserve” and made noncompensation issues a key piece of its case to the public and a central matter in its 2012 strike (despite the fact that the latter was illegal). Even in the union’s press release announcing the work stoppage, President Karen Lewis said the strike was about “getting a fair contract which will give our students the resources they deserve.” Outside the union’s headquarters the night before the strike, Lewis said, “As we continue to bargain in good faith, we stand in solidarity with parents, clergy, and community-based organizations who are advocating for smaller class sizes, a better school day, and an elected school board.” The union maintained this message without running afoul of the law.
And these concerns were not mere rhetoric. The union actually did use its bargaining position to win real gains for students in its contract.
Nearly six hundred new art, music, and gym teachers were to be added to the teaching force—a particularly critical gain in a school system where, at the elementary level, for example, only 25 percent of neighborhood schools had both art and music teachers. For the first time, textbooks were guaranteed on the first day of class—many teachers throughout the city had actually begun previous years without them. The board was attempting to negotiate the elimination of class size caps; the union not only kept such caps in place but won $500,000 to attempt to reduce class sizes. A committee was created and allotted another $500,000 to hire additional special education teachers.22 The union even negotiated an increase in a classroom supply budget of 150 percent.
Beyond negotiating contract provisions that were beneficial mostly to students, the union successfully made the strike about American education reform. They made the obsession with standardized testing a subject for debate—a direct challenge to both the right and the Obama administration’s education policy, as Race to the Top expands the use of standardized testing in evaluating teachers’ effectiveness. The union successfully pushed for a hiring pool for teachers who had been laid off through no fault of their own; 50 percent of new hires must come from that pool. As a result, CPS cannot remove longtime teachers at will in order to replace them with younger, cheaper teachers. This provision will help to reduce the constant churn of teachers that is seen at the city’s charter schools, which puts an inexperienced workforce at the helm of classrooms throughout the city. The union made a central issue of the declining numbers of educators of color in a school district that has over 90 percent students of color, thus defending both educators and students of color within the schools as well showing a larger willingness to name CPS’s policies as deeply racist and promoting “educational apartheid.”
Highlighting Racial Justice
Education reformers have openly addressed the undeniable fact of the miserable conditions for poor public school students of color around the country. After the Department of Education released data showing massive educational inequality in US schools, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stated, “The undeniable truth is that the everyday educational experience for many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise. It is our collective duty to change that.” While some of their ideological ilk have been loathe to even mention the existence of racial inequality, Duncan and other neoliberal reformers have explicitly and effectively positioned themselves as the defenders of communities of color while also often positioning themselves against the teachers unions, whom they portray as defenders of the status quo and thus of racial inequality. For the most part, teachers unions have stood by idly as reformers like Duncan appropriated the mantle of the civil rights movement.
The reluctance to name and attack racist schooling policies while racial inequalities have widened and parents have waged fights against them has created a vacuum into which neoliberal education reformers have stepped. Reformers have only been able to portray themselves as inheritors of the legacy of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement because teachers unions have not. While not all parent and community groups accept the reformers’ claims at face value, those who do can hardly be faulted: Reformers are appealing to communities’ deep desires to change a schooling system that has failed them for decades.
The problem stretches far back. While teachers unions have supported community-led struggles for racial justice throughout their history, they have too often been actively hostile to them. An example is the teachers strike in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1968, when black community groups entered into open battle with AFT locals on strike. Today, there is no street fighting between black parent activists and teachers union members, but there is little active support by the latter of the former’s struggles. Most teachers unions do little to actively embrace the causes of community groups fighting for racial justice in public schools and would never describe the conditions in urban public schools around the country as “like apartheid,” despite the overwhelming evidence that this is the case. Even progressive-minded union locals are afraid to push their membership on the issues of racial inequality, and they would never want to engage in genuine power-sharing with community organizations that might push them to take risks that don’t sit well with union staff.
The CTU is one of the few teachers union locals around the country willing to name the policies of its district—in which 91.2 percent of students are students of color, 87 percent are poor students, and 90 percent attend schools classified as “hypersegregated”—as racist. In speeches, policy papers, and statements to the press, the union has described Chicago’s schools as “apartheid-like.” In a June 2013 speech at the City Club of Chicago, Karen Lewis said, “Rich white people think they know what’s in the best interests of children of African-Americans and Latinos.… There’s something about these folks who use little black and brown children as stage props at one press conference while announcing they want to fire, lay off, or lock up their parents at another.”23
The union has supported community groups in filing Title VI civil rights complaints with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights around school turnarounds and closures in black and Latino neighborhoods. Its November 2012 report in particular, titled “The Black and White of Education in Chicago,” attacks CPS for exacerbating racial inequality by examining the racial composition of neighborhoods and schools targeted for closures and t
urnarounds; it points out that the larger a school’s population of students of color, the more likely it is to be shuttered. Since 2001, some 88 percent of CPS students who have been affected by closures or turnarounds have been African American.
Teachers of color have long been the ones willing to work in these hypersegregated conditions. But according to the union’s data, the percentage of black teachers in CPS has declined from 45 percent in 1995 to 29 percent in 2011, leading to a lawsuit filed in late 2012 against the district by three fired black teachers and the union. The steep decline in the number of teachers of color in CPS schools has serious implications for the black “middle class” in Chicago as well as for students of color; as it organized in the years before the 2010 election, CORE agitated around this issue and has made it a central organizing task since taking office.
Brandon Johnson was once a middle school reading and social studies teacher and is now an organizer for the union. He realized the extent to which black teachers were under attack in Chicago through his conversations with activists who had fought for black teachers to become full members of the union and full employees of the CPS during the Civil Rights era. A retired teacher who had witnessed the struggles to bring black teachers into full membership in the union told him, “This is in direct retaliation to what we built in the ’60s and ’70s. They’re trying to kill you.”
“I was really livid,” Johnson said, “to think that there was a system that does not value an entire race of teachers—especially when 90 percent of students are students of color, and a good portion of them black.”
The union’s Black Teachers Caucus was an independent rank-and-file organization that agitated against the conservative union’s leadership during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, fighting for both improvements in black students’ learning conditions and the betterment of black teachers, most of whom had been limited to being “full-time basis substitutes.”24 In order to continue that fight, Johnson helped restart a Black Caucus—which he now heads.
The union has made the issue of racial inequality central to its day-to-day work in a way that speaks to the concerns of both teachers of color and parents in communities of color whose children bear the brunt of decades of disinvestment in their schools and neighborhoods. By doing so, they have wrested the banner of racial justice and the trust of communities of color out of the hands of the neoliberals in Chicago.
Social Movement Unionism in American Labor
Most American unions have long seen their central task as the defense of their members’ interests. This contrasts sharply with unions throughout the rest of the world, many of which see themselves as defenders of the interests of the working class as a whole. Labor scholar Kim Moody describes the two models—business unionism versus social movement unionism: “The former’s vision does not extend beyond ‘bread-and-butter’ issues related to workers’ compensation; the latter identifies itself as a vehicle for society-wide transformation on issues that affect communities beyond individual workplaces.”25
The tension between those two visions has been present since the birth and throughout the history of American teacher unionism. Since its earliest days, liberal and radical members have attempted to push unions’ agendas to the left, toward a unionism that defends public education and fights for progressive reform; conservative unionists have stuck to fighting over compensation and have largely won out.
Social movement unionism that aims to push a broadly transformative agenda for all should be pursued because it is, from a left perspective, the proper thing to do. But for labor as a whole and teachers unions in particular, the experience of the CTU shows that it is also the only thing to do. Teacher unionism cannot survive the attacks it is currently facing by neoliberal education reformers without answering those attacks head-on, taking up an agenda that both defends teachers and fights for students’ and communities’ best interests through a defense of public education.
Just as conservative business unionism and liberal reform unionism has failed to “bring home the whole hog” for members in contract fights over the last decades, so have they failed to help create broad movements for justice that engage the working class beyond unionized workers. Teacher’s unions’ fates in the twenty-first century will rest on their ability to represent the concerns of the students, parents, and communities they serve while arguing forcefully that free market forces do not serve these groups. Anything less will be suicide.
1 “CTU’s Karen Lewis: People Don’t Always Get Everything They Want in a Contract,” WBEZ, September 18, 2012, wbez.org.
2 Assumably, the CTU would have made class sizes and other non-monetary concerns an issue during bargaining, but education reform legislation, including SB7 and the Chicago School Reform Amendatory Act of 1995, made such issues “non-mandatory” bargaining issues—CPS was not legally compelled to negotiate over them. See Yana Kunichoff, “Effects of SB7 Collective Bargaining Provisions Being Felt in CTU vs. CPS Negotiations,” Chicago Reporter, July 19, 2012.
3 For an extensive critical discussion on the final negotiated contract and other aspects of the strike, see David Kaplan, “The Chicago Teachers’ Strike and Beyond: Strategic Considerations” Monthly Review, June 2013.
4 A central critique of prominent liberal defenders of public education—like education historian and former US Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch—is that they do not identify current efforts to introduce free market reforms in education as part of this broader neoliberal project; public school reformers like former Washington, DC, Chancellor Michelle Rhee or foundations like Gates are portrayed as simply uninformed or misguided rather than actively working to undermine education as a collective good. See Lois Weiner, The Future of Our School: Teachers Unions and Social Justice, Haymarket Books, 2012; Lois Weiner and Mary Compton, eds., The Global Assault on Teaching, Teachers, and Their Unions, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
5 Will Johnson, “Lean Production,” Jacobin, Winter 2013.
6 Joanne Barkan, “Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools,” Dissent, Winter 2011.
7 Stephanie Simon, “Mayors Back Parents Seizing Control of Schools,” Reuters, June 18, 2012. On the undemocratic premise underlying parent trigger laws, see Liza Featherstone, “ ‘Empowerment’ Against Democracy: Tinseltown and the Teachers’ Unions,” Dissent, September 26, 2012.
8 Barkan, “Got Dough?”
9 Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City, Routledge, 2011.
10 Ibid., p. 61.
11 Antonio Villaraigosa, “It Is Time for Teachers Unions to Join the Education Reform Team,” Huffington Post, December 7, 2010. Stan Wilson, “L.A. Mayor Backs Weighing Student Performance in Evaluating Teacher Quality,” CNN, September 12, 2012.
12 Frank Bruni, “Teachers on the Defensive,” New York Times, June 27, 2010.
13 Joe Nocera, “Obama’s New Cabinet,” New York Times, November 26, 2012.
14 Dana Goldstein, “The Education Wars,” American Prospect, March 20, 2009.
15 Cleveland: Lee Sustar, “Can the AFT Meet the Challenge?” Socialist Worker, July 25, 2012. Newark: Josh Eidelson, “Newark Teachers Union Embraces Performance Pay, Wins Peer Review,” In These Times, October 22, 2012; Devin Leonard, “Facebook and the Newark Schools: About that $100 Million …” BusinessWeek, June 28, 2012; “Newark, N.J., Teachers Ratify Contract,” American Federation of Teachers, November 14, 2012.
16 “Dynamic Duo: Randi Weingarten and Rahm Emanuel—CGI America 2012,” YouTube. On the Infrastructure Trust and its implications for infrastructure projects and the public sphere, see Ramsin Canon, “It’s Not the Privatization, It’s the Privatization,” Gapers Block, April 16, 2012, gapersblock.com.
17 “Karen Lewis on the ‘Ed Show’: Rahm Is ‘Absolutely’ Anti-Teacher,” Huffington Post, October 11, 2011; Ben Goldberger, “Karen Lewis, Street Fighter,” Chicago, November 2012.
18 Joe Macare, “Hipster Alderman Ag
rees With Fox Host: ‘Blow Up’ Chicago Schools,” Occupied Chicago Tribune, September 12, 2012, occupiedchicagotribune.org.
19 George Schmidt, “AFT Reports: Chicago Played Major role in the American Federation of Teachers Convention in 2012,” Substance News, August 1, 2012, substancenews.net.
20 Chicago Schools Forward, “Stand Up to the Fat Cats,” December 9, 2012, YouTube; Karen Lewis, “Karen Lewis Takes Aim at a Critic of CPS Teachers,” Chicago Tribune, September 14, 2012; “Mayor’s Adviser Attacks CTU,” Chicago Tonight, WTTW, September 19, 2012. video.wttw.com/video/2280999377/.
21 Stephen Lerner, “An Injury to All: Going Beyond Collective Bargaining As We Have Known It,” New Labor Forum, Spring 2010.
22 The long-term viability of several of these contract demands, such as negotiating smaller class sizes and hiring new teachers, has been thrown into question, however, as CPS carried out massive budget cuts and teacher layoffs in the lead-up to the 2013 school year.
23 Ted Cox, “CTU’s Karen Lewis Blames ‘Rich White People’ for Education Inequity,” DNAInfo.com, June 18, 2013.
24 John F. Lyons gives an account of the history of this and other racial justice struggles within the union in Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929–70, University of Illinois Press, 2008.
25 Kim Moody, U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, The Promise of Revival from Below, Verso, 2008.
CONCLUSION
In May 2011, in the lead-up to the Chicago teachers strike, Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed Jean-Claude Brizard, a former teacher and schools administrator in New York City and Rochester, to be CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Brizard would last less than a year and a half in the position. He was brought in as it became clear that the city’s teachers would be striking for the first time in a generation and then dismissed (with a $250,000 severance package) a month after teachers and parents had treated him as the political punching bag he was clearly intended to be.
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