Strike for America

by Micah Uetricht

  Brizard remained quiet for nearly a year after leaving Chicago, but in August 2013 he sat down with an education think tank to discuss his tenure.

  When asked about his interactions with the CTU, Brizard said, “We severely underestimated the ability of the Chicago Teachers Union to lead a massive grassroots campaign against our administration. It’s a lesson for all of us in the reform community.”1

  There are few times in recent American history when unions have surprised anyone—bosses, the public, the broader left, even their own members. The typical sentiment is closer to labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan’s in the opening words to his memoir Which Side Are You On?: “ ‘Organized labor.’ Say those words, and your heart sinks … It is a dumb, stupid mastodon of a thing.” Most twenty-first-century unions don’t teach anyone many lessons—to many, it is a wonder they have not gone extinct.

  The CTU has transformed itself into an organization that no one could call mastodonic. It is a union whose power is undeniable, even to a former CEO with whom it had only recently done battle. And it is a union that could and should serve as an example to all workers, whose latent power within the American and worldwide economy goes underestimated and unused each day.

  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 180,000.2

  Those numbers have largely mirrored the decline of labor’s membership since the onset of deindustrialization. Over the last four decades, as the movement’s membership has declined and as attacks on unions and the public sphere have increased, unions have responded not with a renewed resolve to push back against those attacks but by scaling back their struggle. But this strategy has failed. Capital has ratcheted up its offensive against labor and expects little resistance in response. By contrast, the unionism pushed by the CTU since the election of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) has rejected the strategy of accommodation, of capitulation, and of ceding the terms of debate over education reform and the idea of the public sector as a whole to labor’s enemies.

  Mainstream media coverage of teachers unions and public sector unions in general has given many—even those on the left and those working in the labor movement—the impression that public sector workers’ fights are uphill battles against a public duped into believing that such unions are their enemy. There are some data to support this claim; since the 1980s, public opinion of public sector unions has grown less and less favorable. But the CTU showed that such declines are not inevitable. The public can be won over to the public workers’ side—not despite striking, but actually through striking.

  That is not to say, however, that unions can bring about a revitalized labor movement by simply engaging in more strikes. Radicals often fetishize workers’ use of the strike, seeming to believe that any problem workers confront can be solved by withholding their labor. But in the case of the CTU, the strike was part of a broader fight against neoliberal education reform. Its fight was based on a broad vision of what progressive education reform could look like; it included genuine organizing alongside communities and public demonstrations over issues beyond teachers’ bread-and-butter concerns, such as provisions beneficial to students. Placing the strike within the framework of a larger strategy allowed Chicago’s teachers to win.

  CORE has become part of a long history in the American labor movement of disillusioned rank-and-file union members rebelling against conservative leadership, many through similar caucuses and other independent groups.3 Today, varying levels of democracy are available to disgruntled union militants looking to shake up their unions. Some locals, like the CTU, have fairly open internal structures that can be effectively used by well-organized activists. In others, however, that is not the case. In the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City, for example, retired union members loyal to the old guard make up over half the votes in leadership elections—making challenges by the rank-and-file nearly impossible. Within many of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)’s “megalocals,” which often span multiple states and include tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of members, it is difficult to imagine a group of rank-and-file workers successfully challenging their leadership.4 Whatever a union’s structure and level of democracy, there are bodies of knowledge built up over years of struggle that aspiring dissidents can access. Most notable among these is the publication Labor Notes and the organization behind it, which helped the members of CORE and amplified their message as they slowly began to form a caucus. It has been the most prominent American labor organization in working with radical unionists. Since the end of its strike, the CTU itself has taken its message on the road to union workers of all occupations, sharing its story with both rank-and-file activists and progressive union leadership throughout the country.

  Even among labor’s ostensibly progressive wings, internal democracy and leadership development of rank-and-file workers has never been much of a priority. And for good reason from union bureaucrats’ point of view: union leaders—whether progressive, centrist, or reactionary—worry that their power will be challenged by savvy dissidents. In many cases, their fears are well-founded. But if social movement unionism of the sort that the CTU has pursued under CORE is to spread throughout the labor movement, agitation and organizing by independent groups of rank-and-file union members will be essential.

  There is no single way out of the slump that teachers unions and the broader labor movement—the institutions tasked with defending the working class as a whole—find themselves in. But revitalization will not be found by continuing the failed strategy of conservative, parochial, top-down unionism. The CTU developed its membership in a way it had never done before, and it was willing to expand its concerns to students and communities beyond its members’ own. By the time teachers took the militant step of walking off the job, they were striking for the future of public education and in defense of the entire working class—and they won. If the entire working class is to win, its defenders should take note.

  After the Strike

  Since September 2012, other unions in Chicago and elsewhere have seemed to take some inspiration from Chicago teachers. The leadership of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, which represents 75,000 public sector workers in Illinois, publicly praised the CTU’s strike and came close to striking themselves in a contract battle with Governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat. Some half dozen teachers union locals near Chicago have themselves gone on strike since the CTU strike, with mixed results in contract negotiations.

  The SEIU Local 1, a massive property-services local spanning multiple states, has ratcheted up its rhetoric against Mayor Rahm Emanuel in contract and layoff fights—a fact of note both because confrontation with the Democratic Party is rare in the American labor movement and because SEIU has positioned itself as the key backer of the Democratic Party nationally, spending more, for example, on President Obama’s reelection campaign than any other entity.5

  Rank-and-file activism among teachers and all unions is seeing an uptick. After its leadership negotiated a contract that included the introduction of merit pay, the Newark Education Workers Caucus, in Newark, New Jersey, was formed. The fact that its members take inspiration from the CTU has led the union’s president to state, “They had some signs there that we should follow Chicago’s lead.… I think that’s very dangerous.” In New York City, the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) formed among United Federation of Teachers members. The UFT has been the home base for the leadership of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—including current president Randi Weingarten, a former UFT president—since the 1960s, and the Unity Caucus has ruled uninterrupted for the duration. Although MORE lost its electoral challenge to the caucus in A
pril 2013, it has vowed to continue to push the UFT from the left and will likely run again in future elections. Outside of education, rank-and-file nurses in New York, graduate students in California, longshore workers in Alabama, and Teamsters in New York City, among many others, have run reform slates in their unions in recent years and won.6

  Beyond elections, teachers unions are seeing some signs of militancy alongside communities. The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, decimated by shock-doctrine–style reforms over recent years, has formed a citywide coalition with parents and other community groups to try to halt school closures and educator layoffs, and has released a report similar to the CTU’s articulating their own vision of what school reform should look like. Rank-and-file teachers from Garfield High School in Seattle voted almost unanimously to boycott a standardized test, alongside the school’s Parent Teacher Association, despite the high stakes attached to that action. Another Seattle school soon joined them, and then the boycott spread to schools in Portland, Denver, and New York City. While both the National Education Association and the AFT have issued statements and resolutions against standardized testing, it is rank-and-file teachers who have taken the steps to actually refuse to administer them.7

  Tepidly, some unions have begun to break with the Democratic Party’s more explicitly neoliberal wing. Moreover, opposition to free market education reform and a willingness to strike is clearly spreading among teachers unions everywhere—in part because of the example the CTU has given of what an effective militant struggle can look like.

  But unions should not oversimplify the CTU’s example. Reviving the strike, as Joe Burns argued in his 2011 book, will be key for labor to revive itself. But it will not help if more unions simply walk off the job, particularly in education and the public sector broadly, where strikes interrupt the provision of services that are critically needed by working-class people; that is not a viable strategy for future victories. It is not enough for unions generally and public sector unions in particular to simply stop production or service provision; they must figure out, as the CTU did, how to effectively utilize work stoppages as focal points that can rally community support (and, one hopes, the support of other unions) for a larger movement against neoliberal reform.8

  Indeed, CORE’s raison d’être was not centered around the old union leadership’s unwillingness to strike, even though the United Progressive Caucus (UPC) had not led the union out on strike in a generation. Rather, neighborhood public schools throughout the city were continually being shuttered, with charter schools springing up in their wake, under the neoliberal education agenda pushed by the mayor and the head of CPS. The policies were serious blows to Chicago teachers and students alike, providing a potential opening for a broad community-teacher coalition to fight back and defend the interests of both—an opening, in other words, to create a true movement against free market education reform.

  Repeatedly, the old leadership refused to work toward such a movement—so rank-and-file teachers created their own, working side by side with parents and students to fight back, eventually leading to the creation of CORE. That is, CORE originated as a group working not simply to push for better salaries or health-care coverage for teachers but to advance a broad vision of educational equality.

  Other unions have struck in the wake of the CTU strike—some undoubtedly in part because of the example set by Chicago teachers. While some have claimed victory, others have unquestionably failed. The New York City public school bus drivers’ strike of January 2013, examined at length in an important essay by Megan Erickson,9 is an example of the perils posed when public sector unions simply walk off the job without a long-term strategy of movement building with working-class users of public services. Much like that of the Chicago teachers, the struggle of the New York school bus drivers could have been framed around the needs of both parents and community members whose children ride the buses as well as those of the drivers. A strike could have been a focal point around which both converged, with parents understanding—after a long-term campaign to build relationships with drivers—that the strike would be the means by which the union would fight for both better services for students and a more stable existence for drivers.

  But while the union, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181, was willing to take the rare step of a strike, the union built no such movement. So when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Education Chancellor Dennis Walcott both referred to the strike on separate occasions as “a strike against our children,” there were no long-standing relationships between union members and parents that could insist on the contrary.10 The strike was a failure.

  Contrast this with the Chicago teachers strike. Mayor Emanuel, predictably, attempted to demonize teachers in similar ways, stating the day before the strike that “our kids do not deserve this.” But during the strike, multiple polls showed that Emanuel’s antistrike rhetoric fell on deaf ears: CPS parents backed the union over the mayor by huge majorities. As this book goes to press, those numbers still stand.11

  The CTU strike shows that strikes are still labor’s most powerful weapon. But they cannot lead to victory for labor—particularly in industries like education, transportation for children, and other sectors involving “care work”—by simply halting work without having those who depend on that labor on their side. Labor’s opponents depend on their ability to malign organized workers by claiming that they are acting selfishly, without regard to the harm their actions will cause to the communities who depend on them. But because the teachers organized closely in those communities for years before their strike—with genuine empathy for community concerns and a willingness to shift focus and tactics on the basis of those communities’ wishes—those accusations rang hollow when the strike came.12

  The UPC, the union’s old guard who maintained power for decades and would not fight—either by itself or with organized community groups—against the board’s neoliberal agenda, did not disappear during CORE’s tenure. They reappeared in 2013 at the head of a coalition of caucuses, the Coalition to Save Our Union (CSOU), within the CTU—a coalition that included ProActive Chicago Teachers (PACT), the liberal reform caucus that held power for one term in 2001. PACT moved from a union agitator for reform throughout the 1990s and 2000s into partnership with the forces that sought to roll back the gains won and the movement built by CORE. The coalition’s platform focuses on losses around bread-and-butter issues in the contract negotiated during the 2012 strike, like pay, benefits, and the cost of health care.

  The UPC’s repeated inaction on school closures and refusal to work alongside community groups were among the principal reasons for CORE’s initial formation, along with its inability or unwillingness to take the union out on strike for a quarter century. But the CSOU tried to run to the left of CORE on school closures and the strike, claiming that the union’s leadership should have stayed on strike until they won a moratorium on school closures. The union, the CSOU also argued, should focus more on servicing its members than forming a movement.

  Chicago teachers had little interest in retreating from the broad movement they had helped to build; and CORE was decisively reelected, winning 79 percent of teachers’ votes to the coalition’s 21 percent.13

  It is clear, then, that the CTU’s agenda of left unionism is not being foisted on an unwilling or apathetic membership. Having seen what social movement unionism was capable of achieving, an overwhelming majority of Chicago’s educators opted to go on trying to beat back an education policy of austerity in Chicago and the United States as a whole.

  This huge level of interest in militant, democratic unionism on the part of educators themselves is what is required for the CTU or any union to mount an effective challenge to neoliberal education reform and neoliberal policies generally. Union leaders with strong left politics but an inability to educate and politicize their members will not be able to create a groundswell of resistance at workplaces and within communities—and will likely be hounded by those within the union wh
o would rather focus on advancing members’ self-interests alone.14 If community-union coalitions are going to be able to fight austerity, they will need to inspire the kind of widespread consciousness-raising at the rank-and-file level that has been seen within the CTU.

  For at least another term, the CTU will continue to pursue a broad progressive agenda and help lead a citywide movement for educational justice. But the poststrike maneuverings of the city’s Board of Education (and the union’s inability to halt them) are continuing. In particular, these efforts involve the closing of forty-nine public elementary schools and one high school program, almost entirely on the city’s South and West sides in black neighborhoods in 2013, and a recent round of budget cuts that have totaled $162 million as well as mass teacher layoffs. All of these defeats raise the question of whether the kind of unionism that led to victory in the 2012 strike will be enough to halt the continued dismantlement of public education.

  Shortly after the union’s victory in the strike, the Board of Education announced its plans to shut down a massive number of public schools. It had already closed 110 schools since the late 1990s, usually a few each year. The board initially claimed that it had its sights on over 300 schools to be closed in 2013 alone; later, it shifted that number to some 130; finally, fifty schools were closed—the largest mass school closing in American history.

  The justification for the closings has shifted wildly in short periods of time, oscillating in response to changing political winds or the exposure of one rationale as being dishonest or simply false: initially, schools were described as “failing” and therefore had to be shut down; after teachers and communities pushed back on this label, the justification became about an “underutilization crisis” and the efficient use of the district’s scarce resources. Since the district’s finances are scarce (the CPS board claims that it is facing a $1 billion budget deficit over the next three years), money has to be allocated efficiently—and this means the closing down of schools it claims are underutilized.