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In 2012, Chicago teachers went on strike for the first time in 25 years. Under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the city would close or shake-up 122 public schools in seven years.
Chicago may have a new mayor, but it has an old problem: the 20,000 plus members of the Chicago Teachers Union are poised to take a strike vote, possibly upsetting mayor Lori Lightfoot’s fledgling relationship with the city’s public school employees.
Lightfoot became Chicago’s mayor in April, winning a closely watched election after former mayor and longtime associate of President Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, abruptly decided not to seek a third term. In 2012, just months after being elected mayor, Emanuel faced his own confrontation with the Chicago Teachers Union.
In September of that year, just as a new school year was about to start, thousands of union members hit the streets of Chicago in a sea of red t-shirts and homemade picket signs. For the first time in twenty-five years, Chicago teachers were on strike, citing concerns over untenable working conditions, such as large class sizes, as well as the growing threat of “corporate education reform”—a market-based approach to public education that many prominent Democrats, including Emanuel, embraced over the objection of labor groups.
The 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike, which lasted for seven days, is widely seen as a harbinger of the #RedforEd tide of teacher strikes and walkouts that have occurred across the country since 2017. In 2012, outlets such as the New York Times caught the historic potential of the 2012 strike, noting that “the fight in Chicago was merely one glimpse at a mounting national struggle over unionized teachers’ pay, conditions, benefits and standing.”
Chicago teachers also staged a one-day walkout in 2016 under then-governor Bruce Rauner’s watch, citing deep concerns over his proposed funding cuts for public education.
Now it may be Lightfoot’s turn to feel the effect of thousands of red-clad, emboldened Chicago Teachers Union members flooding the city’s streets in protest. A strike vote is scheduled for September 26, with a possible strike date—should a majority of union members agree—set for October 7, at the earliest, according to a write-up in the Chicago Tribune.
The issues this time around center on teachers’ working conditions, benefits and pay, as well as other boilerplate labor concerns. But a key element of the current struggle also appears to be an unwillingness by the Chicago Teachers Union, under the leadership of president Jesse Sharkey, to allow teachers and other school staff to bear the brunt of ongoing funding cuts for public education.
Lightfoot has maintained that her office’s current contract offer is “robust” and fair, as it relies on the conclusions of an independent fact-finder’s assessment and provides a 16 percent salary increase for teachers over five years—one percentage point more than what the union had reportedly proposed.
Sharkey is not buying it. In a late August news conference, he avoided praising Lightfoot’s offer and instead sought to put the promise of a pay increase in a broader, less flattering context. “The wage and benefit proposals will be said to be generous by the mayor,” Sharkey warned, but in reality, “they come in the context of nearly a decade of austerity and cuts for Chicago’s teachers and other school staff.”
The Chicago Teachers Union strike threat also comes in a renewed era of labor action in the United States, thanks in large part to the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike and the surge of actions that followed. Outlets like the Socialist Alternative and groups like the National Education Association, which is the nation’s largest labor union, have argued that the #RedforEd actions of 2017 and 2018 are likely to ramp up again as the 2019-2020 school year takes hold.
“The wage and benefit proposals will be said to be generous by the mayor,” Chicago Teachers Union Jesse Sharkey warned, but in reality, “they come in the context of nearly a decade of austerity and cuts for Chicago’s teachers and other school staff.”
Margaret W-F, writing for the Socialist Alternative, argues that the strike threat in Chicago, and another one in Columbus, Ohio, signify a continuing pushback against “corporate privatization” efforts in public education. These privatization efforts include the spread of charter schools and other school choice schemes that divert funds away from cash-starved public systems into privately managed, often profit-minded entities.
In Chicago, this resulted in the closure or “shake up”—before and during Emanuel’s tenure—of some 200 schools, as documented in a report from the city’s public radio station, WBEZ. This disruption, purportedly on behalf of the city’s most marginalized students, has “traumatized” entire neighborhoods, WBEZ reporters allege, although supporters maintain the closures were a necessary step towards rooting out substandard educational facilities.
Here’s what’s key, however. The WBEZ report on the slate of school closures notes that the “school system is still confronting the same two problems that prompted it to begin shuttering schools in the first place”: declining enrollment and stagnant student outcomes.
And the core issue of inequality remains. This is the backdrop that frames the 2012, 2016, and potential 2019 Chicago teacher strikes, as well as those that have taken place recently in Oakland, Los Angeles, Oklahoma, and Puerto Rico.
Alia Wong, in a 2019 piece for The Atlantic, noted the growing prominence of teachers unions, and argued that they are “transforming into some of the most significant advocacy groups striving for socioeconomic equality in America today.” She points to the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike as monumental for demonstrating that teacher wages and benefits are not the central issue for today’s labor unions. There is a broader sense, embedded in the Chicago action as well as subsequent ones that rippled across the United States, of teachers’ willingness to fight for their own dignity as well as that of the students and families they serve.
That’s the point that Chicago Teachers Union president Sharkey, along with the more than 20,000 members he represents, makes. The union is still fighting to restore the damage caused by recent austerity measures, layoffs, and budget cuts. An In These Times piece on the current strike threat, for example, notes that just over five years ago there were close to 500 librarians in the Chicago Public Schools system. Today, there are less than 200.
The same goes for nurses. “There are only 108 school nurses, and most schools have a nurse present only one day per week,” reporter Kari Lydersen noted in In These Times. There is a similar dearth of school-based social workers, according to the union, and calling these statistics out is part of a broader strategy to advocate for the health and well-being of all students—even if that means walking off the job to get it done.