Struggle Against Union-Busting in the Pandemic
Chicago Teachers in the Eye of the Storm
For Teacher-Student-Parent-Worker Control of Reopening Schools
By Class Struggle Education Workers
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| A student holds a sign outside meeting on “defunding” Chicago's school police. All police and security guards out of the schools, and out of the unions! (Photo: Voices of Youth in Chicago Education) |
For over a month, a tense stand-off between the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and Mayor Lori Lightfoot – who controls Chicago Public Schools (CPS) – was the focal point in a nationwide tug-of-war over reopening schools, many closed since last spring due to COVID-19. Union-bashers like Forbes magazine (4 February) called on the CPS to “learn from the 1981 air controllers strike,” where Ronald Reagan declared the walkout illegal and fired every striker. In mid-January, Lightfoot locked out nearly 150 teachers from Google Classroom accounts and cut off their pay for continuing to teach remotely and refusing the CPS order to return to elementary schools, even as city residents were being told to stay at home. Union members reported that buildings were “filthy” and “in various states of disrepair” with inadequate ventilation.
The media has portrayed the conflict as the union opposing opening schools, yet the CTU put forward a number of specific demands for safely reopening. What the fight was really about was union-busting: a high-handed mayor backed by super-rich privatizing education “reformers” (including well-connected Democrats) sought to force the teachers to their knees. A barrage of anti-CTU articles (including in the Sun-Times, part-owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor) was part of a national drive to blame teacher unions for keeping schools closed and to stir up parents against them. While the CPS was forced to backpedal, even as talks were in final stages, the mayor went ballistic, accusing the union of “leaving us with a big bag of nothing” and again raising the threat of a lockout. In short, this was a fight for all workers.
The clash in Chicago is part of a surge of labor battles across the country in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. In some places, workers have taken the initiative, as in the strike last May by fruit packinghouse workers in Yakima, Washington, and more recently the Teamster strike at the giant Hunts Point produce market in New York City in January as well as the drive for union recognition under way at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama. More commonly, employers are out to bust unions and organizing drives with lockouts and brass-knuckled intimidation tactics. The Guardian (26 January) reported on “US companies using the pandemic as a tool to break unions,” highlighting the lockout of Chicago teachers and the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team owners’ replacement of IATSE[1] arena workers with non-union managers.
In that “Framework for Resumption of In-Person Instruction,” approved by a 2-1 majority vote of the 25,000-member CTU on February 9, CPS still refused to agree to provide vaccination for all teachers before being required to return to school, and did not provide accommodations to teach remotely for all who have household members with medical risk.
The CPS initially had no plan for vaccinating teachers; in the agreement, the city agreed to provide 2,000 immediate vaccinations for pre-kindergarten and special education staff, and “at least 1,500 first vaccine doses per week to CPS employees.” Pushing back the dates for students returning to school (K-to-5 on March 1, grades 6 to 8 on March 8), a month after originally planned, will enable more teachers and staff to be vaccinated. (Now the school board has done a full 180 and is talking about requiring vaccination.) CPS agreed to juggle schedules to provide more accommodations for those with at-risk household members, while gratuitously forcing some on unpaid leave rather than letting them teach remotely. State regulations require masking for everyone in schools.
For Union-Led Teacher-Student-Parent-Worker Control of the Schools
A key issue is the demand for an elected Board of Education to replace mayoral control which has been a hot issue for decades. The virulently anti-labor Chicago Tribune (4 March) headlined, “Fight for an elected CPS board ‘not going to go away’.” Lori Lightfoot supported this demand until she was elected mayor. Now she says, “We would never have opened without mayoral control.” She still claims to be for an elected school board, but comes up with all sorts of reasons why it’s not practical right away. One thing is true, though: in any election these days big money will play a big role. Leading capitalists have shown they are prepared to spend millions on influencing (buying) school board elections and pushing charter schools, in Los Angeles (Eli Broad), Oakland (Michael Bloomberg), Seattle (Bill Gates) and elsewhere.
As schools were reopening in New York City last fall, Class Struggle Education Workers stressed that this is a key moment to “fight against mayoral dictatorship, and for educator-led control of the schools by councils of teachers, students, parents and workers.” Even elected school boards preside over huge bureaucracies and are subject to pressure from bourgeois politicians and billionaire “philanthropists” pushing charters, standardized tests (Common Core, S.A.T.), teacher evaluations (merit pay, test scores), etc. Public education, with its steady cash flow, attracts contractors, vendors and privatizers, all seeking to turn the schools into profit platforms amid the falling profit rates of decaying capitalism. And they all want to break the power of teachers unions.
To defeat this onslaught and provide quality education for all, it is urgent to take control of the schools out of the grip of the Democrats, plutocrats and educrats and place it in the hands of those actually involved in public education.
Break with the Democrats – Cops Out of the Schools!
A serious fight to win all the union’s safety demands, as well as to ensure drastically lower class sizes (see “Chicago Mayor Tries to Bully Teachers: “Show Up or Showdown,” below), would have required a hard-fought strike against Democratic administrations from Chicago to Springfield and Washington. The union leadership was not prepared to do that. On the contrary, from the CTU in Chicago to the AFT and NEA nationwide, the teachers unions are bound hand and foot to the Democratic Party. In many states they constitute the Democrats’ apparatus, doing most of the phone-banking and door-to-door canvassing. Yet despite Joe Biden’s claim that he would be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” the Democratic Party is a capitalist party, defending the interests of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Wal-Mart, Loop bankers and the Chicago Board of Trade against the working people, including teachers.
This fight is a continuation of a long history of Democratic Party attacks on the teachers union in Chicago. In 1995, Democratic mayor Richard M. Daley – citing the fact that the CTU struck nine times between 1969 and 1987 – imposed mayoral control of city schools. He also pushed through Section 4.5 of the Illinois Labor Relations Act, allowing the CPS to refuse to bargain over various school issues, notably class size. Daley, who held office for 22 years, from 1989 to 2011, also looked for every opportunity to axe union jobs and privatize. Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel (President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff), in office from 2011 to 2019, campaigned for office by declaring war on the CTU. Democratic mayor Lightfoot, called for repeal of Section 4.5 in her election campaign, but reversed course on taking office.
One important reason why the CTU didn’t fight for smaller class sizes in the recent stand-off is that its leaders hope they’re about to overturn Section 4.5. This blatantly anti-labor law only applies to bargaining with “an educational employer whose territorial boundaries are coterminous with those of a city having a population in excess of 500,000” (guess where in Illinois that might be!). Bills to repeal it have been passed by both houses of the state legislature and the legislation is now on Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker’s desk awaiting his signature. Sharkey and other CTU tops doubtless want to make nice with the governor (who was endorsed in the 2018 election by the Illinois Federation of Labor and the CTU executive board, but not the House of Delegates), to show that they can play by the rules.
Yet those rules, and capitalist “law and order” generally, are stacked against labor, workers and the oppressed. Whether it’s Section 4.5 in Illinois or New York’s no-strike Taylor Law, these are measures by which capital ties the hands of workers’ organizations. Another is SB7, the bill approved in 2011 by CTU-endorsed Democratic governor Pat Quinn that amended the Illinois School Code to require three-quarters of all members of a bargaining unit (like the CTU) to vote to strike for it to be legal. Labor bureaucrats often hide behind these anti-union laws to head off calls for militant action. CTU then-president Karen Lewis actually supported SB7 and CTU leaders met secretly with Democrats in preparing it. But in order to defend the unions, it is necessary to prepare the ranks to defy such laws. Playing by the bosses’ rules is sure to lose.
Lewis died on the eve of the CPS-CTU deal and was widely eulogized, in particular for standing up to the bully Rahm Emanuel early on. Yet in the 2012 strike, after a vigorous week on the picket lines, when “King Rahm” called on the courts to ban the walkout, the CTU leadership under the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (C.O.R.E.) buckled, ramming through a sellout contract. The settlement was followed by the racist closure of 49 Chicago schools in 2013.
C.O.R.E. has been deeply enmeshed in Democratic Party politics since winning control of the union in 2010.[6] Even as a supporter of the now-defunct International Socialist Organization when he was union vice president, Sharkey has endorsed Democrats over and over. The CTU pushed hard for Democrat Jesús “Chuy” García for mayor in 2015, for Obama and now Biden as U.S. president. In the 2020 election the CTU endorsed 43 candidates for the state legislature, all Democrats. And last December, Sharkey and other local AFT leaders penned a letter to president-elect Biden, presented at a photo op with AFT leader Weingarten, saying that “having one of our own in the White House” gave them “hope.”
Despite the blatant efforts to nail the unions by one Democratic mayor after another, the AFT and CTU leaders’ strategy is to chain union power to this bosses party, even as it keeps kicking them in the teeth. As Jim Vail of the Second City Teacher blog (1 February) noted, one of the main forces behind Mayor Lightfoot’s diktat ordering teachers back to school no matter what, was the sinister outfit Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), which has long attacked the CTU, and teachers unions in general. During the standoff over Chicago schools, DFER president Shavar Jeffries “said powerful teachers unions are standing in the way of bringing back students,” according to an AP (31 January) dispatch. The group, a creature of multi-billionaire hedge fund operators who seek to feed off charter schools, earlier put forward CPS CEO Jackson as a candidate for Biden’s education secretary.
Now Biden’s U.S. Department of Education has sent letters to state education departments saying that they must hold federally mandated standardized tests this year, even though most students around the country are having remote instruction. This is ridiculous! It can’t measure “the impact COVID-19 has had on learning,” as the tests were not held last school year, and this year conditions are so chaotic, with online learning burnout and traumatized students, it’s impossible to measure anything.
There is also the presence of police in the schools, where they criminalize African American and Latino students. Last summer, as tens of thousands marched in Chicago along with millions across the U.S. to denounce racist police murder, the CTU called a demo to “defund the police,” attended by many students. On June 24, the school board voted 4-3 to keep cops in the schools. In December, the CTU called on CPS to hire more counselors, and fund them by “reallocating funds from the Chicago Police Department.” We have explained that the calls to “abolish the police” are a liberal/reformist utopia, while simply transferring money from one budget line to will change nothing.[8] But we have long called for getting all police – and security guards – out of the schools, and out of the unions.[9] As schools reopen, the CTU should insist that they be cop-free. Starting now!
This underscores that the battle over the schools must be part and parcel of the broader struggle against racist capitalism. As we have noted, Joe Biden was not only the author of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill that escalated mass incarceration in black ghettos, but also in the 1970s he made a name for himself leading the segregationist pack in Congress in opposing school integration through busing. Yet desegregating Chicago’s schools must be a top priority for teachers in a city where 60% of the population and 83% of the 341,000 students (pre-pandemic) are black and Latino.Oust the Bureaucrats – For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!
Most of the left has acted along with other “progressives” as a cheering squad for the CTU leadership. This includes the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which had not a word against the Democratic Party (“Chicago Teachers Union’s commitment to democracy pays off,” Liberation, 2 February); and the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), which called in the 2020 election to “defeat Trump,” i.e., vote for Biden (“Chicago Teachers Union ratifies framework agreement for return to in-person learning,” Fightback, 11 February). In These Times (10 February), speaking for the right wing of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America (DSA) gushed: “After Threatening Strike, Chicago Teachers Set ‘New Standard’ With Safer School Reopening Plan.” Jacobin (20 February), for the DSA “lefts,” was more equivocal, citing Sharkey saying, “This is not the agreement you deserve.”
Socialist Alternative (SAlt), on the other hand, sides with keep-the-schools-closed advocates who voted against the agreement, criticizing Biden and the Weingarten leadership of the AFT (“Chicago: Lessons from the Fight Against Lori Lightfoot’s Reckless School Reopening,” 1 March). While SAlt criticizes “CORE’s capitulation at the bargaining table in 2021,” it looks back to its “fighting roots.” Yet even before taking office, C.O.R.E. leaders were bureaucrats-in-training. After a long wish-list of liberal/reformist demands, SAlt calls to “completely transform our current education system,” but doesn’t say what that would consist of or how it would come about (nothing about socialist revolution, of course). And the fake-militant posturing is belied by SAlt star Seattle councilwoman Kshama Sawant’s announcement that she had joined the DSA.
Then there are the rabid wannabe union-busters of the “World Scab Web Site” (WSWS), which has been pushing the keep-’em-closed line with a phantom “Chicago Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee.” At the same time, it called on workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama to vote “no” on union recognition.[10]
The Chicago Teachers Union has periodically gone on strike against Democratic mayors who have attacked labor rights. It has opposed racist school closures and called for rent abatements, though typically those demands serve as window dressing and evaporate when it gets down to concrete strike demands. It has won some notable strikes, such as the first-ever charter school strike in December 2018, when 15 CTU-represented charters affiliated with the Acero chain won salary realignment with the CPS pay scale, reduced class size and a commitment to be sanctuary schools for undocumented immigrant students. But more often the C.O.R.E. leadership has sold out at the bargaining table, just as its bureaucratic predecessors did.
At bottom, the CTU/C.O.R.E.’s “social justice unionism” is simply a more activist version of simple labor militancy and “union democracy.” It is incapable of taking on the capitalist state, or breaking with the Democratic Party, and is in fact subordinated to them. Yet those are the tasks at hand. As we wrote of the 2012 strike: “Only class-struggle unionism that openly fights against capitalism can defeat the class war on workers and the oppressed. The unions were built by ‘reds’ who relied on the working class not the employers and their government” (in “Chicago Teachers: Strike Was Huge, Settlement Sucks”). What’s needed is to cohere a class-struggle opposition to the class-collaborationist CTU bureaucrats, to break with the Democrats and all capitalist parties and politicians, and build a workers party fighting for a workers government.
Next up: reopening the high schools
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http://edworkersunite.blogspot.com/2021/03/chicago-teachers-in-eye-of-storm.html
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[1] International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 28.
[2] See “The Fight Over Reopening Schools Is a Class Battle,” The Internationalist No. 61, September-October 2020, where we analyze the evidence showing limited spread of the coronavirus among children (particularly those of elementary and middle school age) and the damage to students’ education, social development and mental health of remote-only schooling. Experience from school reopening in the fall only confirms these facts.
[3] See “A Class-Struggle Program to Reopen New York City Schools Safely,” The Internationalist No. 61, September-October 2020.
[4] See John Dewey, “New Schools for a New Era,” in Marxism and the Battle Over Education, The Internationalist special supplement (2d. edition), January 2008.
[5] See “Chicago Teachers: Strike Was Huge, Settlement Sucks,” The Internationalist, September 2012.
[6] See “Lessons of Chicago CORE,” The Internationalist No. 33, Summer 2011.
[7] See “Teachers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Stop Work to Stop High-Stakes Test,” in The Internationalist, Summer 2012.
[8] “‘Abolish the Police’ Under Capitalism?” The Internationalist No. 60, May-July 2020.
[9] Security guards should be removed from SEIU Local 73 (representing CPS staff) and from the schools altogether. Along with aggressive treatment of students generally, CPS security guards have been accused of hundreds of cases of sexual misconduct a year.
[10] See “How the ‘World Scab Web Site’ Aids the Bosses,” The Internationalist, January 2021
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.
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