Ninety-four percent of CTU members vote to authorize strike for schools Chicago’s students deserve
Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates governing body will set strike date at Wednesday, Oct. 2, meeting.
CHICAGO, September 26, 2019—The Chicago Teachers Union this evening released totals of the Sept. 24-26 strike authorization vote. The CTU Rules and Election Committee reported that as of 9:30 p.m., the Union passed the 75 percent threshold of members voting “yes.” Ninety-four percent of teachers, clinicians, PSRPs, nurses, librarians voted to authorize a strike to win the schools Chicago’s students deserve.
The vote stands as a mandate from CTU members for Chicago Public Schools to uphold promises of equity and educational justice made by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and that those promises must be in writing in an enforceable contract. This is the only way to hold the district to its word after decades of austerity, budget cuts, understaffing, school closings and privatization.
The CTU House of Delegates will convene for its next scheduled meeting on Wednesday, Oct. 2, to set a strike date. The earliest the Union could strike is Oct. 7. The work stoppage would be the third since 2011 and the first under Lightfoot.
“Our school communities are desperately short of nurses, social workers, psychologists, counselors and other support staff, even as our students struggle with high levels of trauma driven by poverty and neighborhood violence,” CTU President Jesse Sharkey said. “This vote represents a true mandate for change.”
“And all of our members vote, not just 30 percent of the electorate,” Sharkey said.
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Bargaining Update
Rank-and-file members met with the district today to negotiate over early childhood and bilingual education provisions. They were sorely disappointed at the non-engagement from the other side. Watch their explanation in this video:
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The Chicago Teachers Union represents nearly 25,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in schools funded by City of Chicago School District 299, and by extension, the nearly 400,000 students and families they serve. The CTU is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers and is the third-largest teachers local in the United States. For more information please visit the CTU website at www.ctulocal1.org.
Go CTU teachers! So proud! Stand strong!
Teachers are teaching other workers how it’s done.
Awesome.
Thank you, Chicago teachers, for standing up for children everywhere and our nation at a time when we need real leaders. You are true patriots.
Sometimes enough is enough, and a strike is what teachers do when their backs are to the wall. Stand strong Chicago teachers!
👏 Yay for the Chicago teachers. Chicago Teachers, YOU have national support.
I support the CTU. I used to be a sub for Sub Center South in Chicago. I’d sub on days when the suburbs, where I worked, weren’t in session.
I wish teachers in Indiana would get their act together and strike.
may every strike/action inspire ten more
I dunno, I’m not so sure this time. From the get-go, CTU has made it a war with Mayor Lightfoot. They wanted Preckwinkle and this is starting to come across as foot-stomping tantrumming that they didn’t get their candidate. Mayor Lightfoot has barely been in office five months and she’s already done some good progressive things, but the CTU is trying to paint her as Rahm’s chosen successor.
On one hand, I’m all in favor of collective action, up to and including strikes, and I’ve been a big supporter of the CTU, especially when Karen Lewis was at the helm. I’m not normally one to advise caution or delay, but I think this might have been a time to wait a bit and give Lightfoot a chance.
I’m feeling a bit the same way. Jesse Sharkey has been antagonistic toward Lori Lightfoot from well before her election. The needs are genuine, but so are the needs of the rest of the city. What is she facing…a billion dollar deficit?
FYI, Lightfoot brought the strike on herself by breaking a MAJOR campaign promise to the union concerning funding for counselors, school nurses and other support staff that the schools need to do their jobs. Another part of the law I mentioned in my post prevents the union from directly bargaining for anything other than pay and benefits, the goal of this being to cast the union in a bad light during negotiations.
Has she actually broken that promise, or is there more to the story? For instance, the CTU is harping on her for “breaking” her promise to support an elected school board, but note RBMTK’s post below – there were other issues besides just the elected part, like how many members the board would have and how long until it took effect. I suspect Lightfoot’s alleged “broken” promise regarding counselors and nurses is similar. After all, she has to deal with the City Council, and an uglier group of individuals may not exist elsewhere on the planet (trust me, my job involves dealing a lot with the City).
I am in the suburbs, so I don’t have the same perspective and haven’t paid quite as close attention as some who are right there, but I stand by my feeling that there has been noticeable hostility to Lightfoot from before her election that never seemed to abate.
I do remember her promises to improve staffing of ancillary personnel, not that I find counselors and librarians as lesser personnel. Did she promise to meet a staffing level in the first five months of her administration? Somehow I doubt it. I still think that the billion dollar deficit she was left with has some influence over her flexibility. What other city services get shafted to meet the teachers (justified) demand? It is a bit of the age old story–we all want services but none of us want to pay any more than we already do to obtain them.
This whole state is getting a dose of what happens when we live beyond our means. That, too, is an over simplification since some difficult changes in tax policy would go a long way to alleviating our debt problems. However, if we can’t afford to fully staff all of our schools, then we had better figure out how to at least spread the resources equitably. That has not been done.
Agree w/you, dienne77 & speduktr. Just the other day, 2 people had an argument about the elected school board bill (for CPS) not passing & not approved by Lightfoot. Well, this bill (& done purposely) had wording in it that–1. the Board would be comprised of 50 members (can any of you imagine how hard it would be to get anything done w/that unwieldy a #?! I sit on boards, & we have enough trouble getting business done w/just 10 members! & 2. It wouldn’t take effect until 2021 (pretty sure that was the year, or, maybe 2022). One person thought–as Jesse Sharkey has said–that it means Lightfoot is against an elected school board, & just wanted to appoint her own. A ridiculous argument.
On the one hand–& a teacher wrote an excellent letter to the Chgo. Sun-Times today–teachers are, in actuality, striking for more for their students (smaller class size, more nurses, social workers, librarians {“75% of schools–9/10 of majority African-American schools have no librarian”}, etc.)**–but on the other hand yes, the leadership is sore that their endorsed candidate didn’t win, & they’re not giving the new mayor a chance.
Somehow, I don’t think Karen Lewis would fully approve.
&, thanks to Stand on Children’s Jonah Edelman, who engineered it so that, on its face, a strike looks like it’s **only* about **teacher salary & benefits, the teachers are, in reality, striking for more for their students. In fact, the headline (yeah, in bold, huge letters–1 & 1/2 inches, w/a red “Hey, Chicago Teachers Union” above–“TAKE THE DEAL”), w/some rather icky commentary (“Chgo. public school teachers should accept the latest offer…a sweet deal that most Chicagoans would just love to get. What employee, in any job, would turn down a 16% raise over 5 years? & let’s not forget the 296,752 schoolchildren who’d be sitting at home learning nothing if the teachers walk out.”) .& an ugly editorial.
& this from the liberal, pro-labor Chicago paper (the Tribune has always been conservative, & had no front page as bad as this!) !!
The elected school board would have reps from all of the varied communities in the city and the proposal was worked on by major grass roots parent and pro public education groups here. One advantage of the large number is that it and the way people become board members is designed to prevent the power of money and influence from usurping local control of public schools.
I agree with RBMTK. Fifty is far too many for a Board. Find me a functioning board of that size. I can see sending one rep from a group of neighborhood communities that could rotate. Those subunits could meet and bring concerns to a board made up of reps from those sub units. I am not very familiar with the administrative structure of CPS, but I do seem to remember something about regional superintendents. The same sort of idea might be of use.
Jon–are you from Chicago or IL? If you are & you know something about which I’m unaware, I appreciate your comment.
In terms of #s & schools, that’s why the LSCs exist.
&–in terms of #s–as recently as w/in the last 2 years, there was complaint about & an attempt to curtail the # of aldermen/wards in Chicago (just sayin’, not necessarily agreein’).
All that having been said, still…I repeat…an unwieldy number.
It must be pointed out that the actual number in favor of authorizing a strike is higher than 94%. Due to a blatantly anti-union state law that only affects the CTU, any non-vote is counted as a no vote. The real number is higher, it’s whatever you get by taking 94% of the non votes and adding that to the yes vote. The law sets the threshold for a strike at 75%, and the CTU has always blown past the 90% mark. A fool named Jonah Edelman was the architect of the law, so we should all thank him for being such a clueless, inadvertent ally of the union.
Yep, as I commented yesterday, we can “thank” Jonah Edelman…from Oregon, at the time…for his meddling in IL.
Just as R.I. Guv. Gina Raimondo came here to “inform” citizens that state pension payments were breaking the bank in IL, which kicked off the whole “ILL-annoy is broke” campaign, complete w/billboards & advertisements featuring Pres. Lincoln w/a tear rolling down his cheek.
Leave. Us. Alone.
Jonah Edelman is an embarrassment to his family legacy.
He is in education for the money and has the nerve to call his group “Stand for Children.”
His disillusioned followers call it “Stand on Children.”
For those who want an update from the front lines:
Xian Franzinger Barrett
3 hrs
Done from an 8 hour bargaining session. I am tired but ready to join all of you to continue to fight/
Our strike authorization vote was powerful enough to move the board to bring something to the table for the first time in nine months.
The board made substantive offers on salary, but we will have to check the veracity of their claims about those offers.
The board still wants to take away our preps, power to determine our grading system and make their evaluation system even more racist and punitive. They are specifically targeting elementary teachers for direct management of our preps with the knowledge that we are predominantly a workforce of women. It is unabashed sexism.
The board emphasized that they have the right under the law to ignore all of our demands around learning conditions like reasonably class sizes and structure and length of school day. They intend to maintain the separate unequal treatment of CPS students–the state’s largest population of students of color.
We will compromise nothing when it comes to the basic humanity of our students, children and communities. CPS can do the right thing, or we will put our own livelihoods on the line to make them do the right thing. Hope for CPS leadership to find their empathy, but prepare for a dynamic strike
Big take aways:
1) the board was scared by our #Strikevote. After 8 months of avoiding any sort of concrete bargaining, they made a concrete offer on several issues.
2) The board needs to do a lot of work to avoid a strike. They seem to be set on an idea that we should trust them to follow through on their promises without binding language, but when pressed don’t seen to have any plan. #CTUstrike
3) The ugly: We said key issues were class size, staffing of vacant positions and nurses/libraries for all, they literally told us since the law says that the children of Chicago are the only one who don’t get protection on those issues, they wouldn’t address them. #CTUStrike
4) Furthermore they gave us a weak sauce proposal on “Recruitment of Educators of Color” with literally nothing to address retention. You know, the way that racist organizations treat people of color. #Educolor #Ctustrike
5) They still want invasive and punitive teacher evaluation despite concrete evidence that their REACH system disproportionately targets educators of color with low ratings. #CTUstrike
Okay, I guess this means you’re from Chicago, or at least IL?
(I know Xian.) So I fathom that you do, in fact, have knowledge as to how the elected school board bill came about.
That having been said, as an activist w/much involvement in grassroots orgs. here & knowing the person I’d mentioned who was arguing against the bill the other day (who is even more involved in Chgo. activists & organizations than am I, & who’d been the one to argue against the 50 members & the timelines of the bill), I have a hard time imagining that anyone would advocate for a board that large or for such a far-off timeline for implementation.