A View From The Left-Democrats, Bankers Out for Blood-Chicago Teachers Reject Sellout Contract

Workers Vanguard No. 1083	12 February 2016

Democrats, Bankers Out for Blood-Chicago Teachers Reject Sellout Contract

The Time to Strike Is Now!

 

On February 1, the Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) 40-member bargaining committee, reflecting the overwhelming sentiment of the membership, unanimously rejected a rotten contract proposal that would have gutted teachers’ pensions and jacked up health care costs. The next day, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s hand-picked head of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) moved to strong-arm the union into submission by announcing massive budget cuts, layoffs and a halt to pension contributions. In an open rebuke to the widely reviled Democratic Party mayor and his CPS flunkey, thousands of CTU members marched on February 4 through the city’s Loop business district, chanting: “Rahm Emanuel’s got to go!”

Steamrollering the CTU in the name of school “reform” has been a major preoccupation of Rahm Emanuel—formerly chief of staff in Obama’s White House—since he became Chicago mayor five years ago. But the teachers have proved to be no pushovers, as they showed in their nine-day 2012 strike. Now the CTU, whose contract expired in June 2015, is again on the front lines. With Emanuel out for blood—more layoffs, more public school closings, more non-union charter schools, more pension gouging—teachers voted overwhelmingly in December to authorize a strike. Giving voice to this sentiment, demonstrators at the February 4 rally chanted, “We will strike!”

There could hardly be a more opportune time for strike action in Chicago, with City Hall reeling after the lid was blown on its cover-up of the racist cop killing of Laquan McDonald. Such murderous police violence has the masses seething in the ghettos and barrios, which also bear the brunt of the assault on public education. The capitalist rulers have little but prison and menial jobs to offer black and Latino youth, and thus no interest in spending money to upgrade inner-city schools or in paying union wages to teachers to educate these kids. Known as “Segregation City,” Chicago is the quintessential American city, where divisions of race and class are at their most raw.

A CTU strike in defense of teachers’ livelihoods as well as public education would resonate with the mainly minority parents, as the 2012 strike did, and highlight the intertwining of black rights and labor rights in this deeply racist, class-divided society. Such a strike could also galvanize other beleaguered unionized public employees, not least the city’s largely black transit unions, who are currently working without a contract. Teachers can count as potential allies organized labor, working people and the black and immigrant poor. Arrayed against them are all the forces of the ruling class, from Emanuel’s capitalist Democratic Party cohorts and the bourgeois media to the cops and courts. The social tinder is there for an explosive class-struggle fight that could fuse the power of labor with the anger of the ghettos and barrios.

CTU Tops Sabotage Class Struggle

The teachers hold the match, but those who run the CTU—namely President Karen Lewis, Vice President Jesse Sharkey and their “progressive” Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE)—do not want it lit. These union “reformers” betray the membership and its impulse to struggle in favor of “working together” with the bosses and their political representatives in the Democratic Party.

Take the matter of who pays for pensions, which the CPS has chronically underfunded. Although Lewis previously said that this issue is “strike-worthy,” she recently volunteered that “we are willing to make certain sacrifices,” including letting the CPS off the hook for its pension contributions! She declared the city’s subsequent proposal to that effect a “serious offer.” That did not go down well with her bargaining committee, much less the union ranks, spurring angry meetings demanding to know why Lewis would even put such a giveback package to a vote. Shortly after it was resoundingly defeated, Sharkey took to the airwaves to assure the bosses: “We’re going to keep working and try to avoid a shutdown of the district, a strike.”

The CTU tops have all but sworn off a strike before mid May, when the school year is nearly over and a walkout’s potential impact would be much less. They are hiding behind the notorious Senate Bill 7, which Lewis herself supported when Emanuel pushed it through prior to the 2012 contract battle. That anti-labor legislation, which requires the union to get approval from 75 percent of its membership for any strike, also mandates a lengthy “fact-finding” period (followed by a “cooling off” period) before a work stoppage can legally begin. But City Hall is not waiting for any “fact-finding”—they’re threatening to slash pension contributions now! Playing by the bosses’ rules is a losing game. The only strike that is “illegal” is a strike that loses.

Emanuel’s earlier provocations sparked the 2012 strike, which animated teachers and other unionists across the country. But with the CORE bureaucrats at the helm, the CTU was fighting with its arms tied behind its back. Lewis, Sharkey & Co. did not seriously seek to mobilize union solidarity in action, instead giving SEIU janitors the green light to cross CTU picket lines. Today, those SEIU jobs are largely eliminated, privatized to a non-union company. With the union leadership accepting the mayor’s insistence that the critical issues of school closings, layoffs and charter schools were nonnegotiable and off limits, Lewis then pushed through a settlement that was not much different from what CPS had been offering before the strike. Less than a year later, Emanuel announced nearly 50 new school closings. Many CTU members now believe the strike was ended too early.

Significantly, a solid strike by teachers now could set the stage for driving Emanuel from office. In early January, the CTU House of Delegates (the union’s highest body) passed a welcome resolution calling on Emanuel to resign, but the ink was barely dry before Lewis distanced herself from it. “That was something that came from the membership,” she explained; “personally, I don’t care” (Chicago Tribune, 16 January). With the presidential primaries underway, the CORE bureaucrats are not eager to upset the apple cart in the Democrats’ Chicago stronghold. Any struggle to send Emanuel packing must not have as its goal placing a “kinder, gentler” Democrat in City Hall, but rather must proceed from the understanding of the need to build a class-struggle workers party that emblazons on its banner the fight against capitalist exploitation and all forms of oppression.

Democrats, including those pretending to be “friends” of labor and minorities, represent the interests of big business no less than Republicans do. One such false friend is Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, whom the CTU tops (including Sharkey) endorsed in last year’s mayoral election. While offering up some rhetoric about bettering the lot of the “little guy,” Garcia is as much an enemy of working people as Emanuel. In the campaign, Garcia vowed to flood the city streets with 1,000 more killer cops, while arguing that he could more effectively wring concessions from the unions through negotiations than Emanuel could through his ham-fisted bullying. The CTU’s support is not reserved for so-called progressives. Last month, the union endorsed State Assembly boss Mike Madigan, the old-school Chicago Democrat and property tax lawyer known for shelving even the most modest reform bills, such as those for a minimum-wage hike and an elected school board.

Acting as CORE’s chief press agent is the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO). For years, ISO supporters both inside and outside the CTU have promoted CORE with nary a word of criticism. A recent case in point is the deafening silence on CORE’s Madigan endorsement in the ISO article “Rahm Declares War on Chicago Teachers” (socialistworker.org, 3 February). No wonder. Notwithstanding their occasional nod to Karl Marx, these fake socialists espouse a program shared with various and sundry union bureaucrats, not least Sharkey, whose columns have appeared in the ISO press. For them, the entire purpose of labor protest and political activity is to pressure the Democrats to give workers a slightly better shake under capitalism.

Other reformist organizations have joined the ISO in participating in CORE, under the pretext that CORE is more “honest” and “democratic” than the union officials it replaced. In reality, it embraces the same pro-capitalist program, centered on supporting the Democratic Party, as the old-line union tops. Thus, these so-called progressives end up betraying the workers, as CORE, Lewis and Sharkey are doing today. What the unions need is a genuine class-struggle leadership that is dedicated to fighting against capitalist exploitation.

Public-Sector Workers Under Attack

The CTU bureaucracy makes a big deal of Republican governor Bruce Rauner’s proposed measures to place CPS in receivership and bankrupt the teachers’ pension fund. But the Democrats are the dominant party in Illinois, including controlling the state legislature. And in pushing to bust the CTU, Emanuel has simply been carrying out the school “reform” policies of his former White House boss. The Obama administration’s policies are designed to help spur state governments to shutter supposedly failing inner-city public schools, roll out the welcome mat to non-union charter schools and launch anti-union attacks on seniority and tenure. Nationwide, the bourgeoisie has been out to gut public-sector unions, targeting teachers in particular, as shown by everything from the pending Supreme Court case (Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association) to strip these unions of “fair share” funds to the deplorable conditions of Detroit schools and their besieged staff.

And from Emanuel to Madigan to Rauner, capitalist politicians of all stripes are sharpening their knives to slash public employee pensions. For decades, the annual CPS budget was financed by “borrowing” (i.e., looting) money from the teachers’ fund. Ever since that fund dried up, the banks holding the debt have charged exorbitant interest rates while encouraging the city to wrest sweeping concessions from teachers.

The fact that the bourgeois politicians are out to get the Chicago teachers should be sufficient warning of how suicidal it is to believe that working people possess common interests with their exploiters. Turning back the ruling-class war against labor, black people and other minorities requires a break from political subservience to the Democrats. The unions need a leadership committed to the independence of the working class from the class enemy.

The money and resources exist to provide quality, integrated, public education for all. Seizing that wealth and putting it at the service of workers and the oppressed can only come about by breaking the bourgeoisie’s hold on power. To that end, the working people must forge a party that fights for their class interests, a multiracial revolutionary workers party. The Spartacist League is dedicated to building such a party, one that will lead all of the exploited and oppressed in the struggle to sweep away this decaying capitalist system and establish an egalitarian socialist society.