Chicago: Union Tops Try To Put Lid on Struggle-Teachers One-Day Strike Draws Wide Support

Workers Vanguard No. 1088	22 April 2016

Chicago: Union Tops Try To Put Lid on Struggle-Teachers One-Day Strike Draws Wide Support

On April 1, the 27,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) waged a one-day strike against the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The strike culminated in a downtown rally of well over 10,000 red-shirted teachers and working-class, black and Latino parents angered by the city’s boarding up of public schools in their neighborhoods. Working without a contract since last June, the rank-and-file teachers are ready to fight. Turnout on the picket lines was solid, well in the 90 percent range at many schools. The CTU members also attended joint rallies at several of the city’s public universities and colleges that are threatened with layoffs, furloughs and April shutdowns because the state government has cut off funding.

At the rally were contingents of auto workers, members of the SEIU and nurses in union jackets as well as Fight For $15 McDonald’s workers. Auto workers have had the recent experience of having a sellout contract with the Big Three rammed down their throats by the UAW bureaucrats in the face of widespread sentiment for a strike. The SEIU has seen its membership in CPS decimated since the 2012 teachers strike, when the CTU and SEIU union bureaucrats colluded to allow SEIU members to scab on the striking teachers. SEIU scabbing was again allowed during the recent one-day strike.

Notably present were members of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Locals 241 (bus) and 308 (rail) who have been working without a contract since January 1. Under the grinding conditions at the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), bus drivers are forced to work split shifts spanning 13 hours while getting only eight hours’ pay—or less for part-timers. Drivers are hounded by the CTA’s more and more bloated layer of supervisors, who write them up even for being one minute ahead of schedule. The intense appetite evident in the CTU ranks for a full-on strike, if realized in deed, could well ignite similar sentiments in the ranks of the ATU.

CTU vice president Jesse Sharkey’s observation in the aftermath of the strike that “the city is on fire and we are the catalyst” brims with an undeserved self-satisfaction but captures a sense of the impact that the teachers’ militancy is having on Chicago’s working and poor people. In fact, CTU president Karen Lewis and Sharkey are trying to douse the flames. They are working overtime to contain the anger of the membership in the service of avoiding upsetting the apple cart in this Democratic Party stronghold in an election year. When the union delegates approved the one-day strike in March by a lopsided 486 to 124 vote, Lewis acknowledged that the opposition was mainly from delegates who “feel like why don’t we just do it now, do a real strike now, and be done with it, as opposed to just a one day strike.”

Thus, the strike on April 1 was orchestrated by Lewis and Sharkey with the hope of allowing the angry ranks to let off some steam in lieu of an open-ended strike. Not a word was said by the CTU tops at the rally about an all-out strike against the Chicago Public Schools system, although Lewis continues to toy with the ranks by tossing around possible dates for strike action. Instead, the labor tops, themselves a central component of the Democratic Party vote machine, go out of their way to aim their fire at the Republicans. “This strike is targeted primarily to Bruce Rauner,” Karen Lewis made clear, referring to the state’s Republican governor, who has issued threats to take over the Chicago schools and throw them into bankruptcy in order to bust the CTU and zero out the teachers’ pensions (InTheseTimes.com, 2 April). What the union should be doing today is preparing for an all-out strike. The reality is that as of now the union’s leadership has no plans for a real struggle. The only scheduled event is an April 20 “day of action” crawl to Springfield, the state capital.

Rauner’s threats are in fact toothless because the Democrats are by far the dominant party in Illinois, including controlling the state legislature. While lambasting Rauner with “fight the right” rhetoric, the CTU bureaucrats endorsed the re-election of Democrat Mike Madigan, Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. In the aftermath of the 2012 CTU strike, Madigan tried to ram through a bill capping Illinois teachers’ pensions outside of Chicago. From Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel to Madigan to Rauner, all the capitalist politicians are looking to bail out the state on the backs of the unions and the oppressed by gutting everything from workers’ pensions to public services. In pushing to bust the CTU, Emanuel has simply been carrying out the school “reform” policies of his former White House boss, Barack Obama. These 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. Going to Springfield to beg from these enemies of labor is simply an exercise in masochism. Chicago’s teachers are more than ready to show the CPS and the bourgeois politicians a real display of labor’s power.

At the beginning of this year, Emanuel’s Democratic Party administration was on the ropes because of his cover-up of the dash cam video of black youth Laquan McDonald being gunned down in cold blood by a Chicago cop. On January 6, as the bully Emanuel’s popularity plummeted, the CTU House of Delegates passed a resolution calling for his resignation. But Lewis was quick to distance herself: “That was something that came from the membership and we respect our democratic process. Personally, I don’t care” (Chicago Tribune, 16 January). Since that time, demands for Emanuel’s resignation have dwindled, doubtless reflecting pressure from Democratic politicos to not make life difficult in the presidential election year.

But the cop murders of black people have not subsided a whit. A recent Emanuel-appointed task force delivered the unremarkable verdict that the Chicago Police Department is plagued by systemic racism. Not surprisingly, the report did not indict Rahm or his Democratic Party mayoral predecessors for their role in covering up and perpetuating the cops’ ongoing racist mayhem. The race-caste oppression of black people is an integral component of the American capitalist system and will not be reformed away. At the April 1 rally, Lewis responded to hecklers about police violence by intoning, “Cops are not our enemies.” In fact, the cops are the armed enforcers of the racist capitalist system. The next speaker, Page May, a representative of Assata’s Daughters, responded profanely and justly, “Fuck the police!” Sharkey later denounced Page for having “condemned police in a way our Union does not condone, and we regret what was said.”

It seems that there are a lot of fires for Lewis and Sharkey to try to put out. In January, Lewis tried to push a sellout contract deal that would have gutted pension benefits and jacked up health care costs, but that offer was unanimously rejected by the CTU bargaining committee. CPS fired back with a threat to stop making pension payments for CTU members. But in the face of the April 1 walkout, the city backed down and made the payments as scheduled. Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune waged a gutter press scabherding drive, ludicrously predicting thousands of scabs would cross the CTU picket lines. In fact, the strike was solid, with even CPS admitting that less than 1 percent of teachers reported to work.

In justifying limiting the strike to just one day, the CTU bureaucrats moan about “legality,” claiming a full strike would be against state laws that require a four-month “fact finding” period after the December strike vote before a strike can begin. Criminally, back in 2012 Lewis supported Senate Bill 7, which imposed these union-busting requirements, including mandating a 75 percent supermajority to approve a strike. This is an outrageous government interference in internal union affairs.

City Hall and the CPS were calling the solid April 1 strike “illegal” too, and are seeking a court order to prevent another one from happening. To that end, Emanuel and his flunkey Forrest Claypool, who now runs CPS, cried crocodile tears about the children who would miss a day of school when the teachers walked out. That is rich coming from politicians who have already closed the schools for three furlough days this spring to save money, who have shut down ghetto schools by the score and who cram the overwhelmingly black and Latino students into crowded classrooms without enough school supplies. It’s no wonder that a recent poll showed that the majority of Chicagoans favor the union over Emanuel as a force to improve public education. As one high school senior said before the strike rally, “Any kid who shows up to today’s protests is going to learn a lot” (InTheseTimes.com, 2 April).

The attacks on Chicago’s public schools are part and parcel of an all-sided drive to gut public education, falling heavily on the city’s black and Latino populations. For decades, Chicago State University (CSU) has served the impoverished ghetto masses, who can get a college education there at an “affordable” $12,000 a year. Close to half of its overwhelmingly black student body of 4,500 are mothers. With a campus shutdown threatened for April 30, the administration demanded that all the campus workers turn in their keys in anticipation of mass layoffs. Spring break was canceled and commencement was moved up to April 28. At Northeastern Illinois University, workers are being forced to take one furlough day per week, a 20 percent pay cut. “It’s aimed at hurting minorities,” said a black junior at CSU. “Other schools here would never close” (New York Times, 9 April).

In January, when there were widespread demands for Emanuel’s resignation for his cover-up of McDonald’s murder, we wrote: “The crisis now rocking his regime and reverberating up to the highest echelons of the Democratic Party opens the door for our class—the multiracial working class—to launch some real struggle not only in its own interests but also in the fight against racist cop terror and in defense of all the oppressed” (“We Need a Multiracial Workers Party!” WV No. 1081, 15 January). That observation is still true today. Chicago’s working and poor people would rise in support of an all-out CTU strike.

Open condemnations of such action come, not surprisingly, from the virulently right-wing governor and the anti-labor Chicago Tribune. But it is reliance on the Democratic Party, from City Hall to the state assembly in Springfield, pushed by its allies in the trade-union bureaucracy that poses the biggest roadblock to strike action. The trade-union bureaucracy subordinates the interests of the workers to the interests of the capitalist rulers, mainly through its support to the Democratic Party which, no less than the Republicans, is a party of the class enemy. This is just as true of “progressive” bureaucrats like Lewis, Sharkey, and their Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) that runs the CTU as of more conservative officials.

Lewis and her CORE operation continue to be darlings of the left. None are more fulsome in their enthusiasm than the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), which has acted as CORE’s chief press agent, particularly touting Sharkey. For years, ISO supporters both inside and outside the CTU have promoted CORE with nary a word of criticism. The online Socialist Worker (4 April) lambastes the Republican Rauner as a “different bad guy on the scene this time around” without even mentioning, much less criticizing, the CTU’s endorsement of Rauner’s partner in crime, the Democrat Madigan.

These types advise the workers to put their trust in the very forces that have led and continue to lead the attacks on their wages and benefits. The collusion of the trade-union bureaucrats with the bosses goes hand in hand with their abandonment of union militancy. It has opened up their members to the unending attacks on their well-being while perpetuating the demoralization that has led to the decline in union membership nationwide. What the unions need is a genuine class-struggle leadership that is dedicated to fighting against all capitalist exploitation and oppression. It is necessary to begin to build the revolutionary workers party that will fight to overturn the racist American capitalist order.