Union Tops Knife Solid Strike

Chicago: Lightfoot, Democrats Screw Teachers

NOVEMBER 12—After Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) members went on strike for eleven school days, the union leadership knifed the struggle and sent teachers back to work before letting them vote on the tentative agreement. Having bulldozed the deal through the House of Delegates (the union’s highest governing body), CTU president Jesse Sharkey and vice president Stacy Davis Gates, alongside Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), touted it as a “contract we can believe in.” In fact, the agreement has sparked widespread discontent and leaves the major issues of the strike either unresolved or addressed with such vague language as to be meaningless.

The strike battle set the determined CTU ranks against Chicago’s “progressive” Democratic Party mayor, Lori Lightfoot. But by undercutting the struggle and demobilizing the workforce precisely as the strike was beginning to bite, Sharkey et al. all but surrendered to Lightfoot and her cronies. Instead of relying on the collective resolve of the teachers and the school staff of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73—who went on strike together—and appealing to the rest of city labor to help build the picket lines, the CTU bureaucracy banked on empty promises from Democratic Party politicians. The actions of the CTU leadership are an indictment of the bureaucrats’ loyalty to the capitalist system and its political representatives, particularly the Democrats, the very party that has gutted public education in Chicago.

This contract should be voted down, and teachers must be prepared to resume strike action! Teachers would be saddled with a lengthy five- rather than three-year contract, and elementary school teachers would not get the paid prep time they demanded. Class size caps, a key issue, are not binding but simply subject to “investigation” and possible “remedy.” As for providing an “adequate” number of social workers and nurses, there would not even be one of each per school until the end of the contract. If there was any doubt that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) wouldn’t milk the ambiguous wording in the tentative agreement, the administration is already stonewalling the union on how to implement annual pay raises for veteran teachers. Furthermore, just as in the aftermath of the 2012 CTU strike, school closings and teacher layoffs could be on the horizon.

It was only when the teachers strike extended into a second week that the city agreed to cough up millions more to concede to some union demands. The CTU’s deal would give paraprofessional and school-​related personnel, or PSRPs, a bump in pay, and all members would receive cost-of-living adjustments over the course of the contract. The heavily black and female Local 73 membership won pay raises, between 17 and 40 percent. The fact that teachers and staff were able to wrest any concessions at all from City Hall is a testament to the power of joint action.

With the bourgeoisie’s local media mouthpieces railing against teachers as selfish, Sharkey and Davis Gates caved to Lightfoot’s hypocritical “think of the children” rhetoric. The massive rallies downtown were a sign of the popular support for the strike among the city’s residents, especially black people, Latinos and the poor. But the CTU misleaders used these demonstrations to sow illusions that the task was to make the mayor live up to her campaign promises, expressed in the chant “Lori Lightfoot, Get on the right foot.” As the chief executive of “Segregation City,” Lightfoot was in fact doing her job, serving the interests of the capitalist bosses by drawing a hard line against the striking teachers.

Wrongly promoted by union leaders as “friends of labor,” the Democrats are a bosses’ party no less than the Republicans. Democratic Party hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were given prime-time slots at rallies before and during the strike. Talking up goodies before election day, these “progressives” hope to head up this system of class exploitation and racial oppression.

Meanwhile, a chummy phone call between Sharkey and Joe Biden was featured on the CTU’s twitter page as a campaign ad for the former vice president. Lest we forget, Biden was part of the Obama administration that pushed school closures, attacked teachers unions and boosted anti-union charters. And one of its hatchet men was Rahm Emanuel, who as Chicago mayor waged a war against the CTU. The charter industry remains a mortal threat to the unions and public education and must be abolished. All charter school teachers and staff should be unionized and brought into the public school system.

Every strike draws a class line and poses the question: “Which side are you on?” Labor needs a class-struggle leadership that understands that workers have nothing in common with the bosses, and nothing to gain (and everything to lose) by placing their faith in capitalist politicians and the repressive capitalist state. Those truly on the side of Chicago teachers and support staff are working people and the oppressed, themselves ground down by brutal austerity and the slashing of social services.

Students and parents joined the picket lines, aware that the strike was also a fight on their behalf. The black and Latino masses, whose children are confined to the city’s segregated neighborhoods and schools and subjected to racist cop terror, have an interest in struggling against the same rulers who are gunning for the teachers. What is needed to mobilize the labor movement together with the ghetto and barrio masses against the common enemy is the forging of a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Such a party would fight to overthrow the capitalist system through socialist revolution and build a society free of both exploitation and oppression.

Leadership Is Key

During the CTU/SEIU strike, the union leaderships kept the picket lines up for only a few hours in the morning. Instead, the schools and CPS buildings should have been shut down tight for the entire school day, cutting off deliveries by UPS Teamsters drivers who, to their credit, refused to cross picket lines while they were up. Outrageously, the leadership of SEIU Local 1, which represents workers for privatized cleaning services, had its members work in struck schools. Mass pickets reinforced by the city’s powerful industrial proletariat—including transit workers in Amalgamated Transit Union Locals 241 (bus) and 308 (rail)—would have been a concrete expression of the basic principle: Picket lines mean don’t cross!

When Local 73 reached a settlement a few days before the CTU, its leadership treacherously gave its members the option of returning to work, leaving it up to individuals to respect the picket lines. But in a real display of union solidarity, Local 73 members stayed out with the teachers. If CTU members ratify the tentative agreement, the contract expiration will not match that of Local 73, which would make joint struggle more difficult the next time around. It is necessary to fight for a common contract expiration for every school union, which would be a stepping stone to forming one single union of all school workers.

The CTU/SEIU leaderships betray their own members by embracing security guards as fellow workers organized in Local 73. The job of school cops, regardless of their class background or race, is to act as an arm of the administration and to police students, teachers and workers. As auxiliaries to the armed bodies of men at the core of the capitalist state, they are servants of the ruling class and a threat to the organized labor movement.

Sharkey and Davis Gates are part of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), which presents itself as a militant and democratic leadership. However, when running the CTU, CORE, like its predecessor, endorses, campaigns for and unloads huge sums on the capitalist parties, above all the Democrats, underscoring that all wings of the union bureaucracy are wedded to class collaboration. CORE’s strategy of “bargaining for the common good” is simply an attempt to sell the same old pro-Democratic Party pressure politics to teachers who have a genuine appetite to improve the lot of their students, minorities, immigrants and the poor. CORE leaders would have teachers believe that the ills of society can be solved by convincing the bourgeoisie to alter its priorities. But the tiny, rich capitalist class can never be pressured to meet the needs of working people and the oppressed.

So long as the labor misleaders politically tie the unions to the capitalist government, workers will be fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. What is needed is a union leadership that is not about “choosing” which bourgeois politician will supposedly represent the workers in City Hall or Congress or the White House, but instead will break all the ties that bind them to their class enemy. Such a leadership would have as its perspective the building of a revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government.

In a Democracy Now interview on October 8, a few days before the strike, Sharkey stated that the union was “trying to avoid a strike if possible” and asserted that “the money should be there” to ameliorate conditions in the schools. The money is there, but the problem is that the wealth in this country is in the hands of the profit-driven ruling class, which does not perceive any benefit in paying teachers better wages or investing in schools to educate the minority and working-class youth who have been thrown on the scrap heap. Gains can be extracted from the rulers through class and social struggle, but as long as the capitalist class is in power, it will allocate resources as it sees fit.

The fight for quality, integrated education and decent jobs and housing for all cannot be separated from the necessary struggle to abolish capitalist wage slavery. Only workers revolution can put an end to racial and other social inequalities that are firmly rooted in this system. When those who labor rule, the vast riches that are today pocketed by the capitalists will be used to begin rebuilding this society for the benefit of all.