Strike for America (13 page)

In May 2011, in the lead-up to the Chicago teachers strike, Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed Jean-Claude Brizard, a former teacher and schools administrator in New York City and Rochester, to be CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Brizard would last less than a year and a half in the position. He was brought in as it became clear that the city's teachers would be striking for the first time in a generation and then dismissed (with a $250,000 severance package) a month after teachers and parents had treated him as the political punching bag he was clearly intended to be.

Brizard remained quiet for nearly a year after leaving Chicago, but in August 2013 he sat down with an education think tank to discuss his tenure.

When asked about his interactions with the CTU, Brizard said, “We severely underestimated the ability of the Chicago Teachers Union to lead a massive grassroots campaign against our administration. It's a lesson for all of us in the reform community.”
¹

There are few times in recent American history when unions have surprised anyone—bosses, the public, the broader left, even their own members. The typical sentiment is closer to labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan's in the opening words to his memoir
Which Side Are You On?
: “ ‘Organized labor.' Say those words, and your heart sinks … It is a dumb, stupid mastodon of a thing.” Most twenty-first-century unions don't teach anyone many lessons—to many, it is a wonder they have not gone extinct.

The CTU has transformed itself into an organization that no one could call mastodonic. It is a union whose power is undeniable, even to a former CEO with whom it had only recently done battle. And it is a union that could and should serve as an example to all workers, whose latent power within the American and worldwide economy goes underestimated and unused each day.

Nationally, strike levels are at all-time lows. Every decade since the 1970s the number of strikes undertaken by workers has steadily diminished; it might be an exaggeration to state that today the strike is nearly extinct, but not by much. The number of workdays lost to strikes in the post–World War II period, labor's heyday, was 60 million; in 2010, it was 180,000.
²

Those numbers have largely mirrored the decline of labor's membership since the onset of deindustrialization. Over the last four decades, as the movement's membership
has declined and as attacks on unions and the public sphere have increased, unions have responded not with a renewed resolve to push back against those attacks but by scaling back their struggle. But this strategy has failed. Capital has ratcheted up its offensive against labor and expects little resistance in response. By contrast, the unionism pushed by the CTU since the election of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) has rejected the strategy of accommodation, of capitulation, and of ceding the terms of debate over education reform and the idea of the public sector as a whole to labor's enemies.

Mainstream media coverage of teachers unions and public sector unions in general has given many—even those on the left and those working in the labor movement—the impression that public sector workers' fights are uphill battles against a public duped into believing that such unions are their enemy. There are some data to support this claim; since the 1980s, public opinion of public sector unions has grown less and less favorable. But the CTU showed that such declines are not inevitable. The public can be won over to the public workers' side—not despite striking, but actually
through
striking.

That is not to say, however, that unions can bring about a revitalized labor movement by simply engaging in more strikes. Radicals often fetishize workers' use of the strike, seeming to believe that any problem workers confront can be solved by withholding their labor. But in the case of the CTU, the strike was part of a broader fight against neoliberal education reform. Its fight was based on a broad vision of
what progressive education reform could look like; it included genuine organizing alongside communities and public demonstrations over issues beyond teachers' bread-and-butter concerns, such as provisions beneficial to students. Placing the strike within the framework of a larger strategy allowed Chicago's teachers to win.

CORE has become part of a long history in the American labor movement of disillusioned rank-and-file union members rebelling against conservative leadership, many through similar caucuses and other independent groups.
³
Today, varying levels of democracy are available to disgruntled union militants looking to shake up their unions. Some locals, like the CTU, have fairly open internal structures that can be effectively used by well-organized activists. In others, however, that is not the case. In the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City, for example, retired union members loyal to the old guard make up over half the votes in leadership elections—making challenges by the rank-and-file nearly impossible. Within many of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)'s “megalocals,” which often span multiple states and include tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of members, it is difficult to imagine a group of rank-and-file workers successfully challenging their leadership.
⁴
Whatever a
union's structure and level of democracy, there are bodies of knowledge built up over years of struggle that aspiring dissidents can access. Most notable among these is the publication
Labor Notes
and the organization behind it, which helped the members of CORE and amplified their message as they slowly began to form a caucus. It has been the most prominent American labor organization in working with radical unionists. Since the end of its strike, the CTU itself has taken its message on the road to union workers of all occupations, sharing its story with both rank-and-file activists and progressive union leadership throughout the country.

Even among labor's ostensibly progressive wings, internal democracy and leadership development of rank-and-file workers has never been much of a priority. And for good reason from union bureaucrats' point of view: union leaders—whether progressive, centrist, or reactionary—worry that their power will be challenged by savvy dissidents. In many cases, their fears are well-founded. But if social movement unionism of the sort that the CTU has pursued under CORE is to spread throughout the labor movement, agitation and organizing by independent groups of rank-and-file union members will be essential.

There is no single way out of the slump that teachers unions and the broader labor movement—the institutions tasked with defending the working class as a whole—find themselves in. But revitalization will not be found by
continuing the failed strategy of conservative, parochial, top-down unionism. The CTU developed its membership in a way it had never done before, and it was willing to expand its concerns to students and communities beyond its members' own. By the time teachers took the militant step of walking off the job, they were striking for the future of public education and in defense of the entire working class—and they won. If the entire working class is to win, its defenders should take note.

After the Strike

Since September 2012, other unions in Chicago and elsewhere have seemed to take some inspiration from Chicago teachers. The leadership of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, which represents 75,000 public sector workers in Illinois, publicly praised the CTU's strike and came close to striking themselves in a contract battle with Governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat. Some half dozen teachers union locals near Chicago have themselves gone on strike since the CTU strike, with mixed results in contract negotiations.

The SEIU Local 1, a massive property-services local spanning multiple states, has ratcheted up its rhetoric against Mayor Rahm Emanuel in contract and layoff fights—a fact of note both because confrontation with the Democratic Party is rare in the American labor movement and because SEIU has positioned itself as
the
key backer of the Democratic Party nationally, spending more, for example, on President
Obama's reelection campaign than any other entity.
⁵

Rank-and-file activism among teachers and all unions is seeing an uptick. After its leadership negotiated a contract that included the introduction of merit pay, the Newark Education Workers Caucus, in Newark, New Jersey, was formed. The fact that its members take inspiration from the CTU has led the union's president to state, “They had some signs there that we should follow Chicago's lead.… I think that's very dangerous.” In New York City, the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) formed among United Federation of Teachers members. The UFT has been the home base for the leadership of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—including current president Randi Weingarten, a former UFT president—since the 1960s, and the Unity Caucus has ruled uninterrupted for the duration. Although MORE lost its electoral challenge to the caucus in April 2013, it has vowed to continue to push the UFT from the left and will likely run again in future elections. Outside of education, rank-and-file nurses in New York, graduate students in California, longshore workers in Alabama, and Teamsters in New York City, among many others, have run reform slates in their unions in recent years and won.
⁶

Beyond elections, teachers unions are seeing some signs of militancy alongside communities. The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, decimated by shock-doctrine–style reforms over recent years, has formed a citywide coalition with parents and other community groups to try to halt school closures and educator layoffs, and has released a report similar to the CTU's articulating their own vision of what school reform should look like. Rank-and-file teachers from Garfield High School in Seattle voted almost unanimously to boycott a standardized test, alongside the school's Parent Teacher Association, despite the high stakes attached to that action. Another Seattle school soon joined them, and then the boycott spread to schools in Portland, Denver, and New York City. While both the National Education Association and the AFT have issued statements and resolutions against standardized testing, it is rank-and-file teachers who have taken the steps to actually refuse to administer them.
⁷

Tepidly, some unions have begun to break with
the Democratic Party's more explicitly neoliberal wing. Moreover, opposition to free market education reform and a willingness to strike is clearly spreading among teachers unions everywhere—in part because of the example the CTU has given of what an effective militant struggle can look like.

But unions should not oversimplify the CTU's example. Reviving the strike, as Joe Burns argued in his 2011 book, will be key for labor to revive itself. But it will not help if more unions simply walk off the job, particularly in education and the public sector broadly, where strikes interrupt the provision of services that are critically needed by working-class people; that is not a viable strategy for future victories. It is not enough for unions generally and public sector unions in particular to simply stop production or service provision; they must figure out, as the CTU did, how to effectively utilize work stoppages as focal points that can rally community support (and, one hopes, the support of other unions) for a larger movement against neoliberal reform.
⁸

Indeed, CORE's raison d'être was not centered around the old union leadership's unwillingness to strike, even though the United Progressive Caucus (UPC) had not led the union out on strike in a generation. Rather, neighborhood public schools throughout the city were continually being shuttered, with charter schools springing up in their wake, under the neoliberal education agenda pushed by the mayor and the head of CPS. The policies were serious blows to Chicago teachers and students alike, providing a potential opening for
a broad community-teacher coalition to fight back and defend the interests of both—an opening, in other words, to create a true movement against free market education reform.

Repeatedly, the old leadership refused to work toward such a movement—so rank-and-file teachers created their own, working side by side with parents and students to fight back, eventually leading to the creation of CORE. That is, CORE originated as a group working not simply to push for better salaries or health-care coverage for teachers but to advance a broad vision of educational equality.

Other unions have struck in the wake of the CTU strike—some undoubtedly in part because of the example set by Chicago teachers. While some have claimed victory, others have unquestionably failed. The New York City public school bus drivers' strike of January 2013, examined at length in an important essay by Megan Erickson,
⁹
is an example of the perils posed when public sector unions simply walk off the job without a long-term strategy of movement building with working-class users of public services. Much like that of the Chicago teachers, the struggle of the New York school bus drivers could have been framed around the needs of both parents and community members whose children ride the buses as well as those of the drivers. A strike could have been a focal point around which both converged, with parents understanding—after a long-term campaign to build relationships with drivers—that the strike would be the means
by which the union would fight for both better services for students and a more stable existence for drivers.

But while the union, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181, was willing to take the rare step of a strike, the union built no such movement. So when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Education Chancellor Dennis Walcott both referred to the strike on separate occasions as “a strike against our children,” there were no long-standing relationships between union members and parents that could insist on the contrary.
¹⁰
The strike was a failure.

Contrast this with the Chicago teachers strike. Mayor Emanuel, predictably, attempted to demonize teachers in similar ways, stating the day before the strike that “our kids do not deserve this.” But during the strike, multiple polls showed that Emanuel's antistrike rhetoric fell on deaf ears: CPS parents backed the union over the mayor by huge majorities. As this book goes to press, those numbers still stand.
¹¹