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Last month’s strike by Chicago teachers and school workers was business as usual. Because business as usual for the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) over the past decade has meant shaking the city’s political and business establishment, challenging assumptions about what a union can fight for, and setting an example for labor of a union committed to rank-and-file power and social justice. In 2012, the CTU struck the first real blow against the corporate school reform crusade in the laboratory where it was cooked up, with a seven-day strike that forced one of the most powerful politicians in the country, Rahm Emanuel, to back down. In 2016, the teachers led a coalition of unions and community organizations in a one-day public-sector general strike to confront a Republican governor’s austerity drive to starve the schools and public services — a glimpse of the future statewide teachers’ revolts that started in West Virginia two years later. This fall, the CTU went on offense. The two-week-long strike at the end of October ended last week with a tentative agreement that “pushed the boundaries of traditional contract negotiations … far beyond fighting to increase salaries,” in the words not of some pro-labor rag but the mainstream US News and World Report. “I don’t know if they didn’t think we were willing to walk out over classroom conditions and fight for what we wanted, or if they just didn’t understand how passionate we were about what we were fighting for,” says Makenzie Verdone, a third-grade teacher at McClellan Elementary School on the city’s Southwest Side. “But nothing happened at the bargaining table until there was a strike.” None of the CTU’s previous battles ended in a clear-cut triumph. In 2012, then-president Karen Lewis described the celebrated outcome of the strike as “the deal we could get,” refusing to sugarcoat where the union lost ground. This year is no exception. The tentative agreement contains enforceable caps on class size for the first time in a CTU contract, but the limits to be enforced instead of just recommended are still high. The union didn’t get badly needed additional prep time for elementary school teachers. The agreement has a commitment to put a nurse and a social worker in every school, remedying a critical need, but the hiring phase-in will take five years. Teachers will weigh these issues as they decide whether to vote for ratifying the tentative agreement next week. But on the other side of the scales is pride in what they achieved over the spiteful opposition of Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the anti-union slanders of Chicago’s mainstream press. The CTU was joined on the picket lines for the first time by the other main union in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73. Solidarity produced a big union win on wages, including extra increases for the lowest-paid members of both unions that will lift their poverty-level income by as much as 40 percent over five years. But the most notable accomplishments vindicate educators’ determination to fight not only for themselves but their students and the community. The advances range from the explicit provisions on class size and staffing to support for homeless students and protections for the rights of immigrants to live and learn in Chicago. To win these concessions, the CTU had to break through a legal barrier: a state law meant to stop it from bargaining over anything beyond wages and benefits. That law is still on the books, but the CTU used the power of picket lines and public opinion to revoke it in reality.

Refusing to Take No for an Answer The CTU’s commitment to fight for all of Chicago goes back to the effort begun years ago by rank-and-file educators to empower members and revive a tradition of militant trade unionism based on strikes, solidarity, and social justice. The union is led today by members of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), a reform group founded in 2008 among a small group of teachers who had fought together against Renaissance 2010, the pet project of then-CPS boss Arne Duncan to impose the school privatization project he later took national as Barack Obama’s education secretary. The teachers of CORE made common cause with community organizations in the predominantly black and Latino South and West Sides of Chicago. It was a natural alliance against the Duncan agenda of charter-school promotion and public-school closures. Thus, CORE’s reputation for linking the struggle of teachers to the fight against racism and injustice was present from the start. It followed them when CORE surprised the union’s old guard and swept into office in 2010. The new CTU leaders would compile a report to project their vision of education justice, with a title that became a slogan beyond their city: “The Schools Chicago Children Deserve.” For most of CORE’s first two three-year terms in office, however, the CTU was locked in defensive struggles — to stop Emanuel’s attempts to permanently hobble the union and Republican governor Bruce Rauner’s savage austerity. This year, the union’s offense finally made it on the field. Pointing to more than $1 billion in additional state money coming to CPS annually thanks to a 2017 state law — plus the commitment of SEIU Local 73 to unite in struggle with the teachers — CTU leaders like president Jesse Sharkey stressed the “historic opportunity” for unions to “improve our schools” with their next contracts. Inspiration for the new agenda came from the rank and file in many cases. For example, the demand for a nurse in every school — one of the ever-present slogans of last month’s strike — emerged among nurses themselves, says Dennis Kosuth, who this year cares for students in three North Side schools each week, down from six last year. After suffering years of deteriorating conditions, “in the fall of 2017, we started meeting on a regular basis, talking about how the shortage was affecting us,” Kosuth says. “Last year, we met with parent organizations like Raise Your Hand and student advocacy groups and collaborated about the issue of nursing in our schools. So it’s been a years-long process of raising our own confidence as nurses in the schools to demand better conditions for our students.” But like other such demands, the call to hire more nurses ran up against a 1995 state law meant to hamstring the CTU by restricting the “mandatory” issues of bargaining to wages, benefits, and the length of the school day and year — a law that only applies to Chicago Public Schools. In contrast to her predecessors Emanuel and Daley, Lightfoot claimed she supported many of the proposals advocated by the CTU on so-called “permissive” issues like staffing. But that didn’t stop her from exploiting the union’s legal shackling. In the spring, the Illinois House passed a bill that would overturn the bargaining restrictions. Shortly after taking office, Lightfoot asked the state senate president to stall the legislation, effectively killing it until next year. Still, laws can’t prevent the CTU from raising its voice about the issues it isn’t supposed to bargain over. The union figured out a way around the rules — essentially by refusing to come to terms over salaries and benefits until CPS relented. The strategy worked, but only when teachers and school workers went on strike. After weeks of stonewalling, CPS negotiators made their first substantive proposal on class size on the first day of the strike. Staffing levels followed on the second day. A few days before, when the CTU had spotlighted housing justice for students, staff, and the community, the mayor and the media reacted with outrage. A union contract is “not the appropriate place for the city to legislate its affordable housing policy,” scoffed Lightfoot. The union demanded to know why not, and swayed public opinion with the gut-wrenching statistic that more than 17,000 CPS students are homeless. By refusing to take no for an answer, the CTU won a very “appropriate” concession: a commitment in the contract for CPS to hire full-time coordinators in every school where more than 70 students are homeless, plus increased stipends across the system and greater access to city housing services, free transportation, and free clothing for students and their families.