“A Day Of Action” Chicago Public Schoolteachers walking off the job Friday for a one-day strike

Striking in protest of enormous budget cuts and layoffs to central office staff proposed by Gov. Bruce Rauner

Chicago-area teachers are currently in the midst of a one-day walkout off the job for a “day of action,” part of a series of nearly three dozen scheduled protests and rallies throughout city.

The Chicago Teachers Union and its 27,000 members are striking for the second time in the past four years – the first famously in response to contract negotiations with Rahm Emanuel – and this time around teachers are seeking political demands not typically seen in a union labor dispute, insisting that poor and working-class people are being subjected to unacceptable conditions in the classroom the communities at large.

“We are going to strike over things that judges might consider illegal but we consider moral and right” said Chicago Teachers Union vice president Jesse Sharkey “There might judges that disagree with us, but we disagree with them.”

At the heart of the teachers demands are outcries over midyear actions including budget cuts to the classroom and layoffs to central office staff by Governor Bruce Rauner, described by Chicago Teachers Union president as “death by a thousand cuts.”

“Black and brown children on the South and West sides are bearing the brunt of this trauma,” CTU President Karen Lewis recently said, referring to the numerous budget cuts and layoffs the school district has recently enacted. “We cannot go on like this.”

Here are some footage from the scenes: