Chicago teachers consider strategy for strike
CHICAGO — A threatened strike by Chicago teachers would test a strategy employed by a growing number of urban teachers unions convinced that transforming contentious contract talks into discussions about class sizes and student services wins public support and can be a difference maker at the bargaining table.
Unions in left-leaning cities including Los Angeles, have made a renewed push to use the strategy this year, emboldened by strengthened public support for teachers and their unions amid 2018 walkouts and protests in conservative states. Chicago’s last major teachers strike in 2012 also has been cited as early inspiration by other unions.
Now, Chicago teachers are returning to that strategy, aiming to get enforceable school district commitments on smaller class sizes and hiring more support staff. Without those and other commitments, they could begin a strike Thursday that would affect nearly 400,000 students.
If Chicago does strike, teachers around the country will be closely watching parents’ response to a walkout based on the unions’ “social justice” agenda beyond state school funding or teachers’ pay, experts said.
“Right now, you’re hard pressed to find a teacher’s union that says we only want to bargain for the economic interest of our members,” said Robert Bruno, a University of Illinois labor professor who has studied and written about the 2012 Chicago strike. “And that’s why it’s so hard to get a settlement.”
City officials, though, argue contract talks are meant for employee wages and benefits, not questions of staffing or affordable housing.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot also has said the district’s offer of a 16 percent raise over five years for teachers is fair and ensures the district can continue to improve its once dire financial state. The district also has committed to hiring more nurses, social workers and support staff over the next five years but opposes teachers’ demand that be written into their contract.
After a change in union leadership in 2010, the Chicago teachers union partnered with other community groups working on poverty and crime. Teachers walked out for seven days in 2012, filling Chicago streets and using the bargaining process to force conversations on how those broader issues affected their students.
The Chicago union wasn’t the first to use that strategy. But its leadership, including then-President Karen Lewis, acted when teachers nationwide felt unions’ political power and clout had been severely weakened, said John Rogers, a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Chicago was a dramatic moment, when this set of ideas coalesced and was enacted and then caught the attention of other unions,” Rogers said.
In the years since the 2012 Chicago strike, teachers clad in red have flooded state Capitols in right-to-work states including West Virginia to protest years of cutbacks in school funding.
The response to those protests reassured teachers of the public’s support, said Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association.
“It is about much more than pay,” Lee said. “It’s about ensuring that every student, not just a select few, has a great public education.”
This year, unions in liberal-leaning cities including Denver, Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif., used contract talks to highlight class sizes and push back on charter schools.