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1) Chicago Teacher Strike: A
Collective Scream. The members of the Chicago
Teachers Union went on strike this morning. It's difficult to call this a
surprise after virtually every voting member of the rank-and-file authorized
it in June.
I am not best situated to opine on what
exactly caused the strike, but it appears that those "in the know" have
widely diverging accounts of what the sticking points actually are.
Alexander Russo, who runs the Chicago-centric
District 299 blog, suggests that maybe one side or the other, or both,
wanted a strike for their own purposes.
That's not to say this is all a stage
play - just that some of this stuff only rose to the level of a
"strike-able" issue because of the political climate and the personalities
involved. As Arne Duncan will testify, negotiations between the Chicago
Public Schools and the union have often been acrimonious, but they never
quite reached the exploding point. Few remember now that CTU members
authorized a strike in 2003, but a contract settlement was reached soon
after.
What's different now is that we live in
a post-Occupy world where any occasion for the airing of grievances is the
occasion for the airing of any grievance. Some CTU members are upset
about pay. Some about class size. Some about standardized tests. Some about
Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Some about Evil Corporate Puppetmasters. Since going out
into the street and screaming is normally frowned upon, a strike is the
perfect solution. Instead of going to work and subjecting yourself to the
things that make you angry,
you line up with your buddies and yell at the boss all day.
The stars aligned when CTU members
elected Karen Lewis and her CORE slate to power. Lewis stood for genuine
union militancy at a time when previous regimes were considered to be
sellouts.
I wrote back then that "Lewis's
election may have large implications for the Chicago Public Schools. Her
politics are
significantly to the left of the machine Democrats who run the city and
the school system. 'What
drives school reform is a single focus on profit. Profit. Not teaching, not
learning, profit,' she said in her
post-election press conference."
I believed
that Lewis would join a long list of union outsiders who quickly became
insiders. I was wrong about that. Oh,
she almost did, but she learned that her muscular activism filled a
niche left empty by Illinois and national teacher union leaders.
She may be AFT's most well-known local president.
In the short-term, strikes favor the
union. Parents don't have any pull with the union, so when they are
inconvenienced they complain to the district and the city. The pressure on
"management" to settle up is strong. But as the days extend into weeks, and
the first paycheck is missed, teacher enthusiasm drops at the margins and
the rank-and-file starts looking for an acceptable offer. Regardless of the
outcome, both sides will declare victory - even if the strike ends up
costing both sides money.
In 2001, the Hawaii State Teachers
Association went on strike for three weeks and ultimately accepted an offer
that netted teachers
an additional $148 per year over the final offer before the strike. The
California Teachers Association still
remembers Wayne Johnson this way:
The watershed nine-day
strike by United Teachers Los Angeles in May 1989 was "a breakthrough for
the professionalization of teachers," said UTLA's then-president Wayne
Johnson, who went on to become president of CTA. As CTA Action
reported, UTLA members won "revolutionary reforms," along with a 24 percent
salary increase over three years.
What the union doesn't remember is that
the
district's final offer before the strike was for 21.5 percent over three
years. When you subtract out the money lost by teachers during the
strike, they barely broke even.
A settlement will be reached in Chicago
when the financial costs of the strike exceed the psychic benefits. The last
Chicago Public Schools pay day was Friday, September 7, which helps explain
why CTU didn't go out until today. The next pay day is September 21. If
there were a betting pool on this, I'd put my money on a deal being reached
next weekend.
2) Last Week's Intercepts.
EIA's blog,
Intercepts, covered these topics from September 5-10:
* Unconventional.
Education weirdness at the Democratic National Convention.
*
YEARGH!!! Howard Dean knows not whereof he speaks.
*
Court Adds Two Counts to Charges Against Maryland Union Treasurer. Five
felonies and two misdemeanors the union didn't think worth reporting.
*
The Original "Hug a Thug." Unions appropriate a comedy skit.
3)
Quote of the Week.
"We are on call at all hours. We work weekends. We have to be expert on
everything." - Brenda Pike, executive director of the Indiana State Teachers
Association, defending her position as one of top two most highly
compensated union officials in the state. ISTA president Nate
Schnellenberger is the other. ISTA is under an NEA administratorship for its
ongoing financial problems. (August 31
Indianapolis Star) |
