Chicago’s First-Ever Charter School Strike
Could Rekindle Teacher Revolt Nationwide
Could Rekindle Teacher Revolt Nationwide
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| Several hundred Chicago Teachers Union members in strike rally picketed the headquarters of the Acero charter school chain, December 4. |
UPDATE, December 9 – At a celebratory strike rally today of hundreds of Chicago Teachers
Union members and supporters, CTU negotiators declared victory, announcing
they had reached a tentative agreement with the management of Acero charter
schools. The deal would reportedly “align pay for educators and
paraprofessionals with Chicago Public Schools’ pay scale, reduce class sizes,
and include sanctuary protection for students and families” (CBS Chicago
News). No details were released at the rally. If a finalized agreement, which
would be subject to ratification, includes significant gains in those respects,
this first-ever charter school strike would mark a significant step forward
in the struggle against the union-busting offensive by these semi-privatized
schools, which have been pushed by the capitalist parties and politicians, both
Republicans and Democrats.
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CHICAGO – At the break of dawn on Tuesday, December 4, some 550 teachers and staff at 15 charter schools affiliated with Acero Schools (formerly The UNO Charter School Network) around Chicago went out on strike. This is the first strike by charter school teachers in the United States. While nationally only 11% of charters are unionized, here teachers and staff of more than a quarter of these publicly funded but privately managed schools (34 out of 128) are organized by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). The strikers’ demands include smaller class sizes (currently 32 students per teacher!), equal pay for equal work (Acero teachers earn on average $13,000 less per year than those in the public schools), better treatment and pay for paraprofessionals, and “sanctuary school” protections for students and families.
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Luke’s Italian Beef, a small pizza place on Jackson,
came out and brought the strikers pizza. The big chain next door, Giordano’s, did not. |
Some 7,500 students are affected by the shutdown. There were pickets at selected schools starting at 6:30 in the morning, and in the afternoon lines of several hundred strikers stretched for two and a half blocks around Acero headquarters downtown. At a rally at a nearby corporate park strikers chanted, “Chicago is a union town, if we don’t get it, SHUT IT DOWN!” Teachers at Acero are members of the United Educators for Justice unit of the CTU, which voted at the end of October by 98% to authorize a strike. They were part of the Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff which earlier this year merged with the CTU. This makes them full-fledged members of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 1, and the power of the whole union must be mobilized to win this battle.
The CTU should IMMEDIATELY hold a mass rally of thousands of educators, staff, parents and supporters to show that the 25,000-strong membership is solidly behind Acero strikers. Charter schools have historically served to undercut unionization, especially in Chicago where the Democratic mayor and city council, school board and Chicago Board of Trade are all big charter backers. This is a strategic opportunity to display the fighting power of the union, which should be brought to bear to bring all charter school teachers into the union. There should be an elected strike committee of teacher and staff delegates from every school, including representatives of parents, students and other workers. Extend the walkout to the International Charter Schools chain! This is the time to organize the unorganized!
Negotiations between the CTU and Acero are reportedly continuing. Management is typically pleading poverty. Nonsense! Charters receive 8% more funds per student than public schools in Chicago, and Acero’s CEO Richard L. Rodriguez rakes in a cool quarter million dollars a year. The reality is that Acero is rolling in dough. After stonewalling for months, at the last bargaining session before the strike the chain released figures of an audit showing that it spent $1 million less on salaries this year than last, despite having $10.6 million more in its coffers and $24 million in unrestricted cash. More than enough to drastically raise salaries and expand special education services, as the union has demanded.
But this strike is not just about cash. A key CTU demand is for more diversity in the teaching staff (although 90% of the students are Latinos and Latinas, two-thirds of the teachers are white and few are Spanish speakers). This is the result of Acero’s origin in the UNO charter schools which pushed an “immersion” method of English-only instruction. The union is also calling for inclusion of “sanctuary school” provisions in the contract, which would require I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents to get a court order to enter the schools. This is useful but very limited “protection.” Class Struggle Education Workers has called for the formation of union-based immigrant defense committees to prevent la migra from coming into the schools or grabbing our students, period.
The CTU is calling this a “historic strike.” It could indeed reverberate around the country, rekindling the teacher revolt that spread like wildfire from West Virginia to Oklahoma and Arizona last spring, and then back to Colorado and North Carolina. A CTU press release (22 October) noted that “Average salaries for teachers at some charters is barely $47,000—less than the average salary for Arizona teachers,” even though living costs are far higher in Chicago. And as in charter schools across the country, teachers at Acero put in hundreds of hours more than those in CPS schools. But defeating the hard-nosed, profit-minded charter bosses and their Democratic allies will be a much harder slog, especially as AFT national president Randi Weingarten is herself a Democratic Party bigwig.
Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s former White House chief of staff, was first elected mayor in 2011 in a campaign focused on demonizing the CTU. He pushed charters in order to break the power of the union. Emanuel’s election committee was co-chaired by Juan Rangel, the CEO of the UNO (United Neighborhood Organization) charter school chain, which in turn received $9 million in loans from the city. UNO started out as an NGO (“non-governmental organization) closely linked to the Chicago Democratic Party machine. It was hired as a consultant when New Orleans public schools were turned into charters under former CPS CEO Paul Vallas following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But in 2015 Rangel had to step down as a result of a securities violation conviction, and UNO was rebranded Acero.
The Acero strike could be the impetus for organizing all charter schools in the Chicago school system. It is vital that the striking Acero charter teachers receive the support of union members and supporters everywhere. It is also necessary for class-struggle unionists and revolutionary Marxists to underline the lessons of the 2012 CTU strike, when militant pickets shook the city, but Democratic mayor Emanuel hard-lined it and the union’s “progressive” leadership rammed a giveback contract down the throats of the striking educators (see “Chicago Teachers: Strike Was Huge, Settlement Sucks,” The Internationalist special issue, November-December 2012). Instead of breaking with the Democrats to build a workers party, in the 2015 election the CTU backed dissident Democrat Jesús “Chuy” Garcia.
You won’t hear this from the International Socialist Organization (ISO), whose Socialist Worker articles simply regurgitate the union press releases. This is not surprising as CTU president Jesse Sharkey is a supporter of the social-democratic ISO. The World Socialist Web Site, meanwhile, criticizes union tops such as Sharkey and AFT president Weingarten (who showed up yesterday for a photo op), but its phony pro-strike posture is just a cover for the fact that the fake leftists of the WSWS oppose unions altogether. Chicago teachers should be forewarned about this treacherous outfit. What’s needed to gear up the CTU for a real fight is a union leadership based on a program of unflinching class struggle, opposed to the class collaboration of the C.O.R.E. (Caucus of Rank and File Educators), led by Sharkey, which in late 2016 headed off a potentially solid strike when the entire membership was mobilized.
The charter school strike, like any real class battle, is political. In Wisconsin in 2011, teachers led a statewide labor mobilization against union-busting governor Scott Walker, only to see a looming general strike called off at the last minute by the union tops in favor of electing Democrats. That only happened seven years later, while teachers’ collective bargaining rights were immediately slashed and union membership fell by half. In Chicago, where teachers face Democratic mayor Emanuel (now a lame duck, as his reelection prospects dimmed due to his cover-up of the racist police murder of Laquan McDonald)[1] and newly elected Illinois Democratic governor Pritzker, owner of the Hyatt hotel chain, key to victory is breaking from all the parties of capital and building a class-struggle workers party.
As we stated in “Lessons of the Teachers Revolt,” in the CSEW journal Marxism & Education No.5 (Summer 2018), those lessons are:
“First of all, we must oust the bureaucracy that stands in the way of real class struggle… It is necessary to be precise. The enemy is the bosses, the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy is an obstacle, but the unions belong to the workers.
“Second, it’s necessary to break with the Democrats and all the capitalist parties…. The teachers unions are the organizational mainstay for the Democratic Party….
“And third, it is necessary to forge a class-struggle leadership with a program to actually fight and win against a united ruling class.”
Or as we put it in “Life After Janus: Bust the Union-Busters with Hard Class Struggle” (The Internationalist No. 53, September-October 2018), “there is ferment among the ranks, and a willingness to fight that hasn’t been seen since the 2011 workers revolt in Wisconsin. The bought-off union bureaucrats […] may bandy about the spectre of West Virginia, but these ‘labor fakers’ are incapable of waging class war, which is what it will take.” n
[1] See “Chicago: Democrat-Led Cops Continue Racist Killing Spree,” The Internationalist, August 2016.
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.