No Shortcuts by Jane F. McAlevey

Author:Jane F. McAlevey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

The old guard were Shankerites, basically unrepentant business unionists who thought that contracts were tough sometimes but we could win them by having a big hand on the table and making deals by talking tough, but we began to ask aloud, How’s that going to work with Rahm? He’s not coming to make deals, he’s coming to fight.

The new leaders were changing the conversation about how a contract should be won, and they were acting like a union by involving all the members in the discussion. The Occupy movement had just surfaced on the heels of the spring 2011 uprising in Wisconsin, which was led by Midwestern teachers with many ties to Chicago. Every month, the CTU and CORE mobilized activists to attend the CPS school board meetings and to challenge the board during the period of open public comments on the agenda, which is required by law. The fall of 2010 had been colored by CPS administration-prompted skirmishes, but by the fall of 2011, the skirmishes were prompted by the CTU and aimed at socializing the teachers into taking harder and more frequent direct actions, building their confidence in their ability to win. At the December 2011 meeting, the teachers used the #OWS (Occupy Wall Street) tactic “mic check”: One person says something and everyone else repeats it, as into a megaphone powered by human voices. After the mic check began—“These are our children, not corporate products!”—the school board left the room and shut the meeting down.57 The teachers and their allies were successfully finding their voice and practicing direct action; business as usual would not be happening.

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