Strike for America by Micah Uetricht

Author:Micah Uetricht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

After the strike’s first week, many Chicagoans assumed that teachers would return to class on Monday. Emanuel had clearly lost the public relations battle. Polls showed strong majorities, especially among CPS parents and Chicagoans of color, backing the teachers by large margins. The union had the upper hand in bargaining, and through the tentative agreement CTU leaders brought to the House of Delegates meeting that Sunday was rumored to contain a number of harmful provisions for teachers, given the broader assault on teachers unions and the austerity generally, it seemed as strong as possible.

But on Sunday, September 16, the House of Delegates did not vote to end the strike. They extended it by two more days.

The union had wrung significant concessions out of a Board of Education that seemed bent on levying a number of significant blows against them. But delegates said their membership had not had enough time to fully examine the proposed deal. The agreement would not be “shoved down our throats,” as delegate and first-grade teacher Yolanda Thompson put it.

After the first week, at the Sunday-night House of Delegates vote over whether or not to extend the walkout for two more days, Lewis made no attempt to sell the idea of ending the strike based on the contract’s strength. Some of the union’s staff were worried that the union would squander the goodwill it had built up among CPS parents, but the leadership did not try to dissuade the membership from extending the strike.

So instead of forcing the membership to decide on a contract they had not read and did not fully understand, delegates extended the strike for the sole purpose of allowing rank-and-file members the full opportunity to comprehend the contract that had been negotiated in their name.

The vote was a victory for union democracy. But union democracy does not always make for good PR: favorable coverage in the mainstream press evaporated. The city’s major newspapers and nightly newscasts ran top stories about parents’ patience running thin with the union. But on Monday morning, teachers arrived at picket lines outside their schools at 6:30 a.m., eager to review the proposal but lacking a formal process to do so.

Becca Barnes, a ninth-grade history teacher on the South Side, said teachers at her school made photocopies of the contract, stood against a fence, and spent an hour reading through it line by line, circling key sections and commenting in the margins—as though they were grading papers. As they began picketing, the contract was still on their minds. So Barnes and her fellow teachers—about a hundred of them—decided to walk to a nearby park and read it together.

“None of us planned in advance to comb through it collectively,” Barnes says. “We were going to just go over highlights,” Barnes remembers, “but then someone said, ‘No—we need to read the entire contract.’ ”

So, sitting together at a park, they read through every line, debating the victories and concessions hashed out at the bargaining table.

“It was very emotional,” says Barnes. “Some people were sick of striking.

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