UNION NEWS... Lewis and the CTU 'Executive Team' now blaming the delegates and members for the weak contract they brought in shackling the members until 2019...
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis and the other seven members of her newly created so-called "Executive Team" began the process at the union's December 7, 2016 House of Delegates meeting of blaming the union's members and delegates for their failures. Specifically, Lewis and the other officers warned the nearly 800 delegates that if they didn't enforce the union's latest contract strongly at the local school level, it would be the fault of the rank and file if the union got even weaker.
While examples of the centralized weakness of the once-strong Chicago Teachers Union are widespread, few are more dramatic than three facts that were staring everyone in the meeting in the fact:
-- The union's leaders continue to undermine the union's most important committees, with delegates noting that there are no meetings scheduled for the high school steering, elementary steering, and school finance and taxation committees in either December 2016 or January 2017...
-- The union's delegates were again called upon to affirm the "social justice" agenda being set by the union's leaders, while ignoring most of the pay and benefits challenges now facing the members...
-- The union's delegates were faced with even more than the usual double talk when many of them began noticing that the salary schedules in the new union contract (which goes until June 30, 2019) has resulted in their pay falling even further behind than it had when that regression began under the contract "won" as a result of the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012.
[Disclosure: This reporter is an elected member of the CTU House of Delegates, a former research consultant for the CTU, and an elected delegate to the conventions of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers...].
