Chicago Teachers Union update... The nasty Christmas Eve eve surprise most union members received after believing the lies about their latest contract 'victory'...
Although many of those who voted in favor of the last-minute contract settlement offer recommended by the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union were skeptical -- especially since they were poised to go on strike in a few hours -- the two-to-one margin that approved the deal in the schools seemed to indicate that at least the majority were willing to believe. Those beliefs were based on the faith most people have to retain in their leaders. In the case of the CTU, those leaders were primarily Jesse Sharkey, CTU Vice President, and Karen Lewis, CTU President, both of whom had assured them that the contract they brought in was the best for the member.
And behind those assurances were reams of obfuscations and in some cases Ivy League smugness about what the leaders could "sell" to the members. But there were also claims, including the claim that the union's 27,000 (more or less) members would be receiving a "retroactive" payday on December 23, 2016 -- the last day before the winter holidays began.
And so it was a double surprise when everyone realized that the retroactive pay was much less than expected, and when the majority (or near to it) didn't get any retro pay at all!
The main fact about the contracts negotiated for the CTU members since July 2010 (when CORE took over the leadership of the CTU) have been inadequate or worse. The 2012 contract included (secretly) an agreement by the leadership to five up the four percent raise that the union's members were entitled to for the 2011 - 2012 school year (that raise was the final year of the five-year contract from the previous administration). After that, things got even worse, with the leadership claiming, over and over and over, that "non-economic" victories (which mostly have turned into defeats) were a good substitute for pay raises and tight wins for working conditions and benefits.
The lists of contractual surrenders in the latest deal will be detailed in coming issues of Substance. But the biggest and most obvious is that the current contract locks in the worst economic (i.e. pay) terms in the 50-year history of collective bargaining for teachers (and other union members) in Chicago. That point can't be ignored or denied.
Of course, there is still a national illusion, pushed in some places by "progressives", that the CTU is leading some kind of new unionism. Apparently, that new unionism doesn't count its job of winning pay, benefits and working conditions for its members, instead, substituting so-called "non-economic" stuff and then utilizing as much propaganda as possible to try and continue to convince the union's dues paying members and others that the CTU, in 2017, is still on the side of progress.
But as the New Year begins, more and more CTU members are not only reading their paychecks to learn how badly they've been betrayed, but also taking a close look at the claims that things are (at least) better because of some vague "non-economic" stuff. As one teacher blogger recently shared: "actual conditions in the schools have gotten worse."
The reasons are many, but the central one is that despite the hopefulness (I'm not yet ready to describe it as "hopiness") during the early years of the CORE leadership (roughly, 2010 - 2013), it is now clear, based on the facts, that the leadership failed to organize for contract and legislative fights against the boss's power. Finally, during the latter years (2013 - the present) as we've reported, instead of organizing fight backs on behalf of the union's members, the leadership has spent more and more resources on spectacles and phony stuff (most dramatically, the April Fool's Day strikey thingy in April 2016). By Christmas Eve eve 2016, any of the CTU's rank and file who hadn't realized that the Columbus Day "settlement" rushed to them at the moment the strike was to begin learned the hard way that they had been sold out. How? They either got almost nothing in their "retroactive" pay (because the leadership had agreed to zero raises for the 2014 - 2015 school year and the 2015 - 2016 school year) or because they were never entitled to any raise at all! Despite all of the silliness written because we organized and led a seven-day strike in September 2012 (I say "we" because I was a founding member of CORE and a leader in the House of Delegates and elsewhere during the 2012 strike), even the 2012 deal was less than the union's members deserved. The Micah Uetrich version of reality (repeated also in a few other "progressive" places) is unreliable as history and as analysis. The tragedies to come are based on the sellouts of the past...
By: Chris Rudzinski
We learned from the history ,that we learned nothing .
My poor colleagues,
I would suggest that you read my posts since 2007.
You were f in the a...and now you gave your m..for the same purpose.
Force your union leadership to work for you, because you pay their salaries.
Simple.