The Chicago Teachers Union Goes on the Offense Against Austerity
The Chicago Teachers Union is on strike this morning. In the face of incredibly restrictive, anti-worker labor law, they’re fighting to win written commitments on class size, staffing levels, privatization, and for the city’s entire working class.
Chicago public school teachers and their supporters picket in front of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) headquarters on September 11, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois. Scott Olson / Getty Images
“We paid to control the schools.”
Those are the words of Jim Franczek, lead negotiator for the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), who sits across the table from representatives of two unions with 32,500 members walking the picket line today: the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73.
But Franczek wasn’t talking about this year’s contract talks, or the ones before that, or the ones before that. He was remembering 1995, when he engineered a state law that placed drastic restrictions on the collective bargaining rights of education unions in school districts with a population of five hundred thousand or greater — a laughably narrow limitation that proves Franczek’s law was meant for Chicago and Chicago only.
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