Alex Han is the executive director of In These Times magazine and a longtime labor, community, and political organizer.
In a conversation with Jacobin, Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates, city councilor Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and editor Alex Han discuss how Chicago’s working-class movement elected one of its own as mayor and where that movement goes now.
When Karen Lewis and her Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators took power in the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010, the landscape for labor in her city and country was bleak. She rose to the moment — and helped transform what was politically possible for a teachers’ union and the labor movement as a whole to accomplish.