If you had asked me a year ago, or even a couple of months ago, if I thought there was a chance the union could muster anything close to 3/4 to support such a measure, I would have said: precisely a snowball's chance in hell. I happily stand corrected.
Part of my pessimism stemmed from the inherent difficulty of getting 75% of any group of people to agree on anything, much less something as momentous as a possible strike. Teachers are no more unified by nature than other groups, and perhaps slightly less so. For one thing, there is the El-Hi division, which often manifests itself in the primary school teachers tending towards reluctance to vote for strike measures, while high school teachers always seemed more willing to take the risk. I don't pretend to understand why this is, and I don't intend to pass judgement either way; I merely observe that in past votes on strike issues, elementary schools tended to vote not to threaten walk-outs. What this unprecedented 90% vote for strike authorization means to me is that Management (JC Brizard, Rahm and crew), have managed to piss off all the kindergarten and elementary school teachers as well. That's alot of irate Schoolmarms!
[As a matter of principle and standard operating procedure, I welcome corrections to any errors of fact or interpretation that my Fearless Readers might discover]
My pessimism was entirely justified: the whole point of the Illinois SB7, the law which singled out the Chicago Teachers' Union for the draconian new rules, was to make a teachers' strike in Chicago an impossibility. One of the prime movers behind the bill, the lobbyist Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children, was quite blunt when he talked to a friendly audience a year ago at the Aspen Ideas Festival, explaining how the new law's effect was "essentially isolating Chicago." "We'd done our homework -- we knew that the highest threshold of any bargaining unit that had voted...on a contract was 48.3%. The threshold that we were arguing for was three-quarters, so in effect they couldn't have the ability to strike even though the right was maintained." So, even though the fiction of a right to strike was maintained, Edelman was convinced that "The unions cannot strike in Chicago. They will never be able to muster the 75% threshold." Imagine his, and Rahm's, surprise this week! (For the full transcript of Edelman's candid remarks see http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2426)
Gloating aside -- we can't afford to be smug given how the deck is stacked against us -- what depresses me is that this was a Democratic lobbyist talking to mostly other Democrats, gleefully talking about eviscerating the unions and bragging that they would "jam this proposal down their throats the same way pension reform had been jammed down their throats six months earlier [with SB 1946]." The language is worthy of the reddest-meat, most carnivorous evil bastard union-busting Repubs. And these are members of the party that Labor sees as its ally? With friends like that....
Brizard and other management types have recently been making semi-reasonably-sounding noises. Such as that, while the 30% 'raise' the CTU is demanding is way out of line, teachers probably do deserve something more than the 2% he had initially proposed. Before you see signs of a conversion on the road to negotiations on the part of Rahm, Brizard & Co, however, bear in mind the following facts as to what comprises this unreasonable 30% 'raise.'
1). 4% is to replace the contractual raise the teachers got (after long years without any raise at all) in the last contract but which was unilaterally taken back ..... That 4% raise did not even recoup the ground we lost in cost-of-living increases over the preceding years.
2). 20% is compensation for increasing our working hours with the much-touted "Full School Day" implementation coming up in the fall. Since we are being mandated to work 20% more hours, we should be paid for it. At least that is how most of us teachers understand how employer-employee relations work: employee is paid (P) a certain amount of money (M) per hour (H) worked. For the algebraically-minded, this works out to
P = H x M
However -- and please forgive my inept History teacher's attempt to give a Math lesson -- it seems that Rahm, JC and friends skipped regular Algebra in school and took instead the Special Management Relativity Algebra class, in which the extended hours (EH) do not conform to any known formula, but instead would look like this
P = (H - EH) x M
This calls to mind the well-known workers' corollary in former communist bloc countries: "We'll pretend to work as long as the government pretends to pay us." If management can change the rules arbitrarily, maybe we teachers can pretend to adhere to them....3). So, continuing with my (standard) math lesson, here is our 'raise' so far
30% (big, bad, scary unreasonable pay 'raise')
- 20% (not a raise)
- 4% (not a raise)
6% (actual pay raise demanded by teachers)
JC loves to do call-in forums and the like to talk to the public about issues affecting Chicago schools, although he never once showed up for one of the face-to-face negotiating sessions with his teachers. I urge any and all Chicagoans to participate in the next forum. Phone in or email or text or tweet: every time he talks about the 30% raise we need to call him a liar.
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