The union has a long history of using aggressive tactics to get what it wants at the expense of working families.
The union has a long history of using aggressive tactics to get what it wants at the expense of working families.
I t’s becoming an unfortunate annual custom for children in Chicago: missing school while the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) flexes its political muscles to keep its members from having to report to work.
In January 2021, the union urged Chicago Public Schools teachers to work remotely in its effort to forestall in-person learning for the district’s then-355,000 students. Students had been out of the classroom since March 2020, when Covid-19 shutdowns started, and by the time all was said and done, it wasn’t until February 2021 that students and staff started returning to in-person classes.
Now, with schools once again closed due to Covid, CTU is at it again, opposing a return to in-person instruction until at least January 18 unless an agreement is reached or Covid-infection numbers fall below a certain threshold. On January 4, CTU’s House of Delegates approved a resolution calling for remote learning, which was then ratified by 73 percent of union members who voted.
In response to the CTU’s continued intransigence, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot complained that “it feels like Groundhog Day,” and in a sense, she was obviously right. But given all that has changed in the last year, the union’s opposition to in-person schooling is even less defensible than it was the first time around. It is now unequivocally understood that remote learning is subpar and results in real academic-achievement gaps. Students who endured e-learning for nearly the entirety of the 2020–2021 school year are at a serious disadvantage compared with their counterparts in other districts who attended class in person all year. And that’s not to even mention the mental and emotional toll that remote learning took on Chicago’s schoolchildren.
Yet still, the CTU persists in prioritizing its own agenda over what is best for students.
“We’re a union that fights the boss. That was true for [former Chicago mayor Richard] Daley, it’s true for [former mayor] Rahm [Emanuel], it’s true for Lightfoot. It’s going to be true for whoever’s mayor next,” CTU president Jesse Sharkey told the Chicago Tribune last February.
Lightfoot would likely concur. The CTU has “aspirations beyond being a union,” she told the New York Times the same month as Sharkey’s comments. “I think, ultimately, they’d like to take over not only Chicago Public Schools, but take over running the city government.”
Governor J. B. Pritzker, meanwhile, claims that he has “said all along that it’s better for our students to have them in class,” ignoring the fact that he has played a key role in emboldening the union. Last April, Pritzker signed into law HB 2275, which repealed a portion of the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act that had limited collective-bargaining negotiations between CPS and CTU to issues related to wages and benefits. As a result, CTU gained the right to bargain with the city over work hours and places of instruction amid a pandemic that had made those issues particularly contentious.
Pritzker should have known better. CTU has a long history of using aggressive tactics to get what it wants at the expense of Chicago’s residents and students.
A 2012 CTU strike cost students seven days of instruction and forced CPS to close 50 schools and lay off thousands of teachers due in part to the expensive contract that followed. In April 2016, CTU once again turned its back on students and parents by calling a one-day strike and punishing those teachers who chose to support their students instead of holding the line. (The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board later found that the strike had likely been illegal, but the damage was already done.) Finally, in 2019, a CTU strike kept students out of class for eleven of the 15 days it lasted, and the resulting contract was projected to cost residents an average of $80 more a year in property taxes.
Research already indicates that missed school days have a negative effect on academic outcomes, widen inequality, and worsen racial disparities. A study from the Canadian Journal of Economics found that teacher strikes have a negative, statistically significant impact on test-score growth between grades three and six, with math scores seeing the worst decline.
It is bad enough that the CTU has repeatedly called strikes at the expense of students in an effort to usurp the authority of democratically elected city-government officials. But there’s also an amendment on the Illinois ballot in 2022 that would give all unions more power than even state lawmakers.
Billed as a “Workers’ Rights Amendment,” Amendment 1 would give the leaders of Illinois public-sector-employee unions more power than their counterparts in any other state. It includes four provisions: 1) a “fundamental right” to organize and bargain; 2) the right to bargain over wages, hours, working conditions, economic welfare, and safety at work – i.e., virtually anything; 3) a prohibition on lawmakers’ interfering with, negating, or diminishing those rights; and 4) a prohibition on right-to-work laws.
Taken together, these provisions would give union leaders more power than state lawmakers. Union contracts would carry the weight of the state constitution. Lawmakers would never be able to limit the demands that unions can make in bargaining or restrict when public workers can go on strike. And a little-known provision in the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act that allows union contracts to contradict and overpower state laws would be made permanently unrepealable.
Chicago has long been a bastion of union power, as the CTU’s recent history demonstrates. Now, Amendment 1’s backers are seeking to make every union in the state as powerful as the CTU. And particularly given the sorry state of Chicago Public Schools, that’s an outcome that should scare all Illinoisans.