The fight of Chicago teachers to defend their rights and public education1
Norine Gutekanst*
Teacher protests in Chicago. Photo: Chicago CBS local.
Across the US, workers face the same landscape: efforts to weaken our rights, lower our standard of living, and if possible, destroy our unions. Across the US, the right of workers to bargain collectively is under attack. Our pension funds are being drained and defunded. Civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, workers rights, immigrant rights-- all are under a constant barrage of attacks from local and national politicians and multi-national corporations. As of 2013, only 11.3% of workers belong to unions, this is down from a high of 35% during the mid-1950s. Publicsector workers have a union membership rate (35.3 percent) more than five times higher than that of private-sector workers (6.7 percent). Yet there are great benefits to being in a union—the average weekly earnings of union members are $950/week compared to $750/week among nonunion workers. Since the 2008 meltdown of the economy, workers--and especially public sector workers-- have been blamed for the weakness of the US economy. Our retirement income —our 1. Presentation at the international seminar “The Subordination of México to the USA, an evaluation of 20 years of NAFTA,” organized by the Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas de la UNAM, Mexico City. *Secretary of Organization, Chicago Teachers’ Union.
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pensions— are being targeted for defunding. Politicians say that our pensions are the primary reason why states face public sector budget crises—and not fact that taxes on the wealthy and corporations have been sharply reduced, shrinking the revenues of our states and municipalities. The attack on public sector workers comes from both Republicans and Democrats. These politicians are funded by big business groups who also have developed their own antiworker legislative agenda. Formations such as alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council, writes legislation behind closed doors to weaken our rights across the US, such as “Right to Work” legislation, which weakens unions by allowing employees in a union workplace to refuse to pay union dues, and which depresses our wages and benefits wherever it exists.
Teachers are a special target in the US.
Since the late 1990s, there has been a stronganti-teacher agenda which wants to replace traditional public schools with charter schools and make it easier to dismiss teachers in the public schools that still exist. Legislation across the country weakens our right to job security and ties our evaluations,and our right to a job, to student test scores. Standardized testing intensifies the top-down control of curriculum and the lack of professional autonomy of all educators. As I said, this is a
