Teachers’ union activists in Chicago are contending with their union president’s decision to back legislation that all but bans them from striking and makes major concessions to the corporate education “reform” agenda.
Reform groups that lead teachers unions are also having debates in Los Angeles, where the election for the union presidency was recently won by a challenger to the incumbent reform caucus, and in Washington, D.C., where a newly elected officers offered to take a pay freeze to save jobs.
But the biggest controversy is in Chicago, where Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Karen Lewis shocked members of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), a reform group that was the backbone of her candidacy last year, by personally giving the union’s endorsement for sweeping legislation that, among other things, severely restricts teachers’ right to strike, undermines seniority protections for Illinois teachers outside Chicago, and increases the school day without a guaranteed increase in pay.
To make matters worse, Lewis, a founding member of CORE, failed to report that she had already signed off on the legislation when she spoke to union delegates in a videoconference April 13, the day after she agreed to the legislation.
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Lee Sustar’s article on the crisis in the CTU [http://socialistworker.org/2011/04/21/teachers-union-reform-crisis] is itself a scandal, since it covers up the role that Sustar and ISOers in the CTU leadership played in bringing this crisis about and concealing it from the CTU membership and everyone interested in fighting the attack by Republicans and Democrats on public-sector workers. For details, see [http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/iso_043011.html].