Strike for America Read Online Free PDF Page A

retirement. In fact, much of the entire leadership of the union would be involved in high-stakes negotiations opposite seasoned machine politicians and shrewd, billionaire-funded education reformers.
    As Stand for Children CEO Jonah Edelman explained bluntly during a discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June 2011, 7 the bill was designed to severely limit the CTU’s power. It included new rules on teacher layoffs, evaluations, tenure, and other issues that corporate education reformers had long hoped to impose on Chicago’s teachers. But most important, by setting the bar for a strike approval far above a simple majority, the bill’s sponsors aimed to make a teachers’ strike impossible.
    “The union cannot strike in Chicago. They will never be able to muster the 75 percent threshold needed to strike,” Edelman smugly stated.
    The leadership team sent Lewis to the state capitol withonly a union lawyer who had little experience in such negotiations; she went into battle without a large portion of the union’s membership to back her up (largely because the stakes of the bill and the intentions of its backers like Edelman were not fully understood at the time) or significant member input into the terms of the bill. Lewis herself later called the bill’s passage “a steamroll job” by reformers, saying she was bullied by state legislators into accepting their terms of the law. But not knowing the full details of the law and its designed intent, Lewis gave the union’s official endorsement to Illionis Senate Bill 7 (SB7).
    When union members in Chicago heard of the bill’s details, many were incensed. Members recognized that the bill was devastating—true to its designers’ intent, among other things, it seemed to make a strike effectively impossible. Rather than uncritically backing the leadership they had just worked for years to elect, CORE members began an internal discussion between the rank and file and union leadership. Sarah Chambers, a Chicago elementary teacher and activist in CORE, remembers the internal discussion in CORE’s steering committee as having been “heated.” After an internal debate that Chambers remembers having lasted for several months, the caucus insisted that the union would need to reopen negotiations on the bill. At a House of Delegates meeting, a CORE member introduced a motion to overturn the union’s endorsement of the bill.
    Chambers says Lewis was not defensive about the move.“I am not the union—you guys are the union. You’re saying that we need to remove our name from this, so I’m going to listen to my members,” Chambers recalls Lewis saying. “Other caucuses and other leadership would have never done that.”
    Lewis returned to Springfield and reopened negotiations on SB7, where some of the bill’s most draconian provisions were scaled back, including an actual lowering of the strike authorization threshold to 75 percent of union members.
    Faced with the potential to go down a path of top-down unionism and uncritical support of leaders, CORE members balanced backing their leadership while ensuring its fealty to its left, bottom-up principles.
    Successfully capitalizing on members’ discontent with centrist unionism by mounting a leadership challenge from the left is a monumentally difficult achievement in its own right. If radicals wrest control of their union, they are faced with endless problems of running a massive union bureaucracy, for which years in a factory, hospital, or classroom have not prepared them. The natural impulse for the supporters of such a group is to close ranks around their leaders, against whom attacks from the boss and the reactionary elements within the union never stop. CORE has managed to simultaneously defend and support its leadership in power and to maintain an open environment to criticize that leadership, to ensure it does not succumb to the conservative forces facing any union.
    The Rank and File
    While CORE activists based