Enough on teacher salaries. How much do teachers union bosses make?
Striking Chicago teachers have at times echoed the themes of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Hostility toward big corporations that benefit from tax breaks and other giveaways (real and imagined) has been a recurring theme. Yesterday CTU President Karen Lewis told a rally “I’m not afraid to say that we care about our children and we...
Striking Chicago teachers have at times echoed the themes of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Hostility toward big corporations that benefit from tax breaks and other giveaways (real and imagined) has been a recurring theme. Yesterday CTU President Karen Lewis told a rally “I’m not afraid to say that we care about our children and we have more in common with our children and our parents than we do with these rich people that think they know best.”
But while the teachers union has sometimes been cast in the role of vindicators of the 99% against the rapacious 1%, a quick look at their spending reports indicates that the teachers unions are mainly the stronghold of what might be called the second percent: not fabulously wealthy but certainly well-off.
A failure in federal union financial disclosure law, and the complete lack of financial reporting standards at the state level, means that salary figures are not available for the Chicago Teachers Union. But their Illinois statewide affiliate, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, does have statements online, and a quick review of their report for 2011 shows that 37 officials and employees of the IFT earned over $100,000
This list does not include CTU President Karen Lewis. But Ms. Lewis did earn a $56,700 from IFT in 2011, and probably received very generous income on top of that from the CTU; according to the Chicago Tribune her predecessor at the CTU earned $211,000 in 2009. Double-dipping is not unheard of in the union world when union officials can earn multiple salaries for different roles.
By CTU’s own reckoning an average teacher in CPS earns $71,000, well above the average for workers in Chicago. Meanwhile many of the victims of this strike are poor families that have been forced to improvise child care for children who would ordinarily be in school. While some may want to imagine the strike as a battle of the wealthy versus the downtrodden, there’s a pretty strong case to be made that CTU is actually on the side of the relatively wealthy.