Vallas: Chicago Teachers Union is no friend to other city unions
A current dispute with SEIU and militant stances against police are just two reasons other city unions have reason to believe the Chicago Teachers Union cares little about solidarity and a lot about its own interests.
The Chicago Teachers Union is currently clashing with the Service Employees International Union over language in its proposed contract that would allow classroom assistants represented by CTU to take over the jobs of classroom aides currently represented by SEIU.
SEIU risks losing members. CTU would gain members, plus the power and dues that come from them.
Despite its claims, CTU and its current leadership are no friends of organized labor. CTU will turn on even a close ally.
This is a union single-minded in its determination to expand and protect its members and expand its power, even at the expense of other city unions.
This is their power-hungry agenda:
Prioritizing Chicago Public Schools staffing over other city agencies
The priority given by city hall to the schools over city departments and agencies can be seen clearly in both salary increases and employee headcount. There are 10,000 more non-teaching positions at Chicago Public Schools than there are total police officers in Chicago.
Contrast city employee wage increases to various city unions with the last teacher contract that raised CTU member salaries between 24-50%. Contrast the city’s reduction of over 2,100 public safety positions with over 9,000 new full-time budgeted positions added to the schools. The CTU is favored with power and money at the expense of everyone else.
Consuming an ever-increasing share of tax dollars
The CTU has used its political muscle to secure an ever-greater share of Chicago’s property tax dollars – without concern for the other city unions.
CPS, in its quest to meet CTU needs, has been the primary driver of property tax increases on Chicago residents and has been consuming an ever-increasing amount of city property taxes. Chicagoans pay the second-highest property taxes in the nation among major cities and the share of property tax revenue coming from local Chicago government rose from 45% in 1990 to 56% in 2022. The school district’s share of all city agency non-capital spending is nearly 35%.
In addition to the schools taking up the majority share of the property taxes, CPS also gets large subsidies annually, or about $800 million last year. This limits the city’s ability to balance its own budget without increasing taxes and fees or reducing city services.
Limiting school choice options for families
In its quest to protect its education monopoly, CTU is determined to block needed changes to often-failing schools and limit any private- or public-school alternatives such as tax credits, selective enrollment or charter schools.
This imposes a financial burden on city workers who refuse to send their children to poor performing CPS schools, but who are not fortunate enough to gain enrollment to district selective enrollment schools and have only one other option: private school. The average cost nationally for the private school education of a single child between K-12 is about $172,000. For high school alone it’s $67,884.
This is especially hard on members of the SEIU, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Chicago Transit Authority’s workers, all of whom have salaries that fall far short of teachers’ salaries, as well as the salaries of other city workers. They are also least likely to navigate the magnet school political process as so many of the CTU leaders and teachers have successfully done.
It’s no accident the percentage of Chicago teachers who enroll their children in private schools sits at over 30%.
Creating an enormous burden on city first responders and essential service workers
Besides the CTU’s role in driving up the cost of living, union leaders consistently display a callousness to the needs of other union members. The union’s COVID school closures were a year-long exercise in anti-solidarity with fellow unions. The CTU expected first responders to protect them and essential workers to tend to their medical needs, remove their trash, keep the lights on, while the CTU withheld real education from many of these workers’ children for 78 straight weeks.
Meanwhile, CTU members worked from home enjoying healthy increases in pay and a dramatically decreased workload while its leaders and activist supporters gaslighted those seeking to resume in-person learning. Who can forget a CTU activist’s tweet: “The drive to reopen schools is rooted in racism, sexism, and misogyny.” It exemplified the degree of hysteria teacher unions such as the CTU generated in large, urban school districts.
The CTU and its national brethren also fueled the political drive for vaccine mandates that created enormous stress among other public employees. The vaccine mandates and the threat of job loss for refusal to be vaccinated wreaked havoc among first responders and essential workers, particularly police officers, firefighters and paramedics.
Fueling anti-police sentiment
As if that were not enough damage, the CTU became a pivotal player in the progressive movement’s campaign to attack fellow public workers: the police. CTU leaders provided funding for anti-police groups while participating in rallies smearing the Chicago Police Department, demanding police be “defunded.” CTU leaders consistently blamed police funding for the historic disinvestment in schools and poor communities in general, disregarding that five times as much money is spent on schools as is spent on Chicago Police.
The demonization of the police served to undermine police moral, accelerating the exodus of officers through retirements and transfers and forcing the city to dramatically lower hiring standards to attract new officers. The CTU’s campaign also undermined the trust between CPD and residents, especially among youth, which is so critical to helping police close cases. That lack of trust has played no small part in the abysmal arrest rates that hover at 13% for violent crimes.
Increasing its membership at the expense of its closest ally, SEIU
The SEIU represents special education classroom assistants in CPS and is threatening to sue CPS over a CTU proposal that it says would effectively take jobs from SEIU-represented employees and give them to CTU-represented employees. The teachers’ union has proposed contract language to CPS that SEIU fears would allow classroom assistants, who are represented by CTU, to take over some of the special education classroom aides’ jobs.
Of course, SEIU leadership blames the school district for the dispute between unions. They acknowledged the two unions don’t see “eye to eye” on how to resolve the issue but naively maintain the CTU proposal is to pressure CPS to staff special education services, not steal SEIU members. It’s a strategy to pit people against each other, to fight over the scraps as if CPS had made the proposal and not the union itself. Let’s be clear: CTU wants power and positions, no matter who it crowds out.
Embracing toxic allies
Just look at the CTU’s closest allies to see where their policy and political priorities are. This includes the Democratic Socialists of America Chicago chapter – which includes six Chicago aldermen – who call Chicago Police a “white supremacist” organization. Recently a Socialist alderman’s aide referred to CPD officers as “pigs,” while other local activists encouraged looting. The radical political agenda embraced by CPS in the past few years is to distract from its rock-bottom academic outcomes, declining enrollment, hollowed-out schools and escalating spending.
The CTU’s radicalism also surfaced after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Instead of focusing on failing students, CTU members voted on an arms embargo against Israel, hosted pro-Hamas demonstrations and a student-led walkout, and ratified a Gaza cease-fire resolution. These actions and allies don’t serve to help other unions across Chicago. They likely put other union members at risk.
The CTU is no longer a traditional organized labor union that works on behalf of labor at large. Instead, it’s a fully-fledged political organization whose goals are often unrelated and in many cases in open conflict with traditional organized labor. By issuing outrageous demands, devouring a larger portion of tax revenue, demonizing police and blocking efforts to improve and provide alternatives to failing schools, the CTU has become an existential threat to education, city employees and all other organized labor.t