For the Record: Chicago Teachers Union strike votes
In a talk at the Aspen Institute in which Stand for Children’s national director Jonah Edelman laid out his organization’s crafty strategy for winning the approval of Senate Bill 7, he says that the bill will effectively kill any chance of the teachers union ever striking again. The bill, which also makes it more difficult to get tenure and streamlines the process for firing bad teachers, requires that 75 percent of the Chicago Teacher Union’s eligible voting membership authorize a strike.
Edelman describes CTU’s president Karen Lewis as a “militant and a diehard” who above all would not agree to forgo strike rights. But he called Lewis’ decision to allow the threshold for a strike to be raised as a “tactical miscalculation.” Stand for Children “did their homework” and concluded that if they could raise the threshold for approving a strike high enough, the CTU would be hard-pressed to get any strike approved.
(Stand for Children set up shop in Illinois last year, winning $3 million in backing to push legislators to adopt various education reforms.)
In order to reach the 75 percent threshold, the union will need much higher participation in strike votes than in the past. Edelman said that the highest threshold reached on a vote was 48.3 percent.
“In effect they wouldn’t have the ability to strike, even though the right was maintained,” he said.
In 2003, the last time the union had a strike vote, 15,965 out of 33,000, or 48 percent of eligible members, voted. Before that, in 1991, nearly 60 percent of teachers participated in a strike vote. In both cases, teachers authorized the strike, but an agreement was reached before it took place.
In the 1980s, during which five strikes took place, the numbers of teachers who participated in the votes was low. In 1987, about 15 percent voted and, in 1985, about 14 percent. But in those years, more than 90 percent of teachers who participated voted to authorize a strike, and union leaders said they had overwhelming support, according to newspaper accounts.
Still, union leaders dispute Edelman’s basic premise that they will never be able to get a strike authorized.
CTU spokeswoman Liz Brown says she was told by someone with historical knowledge that, in different years, CPS locked the schools to prevent voting from taking place, forcing teachers to go downtown to vote. This created artificially low participation, she adds.
Brown says that union leaders do not believe the 75 percent threshold will be impossible to reach. Under the law, teachers would understand that not voting would essentially mean a “no” vote.
“We would not have agreed with this if we did not believe that we had a viable option in collective bargaining,” she says.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel and CPS leadership should not count on the idea that the CTU could never muster enough votes for a strike, says Dave Comerford, spokesman for the Illinois Education Association.
In the past, union leadership could make their own rules on when they would go on strike. Teachers understood that and, therefore, would not always show up to vote if they knew the decision was going their way.
But he says Edelman’s speech is the sort of thing that riles up union members and gets them to come out.
“It is that kind of rhetoric that gets people to say, ‘I have had enough,’ ” Comerford says. “People do not like to be told that they can’t stand up for themselves.”
