Important Lessons from the Chicago Teachers Strike

First off. Let’s congratulate and thank the teachers for sticking their necks out for all of us. The strike was a resounding win in many ways.

Strikes usually do not win everything that is demanded or needed. The union walking off the job and wresting economic and wider gains from the city – along with the wave of teachers strikes that continue to prevail – is part of a wider shift in our favor in the dynamics of the labor struggle.

The strike

When we fight, we can win. That is, of course, the main lesson of the strike. If we do not fight, we cannot win – nowhere is that clearer than in a labor struggle.

When we fight we may also lose. That’s true.

Because of the great power held by the opulent minority and their politicians in this country, we do not usually choose our battles. The elites or the right-wing attack us, there is a spontaneous eruption of struggle, etc. We do not control the battlefield. Fighting always carries risk. As the Chicago Teachers Union seems to have done, we must correctly understand the class nature of the battlefield.

Our current understanding of the battlefield is informed by the fact that the discontent in society – brought on by decades of endless war, union busting and austerity – have widened the opportunities for struggle and provided the human energy for victories.

After decades of setbacks, labor is beginning to turn a corner. As the economic and political conditions (domestically and internationally) generate greater anger and activity from below, workers and labor are quite naturally beginning to shed their passivity and show to us all the underlying and largely still untapped power of organized, united mass struggle. There is no greater power on earth than united mass struggle.

A strike with offensive characteristics

The Chicago teachers won their historic strike in 2012 against significant odds. A powerful democratic politician of national prominence, new mayor Rahm Emanuel, sought to institute a reign of austerity and racist gentrification. He sought to make an example out of the Chicago teachers. In fact, he wished to smash public education and the teacher’s union – a large public union with a central role in city’s working and community life – as an integral part of his plan to build a city for the rich and white only.

The first thing Rahm did as mayor was to illegally cancel the teacher’s raises. He started the fight against a union that had not gone on strike since 1987. He lost and the teachers put the first nail in his coffin.

The teachers became an example all right. They became an example of how workers can unify a city and defeat the bosses.

The racist gentrification of the city, however, goes on. It is a war that Chicago’s rulers are winning. A war that the new mayor, Lori Lightfoot, fully intends to carry on.

The teacher’s victory over the new mayor, however, should lead to a strengthening of our side in the war against the city’s corporate bosses, but for that to happen we have to seize on the momentum and replicate and expand on the victory in all areas of the struggle. We must deepen our togetherness. The strike may be over, but we must be on guard for Lightfoot’s next move.

The 2012 strike was a defensive response to the mayor’s assault. Karen Lewis – the heroic leader of the 2012 strike – was hesitant to fully engage in the battle with the mayor at first.

The 2019 strike, which has rightly been dubbed a social justice strike because the union sought to address larger issues that affect the working and learning conditions of the students, teachers and the larger community, took on more of an offensive character by disregarding unjust laws that restrict what issues teachers can strike over and stretching the contest into the inter-related issues of homelessness, racism, Trans rights, health care and much more.

In 2012, understandably, the union was very careful to stress that the strike was only about wages and benefits. When, after the strike and stinging from defeat, the mayor closed 50 schools in poor mostly Black and Brown neighborhoods, the union protested, but, understandably, did not or was not in a position to mobilize its ranks to stop city hall’s viscous racist attack on the people. Again, the strike may be over, but we must be on guard for Lightfoot’s next move. We must go to battle against the city's war on workers and the poor.

The more offensive nature of the 2019 strike and other recent teacher strikes that have advanced a more unifying and class-wide or social issue-based approach to the struggle ought to encourage us to act more boldly, to strategize in terms of class power. We are at a new, crucial point in the conflict over the future of the people and the planet and we must act accordingly. We can and must raise the level of mass struggle. Unions, instinctively because of their numerical superiority and organization, are flexing muscles at a time when backs are against walls and punching back seems more necessary and possible.

We see capitalism clearly

What kind of society is it when in the wealthiest country in the history of the world teachers have to go on strike to have a nurse and a librarian at every school? What kind of society do you have when the poorer you are the least likely you are to have a nurse and/or librarian at your school? What kind of society do you have when schools are underfunded, neglected, shuttered and teachers are under paid, overworked and bullied by management to meet goals that are not backed up by monetary or logistical support?

What type of society treats children and educators like that? Children!

What type of society (what type of mayor?) vilifies teachers and tries to divide the students, parents and community from the teachers by saying that the teachers are hurting the students at the very time the teachers are standing up for their students and heroically uniting everyone in a struggle for simple justice?

Let’s be clear. It is a crime of the highest magnitude for a society this wealthy to do anything but fully fund the schools. What else are our resources for? But that is capitalism – a society where the top robs the bottom and then makes the bottom fight for the things it should already have.

The teachers strike teaches us that the society we live is completely illegitimate and must be replaced by socialism. We must reject this current situation in which so-called leaders invent a fake scarcity of resources in order to keep the rich richer and the poor poorer. We need a society in which workers and oppressed people have real power – a society of the many not the few – a society in which teachers, students, parents and all workers run the schools and collectively make the decisions concerning the education of our children.

Lightfoot, Elections, Class and Race

The strike taught us – once again – to place little to no faith in U.S. elections as the main vehicle for change. Mayor Lightfoot, who campaigned on the union’s education platform, opposed the just demands of the teachers and carried out a campaign of lies and misinformation in order to defeat as many of the teacher’s demands as possible.

When Lightfoot attacked the striking teachers, tried to divide us or lectured us that there isn’t enough money, she shamelessly attacked all of us. Worst of all, she attacked Black and Brown workers and children – the very communities who need public school funding and increased social services the most. Lightfoot is an oppressor. Her career was made as a corporate lawyer, federal prosecutor, mass incarcerationist, sham police board functionary, and apologist and enabler of the violently racist CPD.

Many people voted for Lightfoot in the hopes that she would make change. Many people voted for her in order to make history. She is the first Black woman and the first lesbian to be mayor of Chicago. Looking at the larger picture, Lightfoot’s election is yet another signal of a growing rejection of the status quo of racism, mainstream media misinformation and corporate rule. Not for one second should we lecture at people for voting for Lightfoot even for the slightest of progressive reasons.

But … it is absolutely necessary for us to be as real as possible – to express truths clearly so that they can be acted upon in the heat of struggle. The color of a person’s skin or an individual’s gender or sexual orientation does not dictate whether someone will be on the right side of history, whether someone will be the people’s friend. As soon as possible, we must achieve a much deeper clarity in greater numbers about this or we will not win the bigger battles ahead. Even in the most racist of racist societies with a legacy of the most brutal and violent forms of white supremacy, being oppressed doesn’t automatically translate into being a liberator or friend. Leaders must win our trust through their actions.

Of course, the ruling elite of this city could care less about Lori Lightfoot as a person and would not hesitate, if they could get away with it, to use racism and bigotry against her if they disapprove of her administration of the city or felt that by attacking her it would help them better squeeze the population, etc. We must eternally be on guard against the vile nature of racism as a tool and be prepared to stand up to racism even when it is directed at someone like Lightfoot.

What does this all mean? …

On the one hand, a firm struggle against the twin evils of racism and capitalism is the only legitimate form of struggle against capitalism in the United States. On the other hand, like the Chicago teachers we must unite around the most oppressed and struggle as a class. Power comes through unity and working-class power is the only thing that can defeat our common oppressors.