What follows are some reflections based on my notes from the 2019 Chicago Teachers Union strike where I served as my school’s strike captain.
On our eleven days on the picket line, we sang, danced, ate, and engaged in conversation punctuated by honking cars and trucks, and the occasional middle finger angrily aimed in our direction. We sang of coming together for our kids and ending student profiling. We danced to protest music, throwing our firsts in the air in solidarity with teachers across the district and the world. We talked about justice for our students, and the inequities that pervade our system of public education making us complicit in a form of educational apartheid where black and brown young people in need of the best education that money can pay for instead get schools with 40 students in a classroom and without social workers and nurses.
We talked about our profession, where nearly 50% of new teachers quit within five years, and about the high pressure and high stakes that result in teachers overworking themselves, and burning out as this pressure becomes too great. We discussed the vast emotional, mental and physical energy that teaching, mentoring, advising and coaching requires, and we spoke about our students and how we missed them, how we worried about them, and how we hoped that we would be able to win the schools that they and their parents deserve. We won some things for ourselves, and we won some things for them, and in the process we built a community of solidarity across the city.
On the first day of the strike, I woke up and thought about all the workers in history who have made the choice to stop working until their working conditions were better, and how terrifying it must have been to commit to a work action that you knew could get you killed. And I felt proud to be joining this tradition, albeit with minimal negative consequences hanging over my head, and fighting for the common good and a small piece of a more equitable and just world. And I was frankly worried about helping to run the show at my school as a strike captain and coordinating a picket line of over 80 people.
I grew up in a family without a history of unionism, and since labor history isn’t typically taught in schools, I had limited context for unionism until I closely followed the massive protests in Wisconsin in 2011 in response to Governor Scott Walker’s Act 10, that as Dan Kaufman put it in the New York Times, led to the destruction of progressive Wisconsin. In the following years, realizing that the potential of progressive politics are limited without organized labor, I learned a lot more about labor history globally and in the United States. One element of this learning was following, in 2012, the first Chicago Teachers Union strike that precipitated a revival in public school teacher strikes across the country utilizing a strategy of bargaining for the common good of teachers, parents, students, and community members.
In 2012, I never figured that seven years later I would be living in Chicago, and leading a picket line as part of this union. I never imagined joining marches of over 25,000 teachers and allies in Chicago’s loop, chants ringing off of the skyscrapers of the business class that had thrown their support behind the newly elected Mayor Lori Lightfoot. These moments of solidarity with massive crowds were eventually diminished by a contentious end to the strike. As it grew close to a 14-day strike, our negotiators felt we couldn’t win more, and yet a vocal contingent of teachers believed we had not won enough.
As the weather turned towards the end of October, and teachers on our picket line stood cold and soaked, huddled under ineffective rain shelters, the mood turned. Many of my colleagues were ready to return to the building. They judged we had won enough and that it was time to accept the tentative agreement. In a loud and contentious House of Delegates meeting, Union delegates agreed to accept the tentative agreement and send it to the membership for a vote. And thus, the 2019 strike ended, not with the joy of early participation and lofty imagined resolutions, but with the acceptance that we could only win so much. And yet, these wins, like the wins of previous negotiations and strikes, set the stage for future progress on educational justice for the youth of Chicago, and served as a model for teacher unions across the country.