“The results are not a win. They are an indictment on the state of the relationship between the ‘management’ of CPS and its largest labor force,” CTU President Karen Lewis said in a statement that also took aim at what the union calls “outside groups” that have become involved in Chicago education reform.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the vote “inspiring” and “instructive.”

“Many doubted the 75 percent threshold could be met; few believed it would be exceeded,” she said in a prepared statment… “This level of participation and engagement by Chicago’s educators is both inspiring and instructive. It represents not just anger and frustration, but also a real commitment to Chicago’s students and a desire to be active participants in building strong public schools that help all Chicago children thrive.”

Lewis said union outreach to parents, which has been going on much of the school year, would continue. 

Teachers would not go on strike until the fall, after a fact-finding panel has issued recommendations on some of the issues at play. The final decision to strike would be made by the union’s 800-member House of Delegates, which includes representatives from each school.

Typically, the union’s entire membership would not be asked to vote again until the union and CPS reach a tentative contract agreement. However, the union has the ability to put the district’s offers or the fact- finder’s report to a vote if it chooses to.

CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said the union set up the strike authorization vote as either teachers had to vote yes or nothing. “My frustration is that they were asked to vote with inaccurate information,” he said.

Brizard said he doesn’t think the district should challenge the strike authorization vote, though he added that it is the decision of the board of education. A legal challenge would just be another “distraction.”

Brizard has been saying in public appearances in recent weeks that he thinks the district should give teachers a raise. But he has declined to be specific as to how much of a raise. According to CPS and the union, CPS is offering 2 percent for one year and then in subsequent years wants salary increases to be based on a variety of factors, including student growth. CTU has asked for almost 30 percent.

On Monday, Brizard would not be any more specific about what he thinks the district should wind up giving teachers.  He said the question will be answered by the independent fact-finder, who he called “balanced” and “reasonable.” Yet he didn’t say that he will agree to do what the fact-finder recommends.

The fact-finding panel’s recommendations could become teachers’ contract, unless either side rejects them. But the union has criticized this idea, saying that the fact-finder can only rule on “a very small number of issues.”

“We have an entire contract to negotiate,” Lewis said. She also asserted that the impetus for the vote had come from the union rank-and-file. “We are being led by what our members have told us,” she said.

Altogether, the union said in a news release, about 92 percent of teachers cast a vote. Of those, 98 percent were in favor of authorizing a strike, with just 2 percent against. Factoring in those who did not vote, 90 percent of the union’s membership cast “yes” ballots.

Faith leaders get involved

Clergy from the pro-union Arise Chicago Worker Center held a press conference shortly after the CTU’s announcement in an effort to vouch for the union’s figures.  Allaying concerns about the vote “allows the important work of negotiations to go forward” so that a contract can be in place before school begins, said John Thomas, a visiting professor at Chicago Theological Seminary.

Twelve volunteers from the group were present during the vote counting, Thomas said. They spot-checked the union’s vote counts, made sure that tally sheet totals matched, sat in on union rules committee meetings, and signed over the seals on 47 boxes of counted ballots before they were put into a storage closet.

“We had full access to the entire process,” Thomas said, which lasted until after midnight on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and from 11 a.m. to 8:15 p.m. on Saturday.

“They tended to err on the side of removing a ballot if there were questions” such as blank ballots or those with two boxes checked, Thomas said.

Later Monday afternoon, a group of 100 pastors came together to ask Lewis and Brizard to attend a meeting with faith leaders. Robert Belfort, a pastor at New Beginnings-Pilsen, said the pastors are asking that union and district leadership keep them informed and resolve their differences.

If a strike should occur, the community would suffer, Belfort said. “There is a huge domino effect,” Belfort said. Not only could children be victims of violence while out of school, but parents also might have to pay for child care, he said.

But Belfort said the pastors do not support the district over the union or vice versa. He said his church, like others, gets safe haven money from the city to run programs after school and during vacations. However, his wife is a teacher and he sees her point of view.

“Most parents understand where teachers are coming from,” he said. “If you are asked to work longer, you would like to be paid more and not just told, ‘If you don’t like it, there’s the door.’ ”

It’s obvious to Belfort that there will wind up being a compromise between what CPS is offering and what CTU wants. He said the district needs to present their real offer, sooner rather than later.

“They say they don’t have money, but they will find it,” he said.

Members authorized a strike, but did not walk out, in 1991. Concessions from the district left teachers with a 3 percent pay raise that year followed by a 7 percent raise in 1992. In fall 2003, the union’s House of Delegates set a Dec. 4 strike date, but concessions from CPS led the union’s membership to accept a tentative contract agreement and vote no to a strike by mid-November.

Photo by Mark Chong Man Yuk.

CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey says the vote is a “bargaining tool,” and emphasized that a strike date would not be set until after a final proposal is on the table, which won’t happen until the middle of the summer.

CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll says a strike authorization vote is premature. CPS and CTU are engaged in a process called “fact-finding,” which means an arbitrator is considering CPS and CTU proposals. Both sides had to agree on the arbitrator. The arbitrator will issue a final report on July 15 and then the union and CPS have 15 days to respond to the report. Then, they have to wait 30 days for a cooling-off period.

Only then could the union call a strike.

“The independent fact-finding process can serve as a compromise,” Carroll says. “Why rush? They should let their members review the independent fact-finder’s report first. They have plenty of time for a vote.”

Carroll also notes that 1400 teachers are retiring and will end up voting for a strike authorization of a contract that they won’t be working under.

But Sharkey says there’s good reason to take a vote over the next few weeks. Union leaders do not want to hold a strike authorization vote during the summer, when teachers are dispersed. They also don’t want to wait until the beginning of the next school year, hoping to have a contract in place by the fall when school starts.

Once the next school year starts, things like the longer school day will be in place, making it harder for the union to negotiate over pay for the longer day, Sharkey says.   

But taking a strike authorization vote is risky because a new law requires that CTU get 75 percent of its members to vote yes. That means a non-vote is essentially a “no” vote. If it fails, the union’s power will be greatly diminished.

However, union leadership has been emboldened by a poll showing the public supports teachers by a 2 to 1 margin. Also, a survey the union conducted on May 10 showed that 95 percent wanted to reject the current CPS proposal, according to the CTU.

Sharkey says that 21,000-plus of 25,000 members participated in the survey. The union has done a detailed analysis of where the non-surveyed members are, Sharkey says. In the units where the survey took place, participation was “very high,” Sharkey says. Some small units did not conduct the survey, mostly because the delegate wasn’t around.

The indication that a strike authorization vote is imminent comes as the two sides continue to spar about the details of the contract proposals.

On Tuesday, CTU officials again claimed the proposal presented by CPS only guarantees a one-year raise of 2 percent and removes numerous provisions, including those establishing class sizes; the allocation of art, music and gym teachers; and the number of classes teachers are expected to teach. Sharkey says CPS management also wants to eliminate the measures that set out rules for laying off or displacing teachers.

“They want the contract to go from more than 200 pages to about 40,” Sharkey says.

But Carroll says CPS labor negotiators have tried to streamline the contract, by taking out language referring to antiquated practices. Officials have no plans of changing class sizes or teacher allocation and they intend for those provisions to be in the contract. She says that there are “place holders” for these provisions.

“CTU officials know that,” she says.

Yet the absence of these provisions worries union leadership. CPS officials are projecting a deficit of $600 million. At the same time, they have decided to extend the school day and year and have laid out plans to open 100 more new schools in the next five years.

Sharkey says the fear is of massive teacher layoffs and ballooning class sizes, and that neither teachers nor students would be protected.

“Getting rid of those things would be the wrong thing to do,” he says.

Jay Rehak, a Whitney Young High School teacher and union delegate, says that CPS officials have already told staff at his school that they could have seminars with 50 students to accommodate the longer day.

But the union would not give details on which schools the polls were conducted, or whether any teachers at turnaround schools had voiced their support. “We will have a lot of intimidation and harassment” if the schools are revealed, said CTU President Karen Lewis. 

CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said in response that “Any talk of strike is the wrong message to send to our schools, students and taxpayers.”

“We should be focusing our energies on our students, working together in good faith to reach an agreement that will benefit them and their academic growth,” Carroll said. Catalyst Chicago first reported on the issue of “practice” strike votes in January.

If a strike were to happen this summer or fall, it would be the first since 1987, when a walkout fueled calls for reforms and ultimately led to the passage of the landmark 1989 school reform law that created local school councils and decentralized governance of schools. Former Mayor Richard M. Daley secured recent labor peace with the current 5-year teachers union contract, which will expire June 30.

At a news conference, Lewis described as “cordial” the ongoing contract negotiations with the district, which are now in mediation. But she said the climate inside schools is the worst she’s seen in 25 years of teaching, and has fueled the strike polls.

CTU spokeswoman Stephanie Gadlin has said that the union may call for a fact-finding panel before April is up. That would be the next step in a lengthy, legally mandated pre-strike process. (Click here for Catalyst Chicago’s interactive timeline of the negotiations and possible next steps.)

Contract proposals on the table

Lewis also slammed the district’s proposal for a 2 percent raise next year, saying it amounted to a 23 percent pay cut because of the increase in time that teachers will be required to work once the official longer school day and year begin next year.

She also characterized the district’s proposal for a 20-page contract as “gutting” the current agreement and said health insurance costs would increase.

The district is offering a 2 percent raise in the first year followed by the implementation of a merit pay system, Lewis said, but CPS and CTU have not discussed the size of possible teacher bonuses. (A flyer distributed by the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, the union caucus of the current leadership, states that CPS has proposed eliminating the current contract’s ‘step and lane’ system, which rewards teachers for earning graduate degrees and on years of experience.)

Lewis added that CPS has made “no commitments” to increase the professional wraparound services like school nurses and psychologists that are available to students, one of the union’s demands.