Chicago teachers are still marching for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. CPS and the CTU came to a tentative agreement on Friday before going to happy hour. The final product, a three year contract, guarantees a yearly raise, a hiring pool that opens half of its positions to laid-off teachers, and a system for appealing poor evaluations.
The yearly raise scheme looks like this: teachers will receive a 3% raise the first year and 2% the next two years. I'll save you the math. This pushes the average pay of a Chicago teacher to over $80 thousand dollars a year. Chicago teachers currently make almost twice what Austin teachers make. Surely, this results from high cost of living in Cook County, one might surmise. I looked it up. According to Sperling's Best Places, the two cities have roughly the same cost of living index. Housing costs slightly more in Austin; groceries cost slightly more in Chicago. Salary.com and CNNMoney tell a slightly different story. They say the cost of living in Chicago is 25% more than in Austin and Chicago employers pay 12% more than Austin employers. This makes sense, but it doesn't account for Chicago teachers making double the salary of Austin teachers.
Nope!
So everyone's happy with the new contracts, right? Wrong. The CTU House of Delegates met on Friday to approve the agreement. They said it looked cool to them, but it would be inherently undemocratic to approve it without the consent of each individual teacher, many of whom are still dissatisfied with the terms. So the decision to unstrike will have to wait for the Union Representatives to meet and vote. Unfortunately, they can't squeeze a meeting into their schedule until Tuesday, so the teachers won't teach until Wednesday at the earliest. Karen Lewis says even Wednesday may be optimistic.
Rahm Emanuel responded by filing a request that the State Court file an injunction to force teachers back into their classrooms. A state law prohibits strikes on non-economic issues, including evaluations, layoffs, recall rights, length of the school day, and length of the school year. Pretty much all the reasons the CTU decided to strike. Also, Emanuel claims the strike endangers the health and safety of the children. For many of them, free school breakfast and lunch are they only meals they get on an average day. Since the strike affects mostly urban schools in poverty stricken neighborhoods, many of the kids who would be in schools are at home alone or on the streets in places where crime and violence are rampant. These aren't your suburban kids who spend the day playing X-box and eating Pizza Rolls.
It Gets Kooky
This strike coincides with the monthly Labor Department survey of employment. The Labor Department polls 141 thousand employers, including the Chicago Public School system. CPS runs a biweekly pay schedule, this one from September 9 through September 22. If the teachers don't return to the classroom by the end of the week, the Labor Department survey could show a decrease of 30 thousand jobs for this month. The same thing happened before, during the Verizon employee strike in 2011, the report showed a 50 thousand job loss.
The Labor Department goes back later, after no one's paying attention any more, and adjusts the numbers. But these raw numbers, the inaccurate numbers that don't matter, affect things like the stock market and elections and become the source of yet another unintelligible rant by Limbaugh the Hut.
Also, it doesn't have an effect on unemployment numbers. That's a different survey altogether.
The Parting Shot
My favorite part of this whole situation has been the giant inflatable rat I keep seeing in news images. The rat image gets used often in strikes to demonize employers who use non-union labor. Inflatable rats have become a frequent addition to major strikes and protests as a sort of rallying point. Most are named Scabby the Rat in reference to Scabs, folks who cross picket lines. This one in Chicago is a loaner from the Teamsters to the CTU just for this strike.
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| Picture from Reuters |
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