[We have gone from the dynamic of opposition to the dynamic of a
campaign and now to the dynamic of working with our comrade in office,
all within a few short months. ]
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THE MOVEMENT AND THE MAYOR  
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Jesse Sharkey
August 31, 2023
Hammer and Hoe
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_ We have gone from the dynamic of opposition to the dynamic of a
campaign and now to the dynamic of working with our comrade in office,
all within a few short months. _

On Oct. 25, 2019, the seventh day of the CTU and SEIU Local 73
strike, protesters gathered at Buckingham Fountain to march while
union leadership continued negotiations with the Chicago Public
Schools, This photograph and ones below by Sarah-Ji (Love + Struggle
Photos).

 

Not long after Brandon Johnson won Chicago’s 2023 mayoral election,
he came by the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization’s annual
convention. Several hundred seniors, students, educators, and other
members of the South Side community group were gathered at King
College Prep High School to attend workshops, discuss next steps, and
maintain their connection with a vital part of the network of
community activists, trade unionists, antiracist organizers, and
others who constitute — and identify as — the Chicago movement.
The buzz of victory still hung in the air. Conversations with people
you hadn’t seen in a while started with hugs or big smiles and a
shake of the head. Our movement elected the mayor of Chicago. Can you
believe it?

In his speech, Brandon made three points. First, he restated his
commitment to the movement’s demands, including housing and
education, which echo the community organization’s program. Second,
he stressed the importance of Black and Latino unity — a timely and
important intervention given the opposition to settling asylum seekers
among some in Chicago’s Black community. And the third point, less
explicit and more visceral, was to let the movement claim him for a
minute. To tell the crowd with a wink and a relaxed grin, _I know the
TV cameras are on, but we all know I came out of this movement. I was
a public school teacher and an organizer for the Chicago Teachers
Union_. The folks he joined on a hunger strike in 2015 to save Dyett
High School were sitting in the front row, and the organizers who had
taken over school board meetings with him were standing just off to
the side.

He told us not to let the rich and powerful divide us. He joked about
how many terms Black people have for “cousin.” He was speaking to
his people. _Our movement elected the mayor of Chicago, y’all. Can
you believe it?_

The moment he was done speaking and turned to leave the stage, I was
immediately reminded of the pressures on him — a Chicago Police
Department security detail, an advance team, logistics, photographers,
press liaisons, a crowd of media with cameras and microphones. It was
a complete scrum, and it follows him virtually everywhere he goes in
public. The end of his life as he had known it.

I first met Brandon in 2011 when he interviewed for an organizer job
at the Chicago Teachers Union. I was the vice president, and he was a
teacher at an elementary and middle school in the Cabrini-Green
projects. CTU president Karen Lewis and our team of teachers in the
Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) had just taken over the
biggest local union in the city with the aim to turn the union into
the kind of inspiring, socially aware, fighting organization that
could transform the city’s schools while building an educational
justice movement. For that we needed organizers, a job title that
hadn’t existed at the CTU. Brandon was a perfect fit: politically
engaged, earnest and open to people, and motivated to fight injustice.

Nina Turner addresses the crowd at the Chicago Temple Building during
the Stand Up for Education Justice Rally and March on Oct. 14, 2019.

A pastor’s kid from a family of 12 who, as he is fond of retelling,
shared a single bathroom, Brandon possesses an easy good nature that
can slip into the kind of facile I-can-be-anything-to-everyone style
of a skilled politician. But his is not the story of a silver-tongued,
charismatic young man who charts a meteoric rise up the political
ladder — after all, Brandon chose a team that did not appear to be
winning in 2011. In fact, we were getting the snot kicked out of us.
The mayor at the time, Rahm Emanuel, came to Chicago with the clout of
a DC insider (he had been President Barack Obama’s White House chief
of staff) and an aggressive plan to attack the teachers union and
remake the schools in a corporate model. While Brandon was filling out
his employment paperwork at the CTU, Mayor-Elect Emanuel was in the
Capitol supporting legislation designed to strip away our collective
bargaining rights and bar our ability to strike. Brandon’s
trajectory from the front lines of the CTU’s struggles to the
mayor’s office mirrors the CTU’s transformation from a relatively
isolated and conservative union that politicians used as a punching
bag to a social justice union bolstered by a burgeoning movement that
was not afraid to demonstrate or strike and could help set an agenda
for the entire city.

How would Brandon withstand the pressures of office? What does it mean
for our movement to have one of our own in office? How will we win our
demands for housing, education, and reforming the racist injustice
system? How will we build our movement to take advantage of the new
horizons opening with Brandon as mayor?

The organizers at that South Side event weren’t putting forward any
easy or pat answers to those questions. Yet everyone, almost to a
person, held to the political wisdom of an organizing tradition in
Chicago that sees our most important power as flowing from our own
ranks, not from high office. Few, if any, in Chicago’s activist
community expect the city to meet all the demands a decade of popular
campaigns had generated — the price for our public school program
alone reaches into the billions of dollars, to say nothing of our
demands around housing, jobs, restorative justice, and more. Other
movement ideas — like diverting funding from the police to community
services — contain political risks that could undo the mayor’s
governing coalition. To the people at the Kenwood-Oakland Community
Organization convention, Brandon’s election reflected the importance
of our grassroots work — a sign of our popular influence and
successful organizing more than a naïve belief that electing a mayor
overcomes all the financial and political obstacles to structural
change.

I think the benefits of having elected an organizer as mayor fall
along three lines, none of which has to do with Brandon simply
delivering our political wish list to us like manna from heaven.
First, the election raised expectations among working-class Chicagoans
and people of color. Beyond the campaign promises alone (though those
do provide a benchmark), a mayor who tells us, _This is a rich city
— there’s no reason it can’t provide for everybody,_ it helps
us break out of a cynical and demoralized view that this economically
and racially segregated city will never change. Second, with Brandon
in office, space opens up for us to win people to our ideas. As the
policy proposals about housing, policing, mental health, and more from
Brandon’s transition report
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debated and introduced as legislation, we will have an opportunity to
train our activists on a new variety of political issues. Finally, all
of this produces organizing opportunities and the ability to grow our
unions, neighborhood organizations, and movements. If we run campaigns
that produce compelling narratives, develop the thinking and ideas of
our activists, and keep up the pressure through direct actions, then
we can view the Johnson administration as a boon for our side.

Too often in our history we’ve seen reform-oriented politicians veer
off course, make compromises with power, and then use their own
credibility within the movement to tamp down dissent rather than
encourage the activism that made their rise possible. We’ve also
seen social movements lose their way and devolve into electoral
vehicles that demobilize as soon as the campaigns end. These twin
dangers can ultimately produce a defeatism and a backlash we’ve seen
captured by the right. But Brandon isn’t just a politician who
latched onto a social movement. He taught public school, organized
co-workers, and led a militant union that was at the center of
Chicago’s social movements. The activists and rank-and-file members
of those movements have been part of a drama whose first, second, and
third acts involved movement building, strikes, and mass protests.

CTU and SEIU Local 73 members and their supporters march through
downtown Chicago during the Stand Up for Education Justice Rally and
March.

If you look at the forces that are arrayed against Brandon — first
during the campaign and carrying on now in the same unrelenting vein
— one criticism stands out above all the others: his roots in the
CTU. His election was described as Chicago choosing “one of CTU’s
own,” describing him as “a former Chicago Public Schools teacher
and paid CTU organizer” by ABC7, one of Chicago’s most watched TV
news channels. Over and over again his opponent Paul Vallas, a former
CEO of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), attacked Brandon as a leader
in the CTU, trying to argue that Brandon could not serve all
Chicagoans because he was affiliated with the union, as if being
funded by a handful of equities traders was somehow better than
Brandon’s support from thousands of working-class union members.
Voters didn’t buy it, but the attack has resurfaced as a way to
criticize Brandon’s decisions on issues ranging from personnel to
his handling of public pensions.

Chicago’s most powerful businessmen and guardians of corporate
interests, from the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago
to the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune, understand from more
than a decade of bitter conflict that the CTU is an implacable foe and
at the center of Brandon’s victory in the mayor’s race. The
city’s most important fighting union has been a key anchor not just
in the 2023 mayoral election but for political movements in Chicago
generally.

Yet the vitality of the Chicago movement springs from the organizing,
cross-movement lesson-learning, and solidarity that is at the heart of
what’s going on here, not from the CTU alone. Successive movements
have left a rich legacy for radical politics, from the groundbreaking
work against police torture
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Walmart and low-wage big-box retailers
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After CORE’s upset victory in the 2010 union election, the
insurgent-led CTU made its relationship to other unions, community
organizations, and activist groups central to its plans. One of our
first acts was launching a coalition called the Grassroots Education
Movement (GEM) [[link removed]]. In
early 2012 we put out a report, “The Schools Chicago’s Students
Deserve
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that not only detailed improvements the schools needed, from
wraparound services to arts education (and also detailed the ways
poverty hurts children), along with a series of revenue-producing
ideas to have the wealthy pay for them. This approach came to be
called “Bargaining for the Common Good,” and it helped ensure that
we had common cause with other activists in the city.

CTU and other organizers found ourselves in overlapping struggles,
collaborating and influenced by one another on many occasions. From
the beginning of CORE’s time in office, when the Occupy movement and
the Wisconsin State Capitol occupation inspired us, to the actions of
teenage climate activists who helped us develop thinking about green
schools, movements influenced both city politics and the thinking
inside the CTU. One particularly important example occurred in late
2015 when it came out that the Chicago police had shot 17-year-old
Laquan McDonald in the back, and then covered it up for over a year.
The Black Youth Project 100 and other young Black activists led the
citywide response in a series of marches and confrontations with power
that changed the way CTU members thought about the police, producing a
campaign to cancel the annual $33 million police contract with the
public schools.

Zakiyya S. Muhammad, a longtime Chicago community activist,
participates in a sit-in outside Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office to
demand he meet with protesters about impending school closings on Nov.
2, 2012.

But the bosses’ focus on the CTU reflects the reality that the union
provides a historical legitimacy and organizational weight that
distinguishes it from other organizations and movements. That
legitimacy derives in part from the CTU’s role as a key voice for
Chicago’s Black residents, stemming from the long-standing
importance of public education for Black Chicagoans, the ugly legacy
of segregated schools in the city
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and the important role that Black teachers played in civil rights
organizing. One of them was Mamie Till-Mobley
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Till, who taught in the Chicago public schools for 23 years. Black
teachers also played an important role in combating racist schooling,
as in the 1963 boycott against segregated schools
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largest and most important institutions that has had a number of Black
leaders — a relative rarity in Chicago, where Black people make up
more than 25 percent of the population — starting with
Jacqueline B. Vaughn, who led the union through several strikes in
the 1980s before dying in office of cancer in 1994. Vaughn’s picture
hung in the conference room of Karen Lewis when she was CTU’s
president, and Karen often invoked her legacy and drew inspiration
from her blunt style, including when she openly challenged Emanuel’s
plans to close 50 schools in 2013 by saying that “88 percent of
students impacted by CPS school actions are African American. And this
is by design,” and accusing him of being the “murder mayor.” The
campaign she led against the closings became a rallying point for many
community and social justice activists who were concerned about
Chicago’s stark racial and economic inequality. The current CTU
president, Stacy Davis Gates, is a Chicago public school parent,
former mayor Lori Lightfoot’s most effective public critic, and the
chief architect of our political insurgency.

The CTU’s most unusual characteristic — and a source of our
organizational power — has been our unwillingness to reach political
accommodation with the city’s power structure. The 2012 strike
reminded the labor movement at large about class politics and the
power of labor militancy, but what happened after the strike proved
just as significant. The CTU never adopted the kind of risk-averse,
organizationally timid behavior that characterizes many unions today.
Karen Lewis and the rest of the CTU leadership were not incorporated
into the ruling democratic polity, nor did the union switch from
industrial militancy to a lobbying strategy. Instead we went on to
wage many more strikes and campaigns, ranging from the campaign
against school closings and organizing against corporate tax giveaways
to a long-term strategy to remove mayoral control of the schools and
participation in protests and marches against police brutality.

The CTU has been able to bring money and mass organization with
citywide structure to bear in a way that has anchored Chicago’s
social movements since CORE’s election turned the union’s focus to
organizing for the common good. Our roughly 27,000 members are
required by statute to live in the city and are based in every
neighborhood; by political necessity we have learned how to maintain
relationships with our parents (as many of us are ourselves) and
communities. Chicago’s more than 500 neighborhood public schools are
a source of social services, including free meals (Chicago public
schools served more than 21 million meals during the first six months
of the pandemic, reported The Chicago Tribune
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and are the most stable public institutions in many neighborhoods. Of
course they are also workplaces, and every unionized school has an
elected delegate (equivalent to a shop steward in other unions) who
not only conducts meetings and represents the concerns of teachers and
staff to management but also maintains relationships with parents and
community groups at open houses, through the local school council, and
in targeted campaigns. For example, if the Chicago Public Schools
central office cuts a school’s budget (a common occurrence),
teachers and CTU organizers reach out to parents and community
organizations so that they can plan pickets, conduct press
conferences, and petition in opposition to the cuts. Public schools
are a nexus between Chicago’s largest local union and the city’s
deep history of community organizing.

Many mainstream commentators tend to ignore the social justice focus
CORE brought to the CTU and the resulting transformation of the
union’s relationships with parents and the community and instead
focus solely on the fact that the CTU and other unions contributed
millions of dollars to Brandon’s campaign. Often the same
commentators thought that Vallas’s huge fund-raising advantage and
prominent endorsements would ensure his path to office. For one
candidate, money is delegitimizing; for the other, it boosts his
electability. Our legitimacy, especially in the eyes of Black Chicago;
our mass organization that has made us a presence in every
neighborhood; and our combative stance against the political status
quo mean that we were a critical component of the political foment in
Chicago over the past 10-plus years that led to Brandon Johnson’s
election.

Teachers and staff picket outside Mollison Elementary School in
Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side on Oct. 25, 2019, during the CTU
and SEIU Local 73 strike.

CORE came to lead the CTU thanks to a combination of good strategy,
good people, and good luck. We started the caucus as a network of
activists inside the union who were dismayed at the destruction of our
public schools under the banner of market-driven education reform. One
of our first projects was to study Naomi Klein’s “The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” as a way to understand
how the city’s financial and political elites were using a looming
fiscal crisis to attack public education. An outside observer who
happened by the public library in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood
would have seen Karen Lewis and the rest of the future CTU leadership
with marked-up copies of the book and a pile of highlighters. But we
always intended to be much more than a study group. From the
beginning, we were focused on organizing co-workers and fighting for
leadership of the union. Karen served as the union delegate at Lane
Tech, the city’s largest high school. I also was the union delegate
at a large high school, as was CORE co-founder Jackson Potter, who
took a leave to organize the group. Our early campaigns targeted
issues of key concern to CTU members: fighting school closings, filing
discrimination lawsuits after layoffs at majority-Black schools,
picketing principals who had committed egregious contract violations,
and generally demonstrating the way the union _should_ be led.

CORE benefited from a deep pool of talented members who brought
valuable experience. The daughter of two Black Chicago public school
teachers, Karen Lewis had taken a circuitous route to teaching high
school chemistry (first came a sociology and music degree from
Dartmouth, medical school, film school, and a stint as a stand-up
comic), but she brought the lived experience of Black Chicago’s
fights against racist school policies, including the 1963 school
boycott and the fight against the mobile Willis Wagon classrooms
[[link removed]] and the 1968 strike to win
permanent status for Black teachers
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labor organizer tradition — after college I graduated from the
AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute, worked as an organizer for SEIU 1199
New England, and spent years involved in socialist politics in
Chicago.

None of this might have mattered were it not for twin crises
confronting the union’s leadership, a group called the United
Progressive Caucus that had waged a series of militant strikes in the
1970s and ’80s but had become a complacent and entrenched
bureaucracy. The first was an internal split caused by exorbitant
staff salaries and overly generous perks bankrupting the union
treasury. The second and more important issue revolved around the old
guard’s inability to block market-driven school reforms that were
massively ramping up standardized testing, closing so-called
low-performing schools and laying off veteran teachers, privatizing
services, and increasing the number of nonunion charter schools. The
Chicago Public Schools CEO was threatening mass layoffs and increased
class sizes unless the legislature adopted deep pension cuts. Yet all
that union staff offered angry members at schools targeted for closure
was advice about polishing their résumés. Old-guard leadership
dismissed charters as an educational fad that would soon go away.

On the eve of the 2010 union election, CORE called for a mass march
against the threatened layoffs. We printed thousands of beautiful
full-color posters attacking the rationale for layoffs and pointing to
corporate tax breaks as a source for needed revenue and distributed
them in all the schools. Thousands of members turned out. While union
leadership marched at the front of the event, it nonetheless was clear
to most members which group had the ideas and organization to meet the
coming attacks. CORE won the election and took office July 1, 2010.

On October 23, 2019, day five of the CTU strike, teachers and
supporters marched through downtown Chicago and convened at City Hall,
where Mayor Lori Lightfoot was scheduled to address the city’s
budget.

Over the years that CORE has led the CTU, the union has had three
presidents (I served from 2018 to 2022), conducted three strikes at
CPS, waged nearly a dozen strikes in the charter sector, and survived
a litany of legislative and political attacks ranging from the 2011
attempt to ban teacher strikes to Lightfoot’s offensive against our
Covid-19 safety protocols. These experiences produced a set of
organizational conclusions that remain relevant to our challenges
today. Our bitter political conflicts with Chicago’s leading
Democratic politicians led us to understand that we needed to form our
own independent working-class-based political organization, United
Working Families. The work required to maintain our unity under
unrelenting austerity imparted key lessons about democratic practices
and developing internal leadership so that rank-and-file members could
become union leaders and union leaders in turn could run for citywide
office. Bargaining for common-good demands taught us how to run
polarizing campaigns that made audacious demands on the rich and
powerful while building mass support.

When CORE first came to power, decades of social protections for
teachers and students were being demolished at a fever pace. First
came an attempt to dramatically increase the hours and intensity of
work with no corresponding increase in pay. Emanuel and neoliberal
education reformers such as Democrats for Education Reform and Stand
for Children combined this attack on working conditions with an
offensive against tenure and tried to impose punitive, test-based
evaluation systems. Those were the main issues that drove the 2012
strike.

But this attack on teachers quickly broadened. Chicago’s financial
elites in the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, the
Civic Federation, and similar groups saw that decades of underfunding
had finally caught up with the public schools, leaving Chicago Public
Schools with an estimated billion-dollar-a-year structural deficit
that they believed could be solved only by radical cuts. This meant
determined attacks against teacher pensions and, most dramatically,
Emanuel’s closing of 50 public schools in 2013.

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the mass school closings
on Chicago politics. With the exception of natural disasters such as
hurricanes, it remains the largest mass school closing in the modern
history of the U.S. The city administration and the mayor-appointed
Board of Education released a list of 129 schools and conducted
hearings to decide which of them would be closed. Tens of thousands of
people participated, arriving in buses full of students, parents,
teachers, and administrators who went on to plead their case in front
of private consultants brought from out of town to sell the process.
People gave searing, emotional testimony and demanded explanations. In
response to that pressure, Emanuel’s administration kept shifting
the rationale because it couldn’t tell people the truth: schools
were being targeted to save money while real estate developers and
corporate cronies got huge tax breaks. In the end, the board
rubber-stamped 50 closings, surprising no one but hardening our
resolve to ensure that Emanuel paid a political price.

CORE had come into office with an expansive view of educational
justice and the belief that we needed a broad-based movement to win.
The 2012 strike and especially the 2013 school closings fight forced
us to conclude that we had to be serious about politics to truly
affect what happens with teachers, students, and schools. The
mayor’s office loomed large not only because it set city policy and
appointed the education board but also because the mayor exerted a
tremendous amount of power over elected officials, from city aldermen
to statewide officials.

The people attacking our schools in the realm of public policy were
Democrats — from Emanuel to a host of state and local politicians.
Illinois Senate president John Cullerton worked for years to cut
public pensions, and Gov. Pat Quinn campaigned with an ad promising to
stop “Squeezy the Pension Python.” State Senator Iris Martinez
staffed her campaign with former board members from the charter school
network her policies benefited, and State Representative Christian
Mitchell joined the attack on pensions and supported expanding charter
schools — both with major financial backing from neoliberal
Democrats. The City Council was no better.

In the summer of 2014, Karen began signaling that she would challenge
Emanuel in the February 2015 municipal election and called on teachers
and other movement activists to run for office themselves. Her events
were well attended, and she led in early polls. At the time I thought
this attempt was premature — we didn’t yet have the networks or
organizational capacity to pull off a successful mayoral run, and
doing so would distract our union from its other functions.

Brandon Johnson and Stacy Davis Gates, then the union’s political
director, were key to the union articulating a way forward. They
argued that serious political engagement was necessary to achieve our
goals, and they proposed a plan to address the hostility of local
politicians to our interests by building a new political organization:
the United Working Families party.

Members of the CTU, SEIU Local 73, and their supporters gather at the
Chicago Temple Building for the Stand Up for Education Justice Rally
and March. Members wear either CTU red or SEIU Local 73 purple based
on their affiliation.

The UWF was the result of the CTU and allies deciding to build a
political apparatus that could deliver transformative change. We
wanted a political party that could formulate a platform with clear
ideas for change, develop activists, train candidates, and ultimately
provide a structure that could push new, pro-working-class policies
through the system. We also wanted all the benefits of campaigning:
the lists of supporters, fund-raising work, and reputation building.
If we were going to do the hard work of challenging Emanuel and his
supporters electorally, we wanted the ability to set the political
agenda.

In October 2014, Karen’s bid for mayor was cut short by her brain
cancer diagnosis. The union was left with few options but to endorse
Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a reliable progressive but hardly the kind of
combative, campaigning figure we needed to win. Without Karen, we
lacked a clear path to elected office, and the political forces
arrayed against us continued to intensify. The election of Bruce
Rauner, a Federalist Society–friendly Republican, as governor that
November signaled the start of an acute crisis. Yet Stacy’s vision
for building the UWF proved prescient. Too often unions are left with
little to nothing to show for this kind of dramatic turn and
counterturn of fortune besides a pile of flyers for a defeated
candidate sitting in your junk mail. But in this case we were able to
launch the UWF, which quickly began to cohere a layer of working-class
activists, largely women of color, into an important political force.

Brandon Johnson gave an instructive interview about the UWF in 2014,
fresh off the battle over school closings. He explained: “We just
don’t know who our allies are anymore. We don’t know who our
champions are when it comes to the issues that resonate with our
members, particularly at the classroom level. So you might have
Democrats that say, ‘Look, I’m for public schools, I’m in favor
of public education. I want to see small class sizes.’ But there are
no policy initiatives or legislation that speaks to that desire.”

The worry was not just that Rauner would block critical funds from the
schools and threaten us with bankruptcy — which he did do — but
also that our own membership would become so demoralized by the severe
budget cuts and worsening conditions in the schools that they would be
unwilling to invest in a long-term political project that required a
high degree of both unity and confidence in our ability to create
change. The CTU navigated this difficult period of unrelenting
austerity by mobilizing our members and simultaneously involving them
in debate about strategy. This deeply democratic internal method
included widespread substantive discussions, contested votes,
continual political education, and political risk-taking, all of which
ultimately allowed us to maintain our struggle and set the stage for
later contractual advances and political wins.

The Chicago Board of Education had “solved” a series of financial
shortfalls beginning in 2010 with increasingly desperate short-term
gimmicks. By 2015 the cash-starved Chicago Public Schools was worried
about making payroll and cutting costs in every conceivable part of
its operation. In early 2016 Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest
Claypool sent a letter to the union threatening a unilateral 7 percent
pay cut. When the union responded by notifying the district that such
a cut would provoke a strike, the district further threatened mass
layoffs and later implemented unpaid furlough days. Despite some
bitter internal conflict, the CTU was able to maintain unity and
deepen the political involvement of our membership while facing these
challenges and a near breakdown in our bargaining relationship with
our employer.

A member of the CTU watches as Daniel J. Montgomery, president of the
Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT), addresses the crowd at the
Stand Up for Education Justice Rally and March.

Teachers and other school staff were incensed by the furloughs, not
least because the board canceled days that had been scheduled for
teacher planning without reducing the actual planning requirements;
instead of seeing both their workload and their pay shrink slightly,
teachers had to perform unpaid work. At the same time classroom
conditions deteriorated rapidly as the district virtually stopped
filling vacancies. Students who were diagnosed with special needs
could not get the legally mandated help, and the workload for the
remaining special education teachers skyrocketed. School after school
reported dysfunctional, dangerous conditions due to short staffing.

Members demanded a response from their union. But there was no
short-term solution to the financial crisis undergirding the crisis in
the schools. We found ourselves in a situation where most of the
typical tools of unionism — grievances, public campaigns, even
workplace actions — simply would not induce the employer to hire
more staff or spend money it didn’t have.

The debate about how to respond to the financial crisis felt chaotic,
wide open, sometimes desperate, and often uncomfortable. Some members
demanded we hire more lawyers to fight the furloughs and
understaffing. Others suggested that we stop writing recommendations
and meeting with parents, withholding the unpaid work we typically
perform after school. Some members insisted that powerful moral
arguments could produce solutions, while others were angry at the
union, arguing that if it couldn’t protect teachers against
furloughs, it should stop collecting union dues to make up the
shortfall. That would have bankrupted the union at precisely the time
teachers needed it most.

Rather than try to quash this debate or channel it into a legislative
campaign, our union remained committed to our democratic internal
method and organized discussions about what we should do. We made our
response to the fiscal crisis the subject of intense school-level
meetings and discussions in the union’s elected bodies, including
the House of Delegates (the union’s largest deliberative body) and
the Executive Board. We then held special citywide leader trainings,
attended by hundreds of members, to take input and develop our
approach. We also produced and disseminated a steady stream of
high-quality analyses about the nature of the fiscal crisis, including
detailed research about the role played by outsourcing and
privatization, tax giveaways, and other handouts to the super-wealthy.

These discussions led to an anti-austerity campaign created with
rank-and-file leaders that included a plan to work to rule — a
concerted effort by members to perform only contractually required
work and boycott unpaid duties. The plan was adopted in a vote before
the House of Delegates. Working to rule proved to be difficult for
teachers; many disliked withholding the extra work that makes our
connections to students and parents more productive and meaningful.
Other elements of the campaign were more successful: wearing union
colors on Friday, distributing buttons and literature, and
demonstrating against the staffing cuts. We continued to enforce
hard-fought rules in the workplace, filing complaints about class size
and special education workloads that emphasized the importance of our
contract. The fact that the board’s financial crisis meant that no
relief was forthcoming did not stop us.

Members of the CTU cheer for speeches given during the Stand Up for
Education Justice Rally and March.

All the internal debate, as frustrating and discordant as it was at
times, meant that our membership stayed engaged and developed a shared
political perspective in the face of deep adversity. We also kept our
union from devolving into a talk shop where we debated ideas but
failed to involve our members in workplace actions and solidarity.
Members did not just receive communications but were actively
participating in face-to-face conversations, debates, votes, and
actions. Those interactions led to an understanding that the
frustrations we faced required a strategic response and increased
people’s connection to the union during a challenging time.

In order to address the financial problems, we needed long-term,
structural changes to the way schools were funded. It was necessary
for us to acknowledge the limitations of what we could achieve at that
exact moment without letting the bosses off the hook. We also believed
in putting forward a positive vision of what fully funded schools and
generous public accommodations would mean for our community. So the
CTU made direct demands of corporate and financial targets that
allowed us to campaign for our vision and conduct broad, effective
public outreach.

The first was a campaign against local banks and the Board of
Education that made capital a target. Using research by the Action
Center on Race and the Economy, we dug into Chicago Public Schools’
rapidly increasing involvement in high-risk financial instruments and
found that while local government coffers may have been dry, the
wealthy corporations and financial institutions involved in those
transactions were doing quite well. We argued that the board was
“broke on purpose,” pointing to the financial decisions that
benefited the education privatizers and financiers who were then
running the schools at the expense of the school system overall. One
example we highlighted was a series of high-risk interest rate hedges
(so-called toxic swaps) that contributed to the board owing at least
$617 million
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Wall Street. We demanded that the banks that had negotiated these
instruments return the money to the schools, and we asked the board to
sign on to this demand.

We hoped that by exposing the inner mechanisms of municipal financing,
we could break the illusion that government is separate and
unconnected from the financial institutions that dominate our society.
We asked why Bank of America and other investment banks should make
hundreds of millions in profits off the public schools at the same
time that students go without basic services like counseling or
special education. The point of the campaign was not to fix Chicago
Public Schools’ finances in the short term. We knew Bank of America
was unlikely to return any profits it had made on the interest-rate
market. The campaign was political — to make it clear to our
members, and anyone else who was paying attention, that bosses were
cutting services for the poor to protect investment bankers’
windfall profits.

CTU teachers and staff, students, and union supporters march in
Lincoln Park near the site of the proposed multibillion-dollar
Sterling Bay development project on Oct. 25, 2019. Protesters demanded
that the city allocate funds toward schools and neighborhoods instead
of sending money to developers.

CTU members — joined by other union members, housing and disability
rights activists, and representatives from community-based
organizations such as Grassroots Collaborative, Action Now, and the
Southwest Organizing Project — staged sit-ins in bank lobbies,
picketed corporate offices, and spoke out in the media. When the
public could see angry members making demands of bankers, it was hard
to miss the larger point even if they didn’t know how interest-rate
swaps worked: these guys got rich while we got screwed.

The 2016 fiscal crisis did not just affect the schools, of course. A
wide swath of social service providers, state universities, health
care facilities, and other essential institutions were in financial
freefall. We decided to organize a citywide general strike to demand
that the city close corporate tax loopholes, tax the financial
exchanges, end real estate development subsidies, and use the funds to
invest in social services.

We struck on April 1, 2016. The coalition that took part in this mass
protest included housing rights and immigrant rights organizations,
other unions (though only the CTU had all of its members actually walk
off the job), Black youth organizations, antiracist and abolitionist
forces, and many more. Nearly 30,000 people demonstrated in Chicago
that day. The strike dominated the news, and the forces united in this
coalition showed the deadlocked politicians in Springfield that more
revenue was needed to fund social services — the only way forward
out of the impasse we were facing.

The Broke on Purpose campaign, the Justice for Laquan McDonald
campaign, and the 2016 general strike emphasized aspirational
political goals and sharp critiques of what was wrong with the city.
These were not “safe” campaigns; not all CTU members supported
them. They were broadly political and targeted specific corporations
and institutions, such as Bank of America and real estate developers
like Ivanhoé Cambridge. Similarly, when the news of McDonald’s
murder at the hands of the Chicago police broke in late 2015, the CTU
put itself firmly on the side of the movements, endorsing the
emergency marches, passing resolutions, and engaging in local activism
against the police presence in our schools. In all these cases we took
a strongly oppositional stance not just toward the Board of Education
but toward larger and more powerful forces in the city. This strategy
allowed us to escape the defensive and limited prospects of making
demands on a financially starved bureaucracy. Instead we went on the
offensive against some of the most powerful political and financial
brokers of Chicago.

For those of us who campaigned hard for Brandon’s election, the buzz
of victory has faded into the demands of our work. Some who went into
his administration are feeling the pressure of working under sky-high
expectations and conditions they did not create. Meanwhile progress on
jobs, housing, policing, and the kind of reform that Brandon promised
moves slowly. Others among us continue to build grassroots
organizations and resist the urge to read every news story about the
new administration as a sign of the ultimate success or failure of our
project. The kind of dedication we expect from Chicago’s activist
community is present throughout the city: volunteers overwhelming
migrant centers with offers of help for the immigrants bused from
Texas, neighborhood volunteers and CTU activists organizing youth
summer programs, and hundreds coming out to join the UWF and stay
involved. But we don’t yet have the set of unifying demands and
campaigns that we need to push for our priorities and make them a
reality.

This is the kind of transition that can disorient activists. We have
gone from the dynamic of opposition to the dynamic of a campaign and
now to the dynamic of working with our comrade in office, all within a
few short months. We will make it through this transition by talking
about it — writing about it, discussing it, and maintaining our
critical connections to one another. We didn’t elect Brandon so that
we could sit back, watch the news, and feel smart about our critique
— but we also didn’t agree to keep our mouths shut when immigrant
families get kicked out of a shelter and are forced to sleep in a tent
after arriving seven minutes past curfew.
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need to do more than simply hold Brandon accountable for living up to
his campaign promises; we need our movement and organizational
strategies to live up to our own standards.

The work we have been doing over the past decade helps prepare us for
the next set of challenges. We built the UWF to be an independent,
working-class political organization in order for our forces to be
able to influence government directly. Now we need to build it even
bigger and use it. We learned that we can develop new layers of
leadership and increase rank-and-file activism by leaning into our
democratic practices and participation. Now we need to recruit new
activists and involve them in the decision-making of our unions,
neighborhood groups, and coalitions. And we learned how to make
audacious demands on corporate titans and political power brokers. Now
we must build campaigns that allow us to march, demonstrate, and call
for housing, jobs, green environmental policy, and an end to the
carceral state. Our movement is powerful — let’s use it to make a
better city.

_Jesse Sharkey is a teacher (currently on leave to write) who lives in
the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. He was one of the founders of
CORE and served as the vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union
from 2010 to 2018 and as president from 2018 to 2022._

_Hammer & Hope is a new magazine of Black politics and culture. It is
a project rooted in the power of solidarity, the spirit of struggle
and the generative power of debate, all of which are vital parts of
our movement toward freedom.  We are inspired by the courageous Black
Communists in Alabama whose lives and struggles to organize against
capitalism and white supremacist terror in the 1930s and 1940s are
memorialized in Robin D. G. Kelley’s book “Hammer and
Hoe,” from which we take our name.
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_We will envision collectively what a better future might look like
and the strategies that could get us there. Such an undertaking
compels us to deepen our knowledge of history, politics, culture and
our own movements.  Our aim is to build a project whose politics and
aesthetics reflects the electric spirit of the protesters who flooded
the streets in 2020, a project that breathes life into the
transformative ideas pointing us towards the world we deserve._

_Come join us. We have a world to win._

* Chicago Teachers Union
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* Brandon Johnson
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* Left Electoral Strategy
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