Some Chicago media covered it, as did a few prescient bloggers, but most ignored it. Stories about labor get short shrift in the mainstream press these days, and stories about internal union battles are almost entirely off the radar. But if local journalists had examined the 2010 CTU leadership election closely they would have realized that, in many ways, a referendum on two starkly different visions of teacher unionism by Chicago’s 26,000 educators had just taken place. There was the incumbent United Progressive Caucus (UPC), which had little to say about school closures in poor neighborhoods of color, attacks on teachers, and the advance of free market education reform. While its early roots were in rank-and-file racial justice caucuses within the union, by 2010 the UPC leadership had long atrophied. They paid themselves massive salaries and pensions, used expense accounts questionably, and were entrenched enough to fend off challengers. Down from its once-lofty ambitions, the old guard came to represent a stale top-down business unionism.
What do You think about Strike For America (2014)?
