To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
January 11, 2022
by Joseph Green, Detroit Workers’ Voice
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) agreed on Monday night to a tentative settlement of the latest phase of its struggle to make the Chicago school district take COVID seriously. The settlement is subject to a coming vote of CTU membership. [It was ratified on Wednesday.] It came at the start of the second week that teachers were facing a lockout ordered by Lori Lightfoot, the Democratic mayor of Chicago, who wants the teachers to give up their defense of the safety of teachers, staff, and students from COVID-19.
Chicago teachers had won from the city last spring a plan for a safe reopening of Chicago’s high schools, and this year, with the rapid spread of the Omicron variant in Chicago, they also wanted to ensure a safe return from the December holidays. But the school system has botched COVID testing, and moreover, what testing has taken place showed an 18% infection rate. Teachers had responded by largely refusing in-person teaching until the situation improved, and in retaliation, Lightfoot locked them out of on-line teaching, shutting down the remote-learning network, and docking their pay. In her haste to punish teachers and placate political pressure from conservatives, she has punished Chicago students by presenting the best way to keep schools open as the blocking of all remote instruction and a casual attitude to the safety of students and staff.
There are about a third of a million students in the Chicago school district, making it the third largest district in the U.S. In the testing fiasco, the school system, which boasted of having 150,000 home kits for testing to distribute in preparation for the start of the year, only managed to have about 36,000 tests completed by Jan. 1. As mentioned above, a shocking 18% were positive for COVID, and on top of that, more than half the tests, about 25,000, couldn’t be validated at all. For that matter, many schools didn’t receive test kits.
Given these results, insufficient measures against COVID, and the lack of sufficient school staffing to fill in for the absence of sick or quarantining staff, the majority of Chicago teachers didn’t believe that in-person schooling could be immediately resumed. Teachers tried to improve the situation, with some teachers being involved, even during the lockout, in seeking to to help ensure more COVID testing, but the shut-down of the school system’s remote-learning tools also obstructed systematic testing. The CTU has been demanding vigorous testing, high-quality masking, proper staffing including substitute teachers, and a switch to remote learning when infection rates go sky-high, such as 20% of the staff being in isolation or quarantine. Last week CTU president Jesse Sharkey wrote in an email to CTU’s 25,000 members that “We have rights to safety and we’ve been at the bargaining table for 20 months to secure those rights. We haven’t shifted the goal posts one bit; in fact, we’ve been saying the same thing for months: Please, work WITH us to set up comprehensive testing, work with us to vaccinate students, and work with us to establish basic guard rails.” (1)
The tentative settlement, however, doesn’t seem to have achieved too much of this, and some CTU members are questioning it. It does provide some KN-95 masks for staff and students — the School District and Lightfoot had to be pushed to do even that — but it also contemplates in-person teaching even for the occasions when schools have astonishing high levels of sick and quarantined students and teachers. And it doesn’t seem to have solved the school system’s problems with carrying out testing. Throughout all of this, it is the union, and not the city government, which is taking the COVID crisis seriously, but clearly the struggle for safety is going to continue. Meanwhile, the Chicago administration has been complacent, even comparing the present crisis to the flu: “The city’s public health commissioner is also arguing that COVID-19 for children is behaving much like the flu, especially for vaccinated children and that schools are not closed for the flu.” (2) Lightfoot herself has just come down with COVID, but she is shrugging it off, saying she isn’t too sick.
The struggle over whether to take COVID seriously is going on across the country. There was a time when pooh-poohing COVID by comparing it to the flu was regarded as the province of the madman Trump, but now the Democratic establishment in Chicago is doing that, with the argument that widespread vaccination has supposedly already tamed it. And “Lockout Lori”, as some teachers call her, is seeking popularity by trying to look tough against the teachers’ union. When Rahm Emanuel was Democratic mayor of Chicago, he pushed neo-liberalism and school privatization with a vengeance, and his shadow still looms over the Chicago city administration.
Moreover, the fiasco of December’s school testing shows that what is needed is not just agreement on some measures, but a change in the methods of city government. The Chicago city administration is devoted to the profits of the capitalists and keeping the working residents of the city quiet, to say nothing of its history of racism, so it is bankrupt in the face of the current emergency. The city administration is too detached from the people to care about and organize masses of people to help with public-health measures; it can’t even carry out the COVID tests that it crowed about. Not empty promises or even stockpiling tests will be successful by themselves against COVID, but there must be work to bring the community into carrying out and supervising public-health work, and a cleanup of the notoriously corrupt way the Chicago administration works.
Protect the health of students and staff! Support Chicago teachers against the lies from both Lockout Lightfoot and the conservatives! For a serious struggle by all essential workers against COVID-19!
(1) Sophia Tareen, “Chicago nixes school for 3rd day as virus, union debate rage”, Jan. 6, 022, ABC News.
(2) Sarah Karp, “Chicago Teachers Union unveils new proposal that involves measures already rejected by city officials,” Jan. 8, 2022, WBEZ Chicago.
Picture:
Scene from the Chicago teachers’ walkout
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