PSL members and volunteers, many of whom are students and education workers, are on the picket lines today in Chicago. We are going out to the streets of Chicago and across the country to build support for the strike.
Chicago teachers are taking a very important stand during a time of budget austerity, high unemployment and an aggressive attack on unions by the ruling 1%. Their decision to go on strike shows that we have power in numbers when we come together. Wall Street and their well-paid political henchmen are trying to use the opportunity of the economic crisis to reverse all of our hard-earned gains. Only by joining together in struggle can we stop them.
The teachers’ union is calling on workers to use the power that we possess in capitalist society—to collectively withhold our labor—in order to win a just contract, save their union and preserve public education.
The candidates of the PSL promote the right of all workers to organize, mobilize and withhold their labor to achieve justice. The strike is workers’ ultimate weapon to fight back, and we should use it more often!
At stake: the future of public education
Chicago’s Democratic Party mayor Rahm Emanuel and the education bosses are trying to portray the strike as against students’ interests—this is false.
The only people attacking public school students are the Mayor and his handpicked executives on the school board, when they decide to wage a crusade against their teachers. The Mayor started this struggle when he violated the teacher’s contract by canceling their raises. He then attacked the union, trying to ram through an extended school day.
Mayor Emanuel wants make the teachers work harder for less pay and less benefits. But he also has bigger plans to essentially destroy the public school system and smash the teachers union. He wants to make it much easier to fire thousands of union teachers and close many schools. His plan is to privatize half the school system, using private charter schools, bankrolled by billionaires.
Such charter schools are notoriously anti-union and, despite the propaganda used to sell them, have repeatedly failed to deliver on their educational promises. Privately-run schools based on corporate models, by their very nature, give up on “undesirable” students in favor of the bottom line. African Americans and Latinos make up 85 percent of Chicago Public School students.
Education must be “owned” by the public, not McDonald’s and Microsoft. Public education was won in the streets and we will go out into the streets to defend it.
The Obama administration is deeply implicated in this attack on teachers and workers’ rights. Not only is Rahm Emanuel Obama’s former Chief of Staff, the current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan initiated the corporate education model as Chicago’s school superintendent. The Chicago teachers are resisting not just local attacks, but in fact the national anti-union offensive of which they are a part.
Emanuel is a former banker himself, whose kids do not go to public school. A typical capitalist politician, he takes from workers and gives to Wall Street. The only thing standing in his way of handing over the schools to his banker friends is the teachers’ struggle, with the union as the only organized force positioned to save public education.
The manufactured budget crisis
The question of whether there is money to fund public education and teachers’ salaries is not really a question—it is a weapon wielded by Wall Street against workers. In the case of the teachers’ illegally canceled raises, for example, the Emanuel administration claimed they did not have the $70 million they said it would cost to meet the city’s contractual obligation. That too was a lie.
The city took that $70 million and diverted it to the police department. This month, the mayor’s office announced that they will build a new $55 million park, and the school board just voted to allocate $25 million to defeat the strike.
In December 2011, the state of Illinois granted two Chicago businesses, Sears and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, $317 million in tax breaks because they threatened to move out of the city. Instead of paying this extortion, that money could have been used for teachers’ wages and to fund public education. What did Sears do in the wake of the outrageous tax break? They laid off hundreds of workers!
In October 2008, Emanuel was a member of the U.S. Congress from Chicago. He not only voted for the deeply unpopular bailout that Wall Street demanded, he co-sponsored the legislation that gave his banker friends $700 billion of the public’s tax money. They used that money not to create jobs, but to pad their profits and give themselves record bonuses.
Struggle is the only way forward
Under the capitalist system, a few millionaires and billionaires monopolize the means of producing wealth. Meanwhile, millions have sunk into poverty, unemployment, are food insecure, and lack quality housing. How do they maintain a system so dramatically unequal without people rising up? In addition to the cops, who exist to protect their property, they use their power over the media to influence public opinion, to divide, confuse and misdirect workers’ frustrations.
Chicago’s rulers want the workers to stand aside as they steal from the teachers and pillage the public school system. We cannot let that happen.
Our biggest weapons are struggle, organization and unity. These are the only things that can show poor and working people that the billionaires have no right to rule the education system or any part of society.
The candidates of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, including the Lindsay/Osorio Presidential Campaign and Ymelda Viramontes for Illinois’ 4th Congressional District, declare their unwavering support to the teachers’ struggle. It’s time for workers to leave the sidelines and fight back, to widen the struggle, to defend our schools, our unions, our social services and our rights.
Instead of taking hit after hit, it is time for workers to go on the offensive. Join the Chicago teachers on the picket lines!
