Chicago Teachers Rip 'Big Money Interest Groups' 404
theodp writes "The striking Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is holding a massive 'Wisconsin-style rally' Saturday as ongoing negotiations try to bring an end to the strike that has put education on hold for 350,000 of the city's schoolchildren. 'The 30,000 teachers, school social workers, clerks, vision and hearing testers, school nurses, teaching assistants, counselors, and other school professionals of the Chicago Teachers Union are standing strong to defend public education from test pushers, privatizers, and a national onslaught of big money interest groups trying to push education back to the days before teachers had unions,' explains the CTU web site. 'Around the country and even the world, our fight is recognized as the front line of resistance to the corporate education agenda.' Some are calling the strike — which has by most accounts centered on salary schedules (CPS salary dataset), teacher performance evaluations, grievance procedures, and which teachers get dibs on new jobs — a push-back to education reform that has possible Presidential election implications. The big winners in the school strike, Bloomberg reports, are the city's largely non-union 100+ charter schools, which remained open throughout the strike. Charter school enrollment swelled to 52,000 students this fall as parents worried by strike rumors sought refuge in schools like those run by the Noble Charter Network, which enjoys the deep-pocket support of many wealthy 'investors.'"
They rejected 16% salary increase over 4 years (Score:5, Informative)
and say they want a 30% increase over 2. They are already some of the best paid urban teachers in the whole country. Insane.
http://reason.com/reasontv/2012/09/15/the-deep-logic-of-the-chicago-teachers-s [reason.com]
Don't want to be held accountable, even opposing Obama's merit-based suggestions in favor of tenure, etc.
I'll say what I always said: it's about the children, alright, about using the children.
Re:They rejected 16% salary increase over 4 years (Score:0, Informative)
Teachers are employees, not elected officials. They do not have a mandate to dictate education policy to the public and state governments.
Re:Take back education (Score:2, Informative)
The teachers don't support any sort of reform, and the current system is obviously not working. It's just like the demonstrations in Greece and Spain against austerity. Childishness. Me! Me! Me! They don't care about the kids, or they would have their own reform plan.
They are against any kind of accountability for teachers.
They are against any kind of accountability for schools.
They are for keeping the current "more pay for graduate degrees" pay schedule, even though studies show that teacher graduate degrees have no correlation with student outcomes.
They are against school choice, even against huge evidence that school choice improves schools.
They are against pension reform, when pensions are bankrupting states like California and PA.
What are they for? More money and shorter school days.
Re:Chicago Teachers Rip 'Big Money Interest Groups (Score:5, Informative)
getting annual raises about four times the rate of inflation
Check your numbers. If the real inflation rate was as low as their request, then gasoline would be about $1.50, a day at the hospital would be about $750, a loaf of bread would still be 50 cents, higher ed tuition would still be about $1000/semester....
There are very large numbers of people waiting to get into teaching
For kindergarten teachers in my sorta-rich suburb, yeah the competition for teaching jobs is incredibly intense. For ghetto areas like big cities, where you need to wear a bullet proof vest, often there's racial hiring quotas, there are serious issues getting enough staffing. Its very much like the demand for police officers in different locales... oddly enough the nice places have 10 applicants per position, and the bad places have 10 positions per good applicant...
Re:Chicago Teachers Rip 'Big Money Interest Groups (Score:4, Informative)
You have a very distorted view of history. The 8 hour day and 40 hour work week was instituted by FDR, ruled unconstitutional and then overtime pay was created as a fix. This was all part of FDR's fix to unemployment during the recession. The concept was if spread a little work around it was better then someone grabbing a lot of work at the expense of others. It was a mantra of the Socialist parties and the communists parties in th3 first part of the 1900's.
Safer working conditions would have been the norm without unions too. As soon as the government got into the habit of playing insurer for occupational injuries, working condition standards began being implemented by law and tort. You can thank the Unions for getting some state workers compensation laws passed though. But they have been in place long before Unions had legal rights to exist (1906 for federal employes and earlier in some areas). To claim safe working conditions outside a specific factory or a specific job is a little misguided to say the least. OSHA and MSHA are direct results of the government paying out for on the job injuries. They were created in the 1970's specifically to increase workplace safety and reduce the worker's compensation payouts.
No it wasn't.
Re:They rejected 16% salary increase over 4 years (Score:4, Informative)
That being said, private school teachers often make less, but enjoy a more stable support system for both class sizes and keeping children in line.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Chicago Teachers Rip 'Big Money Interest Groups (Score:5, Informative)
Your mistake is looking only at the history of the USA. There are other countries which got 8-hour work day and other labor protection laws literally decades earlier, and in all those cases unions have been instrumental. US was a late comer to that party.
Re:Chicago Teachers Rip 'Big Money Interest Groups (Score:5, Informative)
You have a very distorted view of history.
I believe your own distorted presentation of history is misleading. The eight-hour workday was not an emergent property of depression era unemployment. The depression was simply fuel to an already existing fire. How legislation emerges is often as important as the emergence itself...
Carpenters in America went on strike in the early 1790's for a 10-hour work day. This had become a general public sentiment and by the mid 1830's Philadelphia workers staged a general strike -- organized and lead by Irish workers in the coal industry. The American eight-hour workday found its initial foothold in Boston in the early 1840's and by the 1860's it was being demanded in Chicago. Baltimore 1866, the National Labor Union made it the first and most pressing issue to normalize on an eight-hour workday. The Illinois legislature passed a (largely ineffective) eight-hour workday law in 1867. The ineffectiveness of the leglislation resulted in a city-wide strike in Chicago that lasted a week before crumbling. Later, in 1868, a similarly impotent eight-hour workday law for federal employees was passed by Congress. In 1869, Grant signed the National Eight Hour Law Proclamation. The movement persisted through out the 1870's and in the 1890's labor strikes of 10's and hundreds of thousands of peoples in Milwaukee, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, and other cities and townships throughout America -- organized labor standing united for that which civilized management and government were unwilling (or unable) to deliver.
The fight was not just in the north... in San Fancisco, the eight-hour workday was implemented at a mill at the turn of the century -- following arbitration and in the face of boycotts and strikes.
Most notably in history, in 1914 Henry Ford called for the doubling of wages and the cutting of work hours from nine to eight. Many sibling companies, while unhappy with Ford's move could not argue with the productivity increase he demonstrated...and they soon followed with similar moves. In 1915, a series of strikes motivated toward the eight-hour work day swept the northeast...successfully.
The Adamson Act of 1916 (signed by Woodrow Wilson) solidified the eight-hour day in the United States for railroad workers. It was the first time in American history that the private industry workhours were regulated by federal authority. The law was challenged and upheld in Wilson v. New, 249 U.S. 332 (1917).
The Adamson Act blazed the trail for all the related legislation in America that followed...
Similarities around the world (timeframes) --
Australia, 1855-1956
Spain, 1873-1919
Portugal, 1919
Germany, 1899
France, 1936 (Matignon)
Russia, 1917
Iran, 1919-1946
Mexico, 1910-1920
New Zealand, 1840-1899
Puerto Rico, 1899
Puru, 1919-?
Uruguay, 1914-1915
Chili, 1924