One Strike And You Are Out: The Failure Of The Cook County College Teachers Union
By Robert Klein Engler (10/26/04)
The Cook County College Teachers Union is now in its second day of a strike against the City Colleges of Chicago. If ever there was a teachers union that symbolized all that is wrong with public higher education in the U. S., then the CCCTU would be that union.
This is the first strike the CCCTU has called in more than 25 years. Over that length of time, the union has been under the leadership of Norm Swenson, known in some union circles as a dinosaur. Just recently, Perry Buckley took over the reigns of leadership, but many union observers see that he was hatched from the same egg as Swenson.
Regrettably, Swenson did not disappear into obscurity, but became head of the negotiating team attempting to write a new contract. It is because of this, and the inability of both Swenson and Buckley to deal with changes in higher education over the past 25 years, that the CCCTU is in a losing position, today.
The most glaring fact coming from both the CCCTU and the City Colleges of Chicago's board is that the striking faculty at the city colleges teach only about 30 percent of the classes. Furthermore, these striking faculty want to maintain their 12 hour a week teaching load. These data mean two significant things: firstly, 70 percent of the classes at the city colleges are now taught by adjunct professors that the CCCTU refused over the years to unionize, and secondly, the CCCTU is now irrelevant.
For the past 25 years, Swenson's myopic union vision has reduced the CCCTU to a group of self-serving academics that are only interested in extorting more and more money from the public coffers. Even today, as the union strikes, the biggest issues facing the survival of a quality community college system in Chicago are off the negotiating table. Class size and the hiring of more full-time faculty are not even mentioned.
Over the years, Swenson's leadership has meant a continual reduction in the number of full-time faculty. Now, years too late, more than 70 percent of the classes are taught by part-timers. The faculty union has managed to create a working environment where a few faculty teach 8 classes a year and are paid $80,000, while the majority of the faculty may teach 4 classes a year and are paid less than $8,000. Those kinds of disproportionate salaries are not what unionism is supposed to support.
Nor has the CCCTU ever done anything about the continually increasing class sizes at the city colleges. It is not unusual, now, for classes at the city colleges to have more than 40 students. Often, these are classes filled with minority students who have special needs that cannot be addressed in such large classes.
The CCCTU has never met the challenge of ethnic cleansing at the campuses, either. When an all Latino administration came to Daley College, and began to purge the faculty and staff of blacks and whites, the union leadership stood idly by. Now, the City Colleges of Chicago is one of the most segregated college systems in the U. S. With mostly all black, all white and all Latino campuses, diversity in education is just given lip service there.
The strike at the City Colleges of Chicago is not worth supporting. If the CCCTU went on strike to lower class sizes, to hire more full-time faculty and integrate the campuses and the work force so that they reflect the nation, then that would be something to support, but it won't happen. Instead, the 30 percent of the faculty that have fat wallets will take to the streets and strike for their own personal gain. Standing there with their lopsided picket signs, they give the impression that they think more of themselves than they do of the ideals of quality, higher education.
One of the best things that can happen to public higher education in Chicago is to have this strike fail and the CCCTU broken. After that, a new faculty union can be built from the ground up. This union can then focus on those issues that will improve public higher education in the city. When the City Colleges of Chicago has a faculty that is 70 percent full-time and 30 percent part-time, when class size is reduced across the board to no more than 20, and when the colleges are truly diverse and integrated, we will see them flourish again.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Robert Klein Engler
