City Colleges Strike Has The Faculty Union Boxed In
By Robert Klein Engler (10/27/04)
Local 1600 of the Cook County College Teachers Union is now in its second week of a strike against the City Colleges of Chicago. Faculty, students and the public are getting restless. In a mostly Democratic city with a union core membership that votes mostly Democratic, the CCCTU and the board of the City Colleges of Chicago cannot find a solution to their problem.
Talks between the union and the board are at a standstill. The request for federal mediation is not working. According to NBC5.com, "Chancellor Wayne Watson said...college officials plan to ask that the four-year contract be resolved at the bargaining table and that all students come back to school." Watson stopped short of saying the union better call off their strike and return to work without a contract, but some observers predict that will happen in a few weeks.
The Daley College union website paints an equally depressing picture of this strike to nowhere. It reports, "The mediator came back from trying to reason with them (the CCC board) and said, 'My page is blank.' Nothing to move with or on, from their side." The website then goes on to claim, "We need your help. It's time to start thinking "outside the box" to get the board to move. Meanwhile, keep up the political pressure."
One has to ask what kind of thinking outside the box must be done here, or what kind of political pressure must be applied to resolve this strike and return all 60,000 students to their classes. Those who has seen the moth-eaten plans of the CCCTU first hand, may suggest that political pressure can only be effective if the union members and the students at the city colleges vote Republican, but his will not happen. The union website encourages students to "Tell the Mayor you want him to intervene and give the teachers a fair settlement!" That won't work, either.
Nor will this strike end in victory for Local 1600. The great irony here is that this union has hitched it's wagon to the falling star of the Democratic Party in the first place. This faculty union is on its last legs, while at the same time it is married to the failed educational policies of the Democrats and the national labor unions like the American Federation of Teachers that keep that political party afloat.
We have to ask how is it that over the years the faculty union got itself in a position where its members now are the most irrelevant group in the city college system. The answer to that question is that there is a line of contradiction that runs from Washington, D. C., through Chicago's city hall and into the consciousness of those striking faculty who walk their picket line of despair in front of the gates to Daley College. These faculty will vote Democratic on the national level, yet cannot understand why on the local level the same Democrats leave them out on the street. Obviously, this faculty cannot think outside their box.
It must seem odd also to a disinterested observer that a union which votes overwhelmingly Democratic and gives large sums of money to the Democratic Party cannot resolve its disagreements with a college board that is appointed by a Democratic mayor of a Democratic city. What's going on here?
What's going on is nothing more than the fundamental contradiction that is at the heart of the Democratic Party itself. This contradiction is that the two groups involved in the strike say one thing yet do another. Both the faculty union and the college board give lip service to education, but neither group means what they say. If they did, then they would never put up with an institution of higher education where 70 percent of the classes are taught by adjuncts.
To achieve their political and economic ends the college board and the faculty union couldn't care less how many adjuncts teach, or if the city colleges are destroyed. Both parties to this macabre dance were never interested in education in the first place. The college board is an arm of a political establishment only interested in perpetuating its power, while the union is only interested in money for its members.
Anyone who lives in Chicago a while knows that the city colleges are just the educational arm of the Democratic Party's patronage system. The college offers jobs to Affirmative Action administrators in return for votes. Likewise, the Cook County College Teachers union realized 25 years ago to keep quiet about quality education and decided just to milk more and more money from the public teat. The union also looked the other way when large numbers of part-time faculty were hired.
>From the point of view of the taxpaying public, the striking professors at the city colleges are seen as simply selfish academics. The senior faculty's demand for a 12 hour a semester teaching load and an $80,000 a year salary seems outrageous.
What is not outrageous is that the full-time/part-time teaching ratio at the City Colleges of Chicago mirrors national trends in public higher education. That's why what happens in Chicago with this strike will reverberate around the nation. If this strike in Chicago ends with the CCCTU members going back to the classroom without achieving the goal of keeping a 12 hour teaching load for senior faculty, it will signal a watershed in the faculty union movement nationally.
To think outside the box in Chicago is to think that this strike is a good thing. It might help in exposing the contradiction that is the union's and the Democratic Party's policies on education. To that end, the voters of Chicago may someday send both the faculty union and the college board packing. There's plenty of room in that box.
If the faculty union really wanted to think outside the box, then it would rethink its motive for striking in the first place. If the CCCTU was really interested in creating a quality educational system for the working classes in Chicago, then it would go on strike and demand the hiring of 100s of full-time faculty. It would remove itself from the failed educational policies of the Democrats, both locally and nationally, it would demand an end to Affirmative Action in education, and demand a class size of no more than 20 students. Now, that really would be thinking outside the box.
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