Chicago Teachers Union

Based on Wikipedia: Chicago Teachers Union

In the depths of the Great Depression, Chicago's teachers did something extraordinary: they revolted against the banks. The city had stopped paying them—not for a week or a month, but repeatedly, creating what became known as "payless paydays." Teachers who had dedicated their lives to educating Chicago's children found themselves unable to pay rent or buy groceries. Out of this crisis emerged one of the most consequential labor organizations in American education: the Chicago Teachers Union.

A Union Forged in Crisis

Before the Depression, Chicago's teachers had splintered into multiple organizations, some still segregated by gender. There was the Men's Teachers Union, the Federation of Women High School Teachers, the Elementary Teachers Union, and the Playground Teachers Union. These groups rarely cooperated effectively. But when the banks failed and the paychecks stopped coming, desperation created unity.

The figure who emerged to channel this anger was John Fewkes, leader of something called the "Voluntary Emergency Committee"—a deliberately vague name for a group that coordinated militant action against the city's financial mismanagement. Fewkes was aggressive but not radical. He explicitly barred communists from his organization, a stance that would shape the union's politics for decades.

In 1937, these disparate teacher groups gathered at the Chicago Civic Opera House—a grand venue that seemed to underscore the moment's significance—and formally merged into the Chicago Teachers Union. The American Federation of Teachers, the national organization for teacher unions, granted them charter number one. Local 1. First among equals.

Within a year, membership had exploded to over 8,500, making it the largest teachers union in the country.

The Women Who Held Back

Not everyone joined the celebration. The Chicago Teachers Federation, an organization of women elementary school teachers founded back in 1897, remained separate. Their legendary leader, Margaret Haley, harbored concerns that weren't unfounded: she worried the new union would prioritize the interests of men and high school teachers over the women who taught in elementary classrooms.

This tension—between different types of teachers, between men and women, between those who taught older and younger students—would persist throughout the union's history. Teaching in America has always been a feminized profession, and Chicago was no exception. Most public school teachers were white single women. But in the union's early leadership, men like Fewkes dominated.

For Black women in Chicago, teaching was the most common professional occupation available, yet they faced systematic discrimination. Qualified Black high school teachers were shunted into elementary positions or forced to work as perpetual substitutes. Some couldn't get hired at all. The union would eventually have to reckon with these injustices—but that reckoning wouldn't come for decades.

The Long Fight for Collective Bargaining

Having a union meant nothing if you couldn't actually negotiate with your employer. The Chicago Teachers Union wanted collective bargaining rights from the beginning—the legal authority to sit across the table from the school board and hammer out binding agreements on pay, benefits, and working conditions.

Superintendent William Johnson refused.

So the union waited. And organized. And grew. By 1939, membership had more than doubled again, to 8,500 teachers who could be mobilized for mass letter-writing campaigns and demonstrations.

In 1948, history nearly repeated the Depression-era crisis. Teachers faced yet another round of payless paydays due to city mismanagement. The union authorized a strike—an illegal action that could have cost members their jobs. Hours before teachers were set to walk out, the school board capitulated, approving a new budget and frantically mailing the overdue checks.

The strike authorization had worked without an actual strike. But everyone knew the confrontation had merely been postponed.

Violence, Shortages, and the Battle Over Merit Pay

Through the 1950s, the union pushed for changes beyond salary. They asked the Chicago Police Department to station an officer in each of the city's 43 high schools. The request reveals something about urban education that persists today: teachers increasingly found themselves managing not just learning but safety, dealing with students who brought the violence of their neighborhoods into the classroom.

The police refused.

The union also raised alarms about a growing teacher shortage—over a hundred classrooms lacked even a substitute teacher. This too would become a recurring theme in American education: the gap between what society expects from schools and what it's willing to pay for.

One battle from this era deserves special attention because it continues to rage today: merit pay. These are compensation systems that tie teacher salaries to performance evaluations—the idea being that excellent teachers should earn more than mediocre ones. It sounds reasonable in the abstract.

The Chicago Teachers Union opposed it then, and teacher unions generally oppose it now. Their argument: Who decides what constitutes excellent teaching? Administrators with agendas? Test scores that measure poverty more than pedagogy? Merit pay, in this view, isn't really about rewarding good teachers. It's about giving management arbitrary power over workers' livelihoods while appearing to embrace accountability.

The Cold War Comes to the Classroom

John Fewkes and the Chicago Teachers Union played a decisive role in one of the darker chapters of American labor history: the anti-communist purges of the 1940s.

The American Federation of Teachers had member locals across the country, including some in New York and Philadelphia where left-wing and communist teachers had found a home. In 1941, the Chicago union—urged on by Fewkes—voted 5,258 to 892 to expel the New York City Teachers Union, the New York College Teachers Union, and the Philadelphia Teachers Union from the national federation.

These three locals represented about a quarter of the AFT's total membership. But the Chicago Teachers Union was bigger, and its votes were decisive. The expulsion went through.

Were these expelled teachers actually Soviet agents seeking to indoctrinate American children? Almost certainly not. Many were simply progressives who believed capitalism had failed during the Depression and that socialism offered a better path. Some were indeed Communist Party members, though party membership in the 1930s and 1940s meant something different than it would during the McCarthy era. The American Communist Party attracted idealists who wanted to fight fascism and racism—causes that mainstream institutions often ignored.

But Fewkes and the Chicago leadership saw communist influence as an existential threat to the labor movement. They weren't entirely wrong about the political risks: unions tainted by communist association would face devastating attacks in the coming decades. Whether purging the left was morally justified or strategically necessary remains debated among labor historians.

Victory in 1966

The 1960s changed everything.

In 1961, New York City recognized collective bargaining rights for the United Federation of Teachers. Suddenly, what had seemed impossible—teachers negotiating as equals with their school board—became reality in America's largest city.

Chicago teachers wanted the same.

The union staged massive demonstrations at the Chicago Board of Education. They threatened an illegal strike in 1963 if the board wouldn't grant them bargaining rights. The city blinked, agreeing to negotiate. After years of delays—including litigation from a rival organization, the Chicago Education Association, which hoped to represent teachers instead—the Chicago Teachers Union finally became the official bargaining agent for Chicago's teachers in April 1966.

Three decades of patient organizing had paid off. Now the real work could begin.

The Strike Years

With collective bargaining came the ultimate weapon: the strike. And Chicago's teachers used it.

The catalog of walkouts reads like a chronicle of incremental gains won through confrontation:

• 1969: A two-day strike yielded salary increases, teacher aides, and class size maximums.
• 1971: Four days out won salary increases and full health benefits.
• 1973: Two strikes totaling 23 days improved salaries, benefits, preparation time, supplies, and class sizes.
• 1979-1980: Multiple strikes over yet another payless payday—this time during the holiday break—resulted in better salary, sick leave, and parental leave.
• 1984: Four days won increased medical coverage.
• 1985: Two days for salary and sick leave.
• 1987: A record-breaking 19-day strike under President Jacqueline B. Vaughn won raises and healthcare improvements.

One walkout deserves special mention. In 1968, before the union had even won its first official contract, "Concerned FTBs"—long-term substitute teachers—launched wildcat strikes against school segregation and racism. They weren't just fighting for better pay. They were challenging the systematic unfairness in how Black teachers were certified, hired, and promoted.

These weren't union-authorized actions. They emerged from teachers who felt the official leadership wasn't moving fast enough on racial justice. The tension between union leadership and rank-and-file activists would eventually reshape the entire organization.

The Insurgents Take Over

By 2010, many Chicago teachers had grown frustrated with their union's leadership. The United Progressive Caucus had controlled the CTU for years, and critics accused them of capitulating to corporate interests, silencing internal dissent, and collaborating with city officials to prevent organizers from reaching teachers at their schools.

A group called the Caucus of Rank and File Educators—CORE—mounted a challenge. Their candidate for president was Karen Lewis, a chemistry teacher with a confrontational style and deep skepticism of education reform initiatives that she saw as attacks on public schooling.

CORE ran an aggressive grassroots campaign focused on a simple message: the old leadership had sold out. Teachers needed leaders who would actually fight.

They won 60 percent of the vote in a runoff election.

The new leadership immediately signaled that things would be different. They cut pay for union officers and used the savings to expand outreach to members. Critics warned that CORE was politically reckless, that they couldn't successfully combat Mayor Rahm Emanuel's entrenched power.

But CORE wasn't interested in getting along with the mayor.

The 2012 Strike

The confrontation everyone expected arrived in September 2012.

Negotiations with the city had stalled. The union's demands included not just better pay and benefits but also an expansion of art and music programs at the city's most underfunded schools. Early on, the CTU made a crucial decision: they turned down an offer of pay increases that came bundled with layoffs. Better pay for fewer teachers wasn't acceptable.

Union members voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike—90 percent of teachers and 98 percent of those who actually cast ballots. On September 10, 2012, they walked out.

It was the union's first strike in 25 years. Many of the teachers on picket lines had never experienced anything like it.

The striking teachers wanted to highlight what they called a "broad attack on public schooling by corporate privatizers." They demanded less high-stakes testing for students, more music and art programs, smaller class sizes, and paid preparation time—the hours teachers spend planning lessons, which often happen on their own time.

Mayor Emanuel threatened to seek a court injunction forcing teachers back to work. The move stalled. The strike continued into a second week.

Finally, on September 18, union delegates voted to end the walkout. The tentative agreement included preferences for laid-off teachers to be hired at other schools and reduced the role of student test scores in teacher evaluations. Students returned to class the next day.

But the CTU wasn't finished. In the strike's aftermath, union leaders traveled to cities across the country—Cleveland, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, St. Paul, Tampa—holding town hall meetings to spread their message: community collaboration, not top-down mandates from politicians, was the path to improving schools.

Charter Schools and the Expanding Fight

To understand the Chicago Teachers Union's recent evolution, you need to understand charter schools.

Charter schools are publicly funded but independently operated. They receive taxpayer money but are freed from many regulations that govern traditional public schools. Proponents argue this flexibility allows innovation and gives parents choices. Critics—including the CTU—argue that charters drain resources from public schools, often don't perform better academically, and are frequently run by private companies motivated by profit rather than education.

For years, charter school teachers were largely non-union, which critics saw as part of the appeal for the reformers and politicians who promoted them.

In 2018, the Chicago Teachers Union merged with the Chicago Association of Charter Teachers and Staff. Charter educators became a new division within the CTU. That December, teachers at the Acero charter school network—CTU members now—went on strike.

It was the first strike at a unionized charter school in American history.

They won. The settlement included sanctuary school protections for students (particularly important in immigrant communities), enforceable class size reductions, and pay parity with district-run schools. The victory suggested a possible future where the charter-versus-public-school divide could be bridged through union organizing.

The 2019 Strike and Its Complications

The CTU's contract expired in June 2019. Negotiations dragged on. Bernie Sanders, then running for president, spoke at a rally organized by the union and the Service Employees International Union Local 73, lending national political attention to the local dispute.

On October 17, 2019, teachers walked out again.

Their top priorities this time: smaller class sizes and more support staff—nurses, social workers, the professionals who address students' needs that have nothing to do with curriculum. In schools serving poor communities, these positions are chronically understaffed. A single nurse might cover multiple buildings. Social workers handle caseloads that make meaningful intervention nearly impossible.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who had replaced Emanuel, faced an uncomfortable political situation. She announced that the city wouldn't add makeup days for school time lost to the strike. Illinois law required 176 days in the school year; Chicago's calendar was exactly 176 days. Lightfoot was essentially telling families that their children would lose educational time with no recovery.

The announcement had another implication: teachers could lose pay for strike days that weren't added back to the calendar. The stakes for both sides were real.

Negotiations continued at Malcolm X College while teachers walked picket lines. The strike stretched on, with students attending only two of the five days in the week of October 14-18.

What the Chicago Teachers Union Represents

Today, the CTU has more than 25,000 members—teachers, paraprofessionals, and clinicians in the Chicago public school system. Since 2022, Stacy Davis Gates has served as president, following Jesse Sharkey, who succeeded Karen Lewis when she retired in 2018 due to illness.

The union remains affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers (still as Local 1), the Illinois Federation of Teachers, the Chicago Federation of Labor, and the AFL-CIO, the umbrella organization for most American unions.

Critics accuse the CTU of prioritizing teacher interests over student welfare, of opposing accountability measures that might improve education, of using children as pawns in labor disputes. Supporters counter that teacher working conditions are student learning conditions—that class sizes, preparation time, and adequate support staff directly affect educational quality.

The deeper question the Chicago Teachers Union raises is this: What is a school for?

Is it a service provided by the government, like mail delivery or road maintenance, where efficiency and cost control should dominate? Is it a market where parents are consumers choosing among competing providers? Or is it something more fundamental—a democratic institution where communities come together to raise the next generation?

Your answer to that question probably determines how you feel about the CTU. If schools are primarily about efficiently delivering educational services, then strikes are disruptions that harm the customers—students and parents. If schools are democratic institutions, then the people who work in them have a legitimate voice in how they're run, and withholding their labor is a form of democratic expression.

The Chicago Teachers Union has been asking that question, in various forms, since teachers first revolted against the banks during the Great Depression. Nearly a century later, they're still asking it. And Chicago—and America—still hasn't settled on an answer.