Strike!

Out of prudence, I’ve tried to suppress some of my enthusiasm for the Chicago Teachers Union strike; the struggle for social justice is an arduous, grinding one, and failure often characterizes it. My Twitter feed illustrates how well that attempt at equanimity is going.

Strikes have become quite rare. Last year the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted just 19 “major work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers.” That’s actually a slight uptick from 2009, when there were five. Five! Here’s some context for those measly numbers: In 1979, shortly before the Volcker-induced “long deep recession that would empty factories and break unions in the US,” there were 235 major stoppages. That year also marked the last time more than a million workers, in the aggregate, were involved in work stoppages. My how times have changed.

The teacher’s strike counterpoises itself to this trend of increasingly cowed workers. And it comes at a most opportune time, falling one week before the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. The felicitous confluence will display two of the most important movement “streams” of the democratic left, could reinvigorate the extra-electoral left, and may even impact the November election.

Moreover, the CTU is a paragon of the social justice unionism model that, if the labor movement is to recover, needs to take hold. One conception of unionism holds that unions’ sole duty is to represent member interests. In this view, workers band together to  to get what’s rightfully theirs. This isn’t a bad thing, of course—workers need power in their workplaces—but the conception is unduly limiting, philosophically, and tactically boneheaded. The self-interest model militates against solidarity across workplaces and industries, and it discourages union involvement in a political push for a more just society. Perhaps this exaggerates the point, but it’s the difference between the California prison guards union and the CTU. Both have inviolable workplace rights they should and do exercise and defend, but the CTU expresses fidelity to egalitarian ends that supersede their own financial interests. Tactically, it becomes easier to cast union members as solipsists, heartless agitators who cause student torpor, when strikers just emphasize their own interests. Predictably, this is already the cartoonish picture neoliberals and other union-averse commentators are painting.

As Ned Resnikoff and David Moberg remind us—and teachers and parents themselves have been stressing—the striking workers aren’t just out to secure their own parochial interests. They intimately understand that teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. They oppose the proliferation of standardized testing. They want more social workers, counselors, and nurses in their schools. They want more equitable funding.

This is social justice unionism, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold.