From the moment voters elected Lori Lightfoot to be Chicago’s 56th mayor this spring, it seemed almost inevitable the city’s public school teachers would strike this fall.
For eight years, the powerful Chicago Teachers Union battled Mayor Rahm Emanuel over the future of city schools. When he bowed out of his reelection campaign, the union put its money and manpower behind Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle for the job.
Despite Preckwinkle’s political power, Lightfoot trounced her, handing the union an embarrassing defeat and setting the stage for a walkout where the union could flex its muscles and try to impose its will on a political newcomer it opposed.
Chicago teachers walked out for 15 days starting Oct. 17, causing the cancellation of 11 school days and disrupting the lives of 300,000 students. The strike set off a protracted battle of wills that ended this week after Lightfoot and CTU agreed on a $1.5 billion five-year deal that both sides say will transform Chicago Public Schools.
Still, it’s not yet clear what the political ramifications will be for Lightfoot going forward. The 2012 teachers strike followed Emanuel until the day he left office, but Lightfoot said she doesn’t believe the CTU’s latest walkout has hurt her popularity or that people will blame her for the strike.
“I hope what people take away from this is that I am a tough but principled leader, that I spend a lot of time making sure that I understand the nuances and that I am very, very focused on doing the right thing,” Lightfoot said during a Friday interview at her City Hall office. “I place a premium on public debate and discussion, but I also have zero tolerance for people who lie to me.”
And she has a message for those who say “‘the mayor’s a rookie, the mayor’s naive,'” calling it “unbelievably insulting and offensive to me (as) a 57-year-old person who has spent most of my life as a litigator.”
“When I was a prosecutor or when I was a defense attorney myself advocating on behalf of my clients, I’ve been in a lot of really, really tough circumstances my whole adult life,” Lightfoot said. “So the notion that somehow this is this new, big test, I’ve been tested my whole life. I’m a black woman from a poor background. Every single day we’re tested. Nobody thought I was going to be here. People underestimated me my whole life, and that’s on them. I know who I am.”
CTU President Jesse Sharkey said it remains to be seen whether the strike will follow her the same way 2012 haunted Emanuel.
“The CTU strike ended up being emblematic of a deeper flaw with his administration, which is that he went after a bunch of popular programs in the city. He increased the number of taxes and fines on working-class people. He continued to seem out of touch with common Chicagoans,” Sharkey said. “I think it wound up being the case that Rahm had to wear the jacket of the CTU strike precisely because it reminded people of another set of critiques that seemed relevant about the way the guy operated. I think it remains to be seen what this strike and the handling of it is going to reveal about Lori Lightfoot.”
But Sharkey said she may continue to have labor problems in the future if she doesn’t take stock of how this fall’s strike unfolded.
“There’s obviously some things that Lori needs to learn about the way labor negotiations work. I think it’s important for people who are going to land negotiations to avoid making absolute statements like, ‘I’m not going to put any more money in this contract’ or ‘I’m not going to make up strike days,'” Sharkey said. “The thing about bargaining is you don’t get to call shots like that.”
Negotiations
Lightfoot, however, on Friday said it was clear to her from the start that the union would be going on strike “no matter what.”
Still, Lightfoot said, she and CPS leaders prepared a budget this summer “building on equity and making sure that we provide the kind of supports in schools that were necessary.”
“We came out in August and said, ‘Yeah, we need to have more counselors, nurses, case managers,’ and we built those things into the CPS budget for this year way before any of the collective bargaining discussions concluded,” Lightfoot said.
Lightfoot’s initial offer included a 14% pay raise. She then upped it to 16%, leading to criticism that her strong opening salary proposal may have boxed her in. The mayor sought to avoid a strike and to cut through the back-and-forth posturing that often bogs down labor negotiations, but gave herself less room to offer the CTU more money after teachers walked out anyway.
The union’s focus on staffing and class size concerns in the talks also put the mayor in something of a bind. Unable to make big new salary offers, Lightfoot was instead left trying to explain early in the negotiations why she couldn’t — or wouldn’t — include guarantees in the accord on numbers of nurses and social workers in schools or students per classroom.
Then Lightfoot maintained a hard public position against make-up days for the strike, only to bend at the eleventh hour, agreeing to five such days for teachers to partially recoup money they lost during the walkout.
Asked about criticism that she erred in offering the union a 16% raise too soon, lessening its leverage as a negotiating tool, Lightfoot said she doesn’t like playing games and reiterated that she didn’t regret the offer.
“I’ve done hundreds of negotiations over the course of my legal career, and I just felt like it was really important for us to put our money where our mouth is to demonstrate to teachers and to staff that we value them, that we care about them,” Lightfoot said.
Lightfoot’s hand-picked education committee chairman, Ald. Michael Scott Jr., 24th, noted that Lightfoot tried to pre-empt the strike by making a good offer from the start.
“I think she led with a great offer, thinking that if she led with a substantial offer we would avoid a lot of this,” he said. “So people can criticize that. I think that’s somebody who came in under a mantra of change and equity, and I think she led with that.”
Socialist Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, 35th, a CTU advocate who was a strong Preckwinkle backer, said Lightfoot could have avoided a strike if she had handled the union differently.
“The teachers I spoke with, they did not want a strike,” he said.
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Others have criticized the $1.5 billion deal as being too generous. The school system, which just a few years ago was on the brink of insolvency, is now on the hook for a deal that stretches past the 2023 mayoral election.
But Lightfoot said it’s a financially responsible deal: “We were not interested in doing something we couldn’t afford.”
Up next, Lightfoot must negotiate contracts for the powerful police and fire unions, which are not allowed to strike. Those labor groups certainly will be looking at the teachers union’s big financial gains as they enter negotiations, and some wonder whether they will demand similarly lucrative packages.
Lightfoot said those unions “do a hell of a job” and should expect a fair offer. “Just like with the teachers, we will be putting a proposal together to demonstrate to them that we respect them and we need them,” she said.
Contract
Lightfoot also has faced criticism that she did not get enough gains in the contract she can claim as her own.
Lightfoot’s deal with CTU eventually will lead to a full-time nurse and social worker in every school by July 2023, as well as limits on class sizes. Under the deal, many classes would get smaller eventually, and in the meantime more relief would be provided to extra large classes.
Lightfoot campaigned in favor of all those items, but the CTU has attempted to claim that she only delivered because of their pressure. CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates has said the union had to go on strike to get those concessions from CPS.
During and after the 2012 teachers strike, Emanuel constantly repeated that he was fighting to make sure Chicago kids could have as much time in class as their suburban peers.
Emanuel’s abrasive style, “Mayor 1%” reputation and the fact he rescinded raises due to teachers ahead of that strike made him a natural villain opposite the CTU. But his “longer school day, longer school year” mantra and the extra class hours included in the 2012 contract enabled him to succinctly argue he was on the side of the students.
Sharkey said this year’s strike is a “mirror opposite of 2012,” when Emanuel came into office with a radical set of demands for change. This time, he said, it’s CTU that was upsetting the apple cart.
Sharkey also said he’s not sure how negotiations would have unfolded had Preckwinkle won the election. He noted CTU supported Harold Washington, yet went on the longest strike in its history while he was in office. Mayors wind up having to represent the entire system, Sharkey said.
“As the representative of the way that works, I think it’s very hard for mayors to change things radically,” Sharkey said. “It’s the CTU that had a radical set of demands for change. We’re the ones who came into the system trying to change.
“Would Preckwinkle have been any better able to deal with that?” Sharkey added. “I probably doubt it.”
Davis Gates said the strike was not inevitable. “The strike was about promises kept, and she should be proud that she was able to keep her campaign promises,” Davis Gates said.
The union recently dinged Lightfoot for not keeping her promise in Springfield to support an elected school board. She opposed a CTU-favored bill for an elected school board but said she still supports one. Lightfoot declined to offer specifics about what her plan would entail or when she wants it in place, only that “what’s most important is to get it right.”
Asked about the argument that the union forced her to keep her campaign promises, Lightfoot chuckled.
“I’m going to use a polite word, that’s just nonsense,” Lightfoot said.
Later, she added: “The notion that somehow the only reason we go there is because CTU drug me kicking and screaming is preposterous.”
Future conflict?
From the time Lightfoot entered the mayoral race as a progressive, she’s faced pushback from some on the left who take exception to her policy stances and the fact she’s a former federal prosecutor.
Preckwinkle often called her a corporate lawyer, and protesters said she was too pro-police. That’s continued to dog her, even though she pushed through a Fair Workweek scheduling ordinance that Emanuel had long opposed and is in the process of pushing through a $15 minimum wage plan so employees make more here by 2021.
But despite the criticism, Lightfoot won every ward in the city, and it’s not clear how much the argument that she isn’t progressive resonates beyond some activist circles.
Lightfoot said she hopes people see her as somebody “who tries to lead a values-driven life and who is strong and is able to balance a lot of different competing priorities but stay focused on the ultimate objectives.”
Asked whether the union might support Lightfoot for reelection, Davis Gates referred to teachers who were arrested protesting at Sterling Bay’s offices during the strike.
“You would have to ask the members who have been arrested, you’d have to ask the members who sacrificed six days of pay to get a school nurse,” Davis Gates said.
Describing herself as fearless, Lightfoot said, “It would have been very easy to pander to the crowd, and I was not willing to do that. I wanted to do what was right.”
Asked whether she believes the union will oppose her in 2023, Lightfoot said, “I’m assuming that they’re coming after me in 2023.”
“My expectation is that I will run for reelection,” Lightfoot said. “There’s a lot that I would like to accomplish. I think that would be hard to do in four years’ time particularly given all the fiscal constraints that we have. But I have no illusions about what their ultimate agenda is.”
Chicago Tribune’s Hannah Leone contributed.
