CHALLENGING THE AUSTERITARIANS
ALEX HANNA WAS IN EGYPT WATCHING A REVOLUTION UNFOLD when she found out that the governor of her state back home was proposing to eliminate her union rights. Hanna was copresident of the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) and a graduate student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison when Scott Walker was elected governor; she and others within the union and its parent union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) of Wisconsin, had been concerned that the Republican, swept into office as part of the Tea Party wave of 2010, would be bad for union workers. But they hadn’t expected anything like Act 10.
The act that Walker proposed as a “budget repair” bill on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2011, mirrored what was being called “austerity” in Europe, purporting to balance the state budget with cuts to salaries and benefits for public employees as well as cuts to services. The cuts were to be expected in the still severe economic downturn, but few had predicted that the governor would eliminate or severely curtail the rights of most public employees to collectively bargain. What was really shocking was the way austerity seemed to serve a kind of disciplinary function; the moralistic language Walker used to describe the bill presented this belt-tightening not only as a response to the crisis but as a punishment, and the punishment was aimed at the victims of the crash rather than its perpetrators. Hanna and the TAA saw the bill as a naked attack on their rights in the workplace by a governor who had run promising to bring jobs back to their struggling state.
The TAA had already planned a rally for Valentine’s Day, in a preemptive strike against likely cuts to the university, and Hanna was deluged with emails asking her to come home. She was observing the popular revolution that had begun in Egypt in the winter of 2011, part of what came to be known as the Arab Spring. But the attacks on the union and the university were serious enough that she returned just in time for the February 14 action. The TAA led a crowd of marchers up State Street from the university campus to deliver a thousand valentines protesting Act 10 to Walker at the Capitol. It was an impressive showing, but marches were common enough in Madison that few expected this one to be different. Jenni Dye, a lawyer based in Madison, was downtown eating brunch and saw the protesters. “I thought, ‘Oh look, another Madison protest.’”
The next day, the Joint Finance Committee of the legislature held a hearing on Act 10. The TAA and other union protesters had planned a “people’s filibuster” of the bill, lining up hundreds of people to speak against it and extending the comment period all day and all night. The repeal of collective bargaining rights, they argued, had nothing to do with “repairing” holes in the budget; freezing their wages was one thing, and even increasing the amounts they had to contribute to their pensions and health insurance could at least be vaguely connected to a need for funds, but getting rid of their right to negotiate for a raise higher than the cost of living when the economy improved was very different and had little to do with the current budget problems. People were incensed. “We had people stuffed in the overflow room of the Capitol, people in line, and the unions were agitating outside,” Hanna said. As the comments stretched on into the evening, the protesters created the Defend Wisconsin Twitter account to send out updates. At the beginning of the day, Hanna said, they’d been told that testimony would continue until everyone had been heard, but sometime after midnight the legislators cut off the speakers, announcing they’d heard enough.
“We decided we were just going to stay,” Hanna said. She and her colleagues sent out messages via Twitter and Facebook, calling for people to join them at the Capitol and to bring sleeping bags. The TAA members invited their students, and they camped out in the Capitol rotunda. At 5:00 a.m., Hanna looked at the person next to her and said, “I guess this is happening!”
Protesters and pundits began to compare the Wisconsin protest to Tahrir Square. The comparisons to Egypt seemed overblown to Hanna at first, but as the occupation went on, similar structures to those in Tahrir Square began to take shape, structures that were later echoed and expanded at Occupy Wall Street. Hanna had found the protests in Tahrir Square vibrant, almost carnivalesque, unlike anything she’d seen before. “It felt very safe, very communal,” she said. There were people selling or giving out food, people giving speeches, people camped out. In the Wisconsin Capitol, too, were medics, food distribution, action planning, all of which seemed to arise spontaneously as people took it upon themselves to make things happen and provide services that were being slashed by the state. The space itself provided a concrete alternative to the austerity the government was pushing. Although organizations like the TAA, the AFT, and other labor unions with elected leadership were present, and helped build the occupation, inside the space things were open and horizontal. Like the occupation of Tahrir Square, the Wisconsin occupation, and later Occupy, held a space that was politically significant—the Capitol building, the “people’s house,” a symbol of Wisconsin’s famously open and transparent governance.
For Jenni Dye, who was the daughter of a Wisconsin teacher but not a union member herself, it was the process by which Act 10 was pushed forward as much as the content of the bill itself that motivated her to join the protests. “Part of it was about standing up for the middle class, for workers, and for the everyday people in Wisconsin that are your friends and neighbors,” she said. “What was happening was just not the way that we did business in Wisconsin. We didn’t rush huge policy changes through. We didn’t meet in the middle of the night and shut out public testimony.” She felt that what was happening was profoundly undemocratic, and it roused her sense of solidarity—it was unacceptable that Walker was blaming the rough economy on her family and friends.
In cities and towns across the country, many of the people who watched the Wisconsin protests unfold had the same reaction Dye did. Union members and organizers, of course, were roused to defend their institutions, but it was the power grab, the high-handed way Walker dismissed the protests, that made people realize that something more than a march was needed. Brett Banditelli, at the time the producer for the Rick Smith Show, a Pennsylvania-based labor radio show, was following the protests via social media. He began to reach out to fund-raisers to see if he could get money to take the show to Madison to cover the protests. At first, funders thought it was simply a local story, but then Ohio’s governor proposed a similar bill—one that didn’t carve out firefighters and police officers, as Walker’s had, but took rights from all, inspiring unlikely coalitions between cops and leftists.
When Banditelli arrived at the Wisconsin Capitol with Rick Smith, the first thing he saw was a massive sign made out of a bedsheet fluttering from a balcony high above the rotunda floor. It read “Kill the Bill!” The occupation had been going for a week by then, and the Capitol was thronged with people bundled up for Wisconsin winter, many of them in red shirts with a blue fist in the shape of the state on it. Handwritten “Kill the Bill!” signs waved in the crowd and hung next to professionally printed union signs—not just from the public-sector unions under threat, the AFT, the Service Employees International Union, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), but also from the once-powerful industrial unions like the United Steelworkers. Banditelli and Smith were far from the only people who had driven all night to join the protests: labor had answered the call. A group of firefighters, who had been excluded from the cuts in Walker’s bill, marched through the Capitol playing the bagpipes, led by their young, charismatic leader Mahlon Mitchell. Three levels of protesters on the rotunda joined in a sing-along of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from the musical Les Misérables.
The sign Jenni Dye remembered best was one she spotted on an outdoor march one snowy day. The man holding it “looked like the ultimate Packer fan,” she said. “He had this big bushy Wisconsin beard and a winter hat on and his jacket was green and his sign said, ‘All the faith that I have lost in the government I have found in the people.’” For her, that was the story of the protest.
As the protests continued, Walker doubled down, announcing a budget for the next two years that the local paper said “remold[ed] Wisconsin government at every level.” It slashed roughly $1 billion from public schools, laid off 1,200 people, sliced 11 percent of the University of Wisconsin’s budget—and lowered corporate taxes even more, on top of $100 million in tax cuts the governor and his legislative cronies had already passed. Cutting taxes for the rich while cutting rights for workers seemed, to the protesters, to be an obvious example of what the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) would later call “being broke on purpose”—eliminating a source of revenue in order to justify cuts that those in power already wanted to make.1
It was in part Wisconsin’s strong labor tradition that made the protests happen—the state famously taught labor history in public schools. It was partly that open government tradition that Dye cited, rooted in Progressive-era reforms. But it was partly something else as well—as the protests grew, there was a sense that finally, working people were standing up against the blame that had been flung their way since the beginning of the financial crisis. It made people from around the country want to take part.
There was also a sense that Walker’s bill was a direct attack on a particular kind of worker who was more vulnerable than others and seen as less worthy of respect. Cindy Clark, a second-generation Wisconsin teacher, pointed out that her mother had seen unionizing teachers in the state as a way to get equal pay for women. Austerity for union workers would hit everyone, from the small businesses that relied on public workers’ dollars to children in the schools and patients who rely on home health aides. But most of the unions that were facing the loss of their rights were made up of care workers: these majority-woman workplaces would take the brunt of the cuts. While Clark assumed at the time that Walker had carved out the male-dominated unions because he would come for them later (an assumption proved correct in subsequent years), she felt that there was an element of scapegoating women in Act 10’s measures. The public sector was also a field with a higher-than-average proportion of workers of color, many of whom had sought those public jobs because they had stronger protections against discrimination. It was at the intersection of race, gender, and class that the bill did its worst damage.
The Wisconsin uprising was the first major US protest to be covered and spread primarily by social media, and it changed the way people around the country followed the actions of movements. Although local and independent media (including my employer at the time, Laura Flanders) did arrive to cover the actions, following Twitter hashtags like #wiunion and #notmyWI remained the best way to see what was happening. Things changed rapidly, and Twitter coverage had an immediacy that traditional media could not match. Dye used Twitter from work to research and share information. When fourteen Democratic state senators left the state to prevent a vote on Act 10, she found out via Twitter and dug into the law to see which rule it was that allowed them to hold up a vote by denying a quorum. “I didn’t want to wait for the media story to come out the next day, and so we were in real time scouring laws and talking about them on Twitter to figure it out,” she said. From work, she could help determine where people could drop off water or deliver food—like the pizzas, famously ordered through Ian’s Pizza from as far away as Egypt. Before the protests, her Twitter account had been private; afterward, she not only opened it up but vowed to respond to everyone who Tweeted at her, even to opponents of the protest.
The live-streaming technology that would be so prominent during the Occupy protests less than a year later was still in its infancy, but videographers made edited clips of the actions and posted them to You-Tube for easy broadcast. Few unions had invested much in social media programs at the time, so activists simply experimented, learning from what worked, fueled by anger and the adrenaline of being part of something rather than rules and best practices. In Ohio and then Indiana, where similar bills were moving forward, similar protests sprang up and took their direction from what was happening in Wisconsin.
“I think the occupation and the engagement on social media really lowered the barrier for engagement,” Dye said. During the 2010 election, she had a hard time figuring out how to get involved. After the election, her group of friends, all, like her, in their late twenties or early thirties, felt like they didn’t have the time that they’d had in college to be activists, or the money to donate to campaigns. They were looking for a way to connect. “We started talking about how could we get more engaged and make change for the future, and then all of a sudden this protest exploded in our hometown,” she said. With the occupation, it was easy to take part, and with Twitter, it was easy for people on the other side of the country to pass on information and to feel connected. (I “met” Dye and Banditelli via Twitter during the Wisconsin protests.) Social media, Dye said, allowed complete strangers to feel a real connection, to understand what solidarity felt like.
Despite the protests, which at their peak drew 80,000 protesters to the Capitol, Walker and the state legislature remained intent on passing the collective bargaining restrictions. Security in the Capitol began to increase, and one night after a big sit-in, the building was locked down with a small group of protesters still inside. Dye arrived the next morning for a quick check-in before heading to work and found the door locked. She and a few other people stood there, checking Twitter to see what had happened, and she Tweeted, half joking, that they should stay outside until they were allowed in. She had to leave for work, but that evening, people showed up. “So many people felt the same way that I did. This was our building. We deserved entry and we weren’t going away,” she said. “We slept outside. It was 13 degrees overnight. One of the nights that we were out there it was so windy that the blankets kept blowing off of us. It was three in the morning and I just gave up and started laughing because there was nothing we could do. We were stuck outside this building and the blankets wouldn’t even stay on us but nobody was giving up.”
On March 10, the collective bargaining portion of Act 10 was stripped out of the budget bill and pushed forward on its own. This didn’t require the fourteen state senators, who were still camped out in Illinois, to be there for a vote. Hanna was on the university campus when she heard the news and sprinted for the Capitol, ducking into cafes with a megaphone and shouting “They’re passing the bill!”
“At that point it seemed a little more militant,” she said. “We went to the vestibule in front of the assembly chambers and were going to sit in front of the seat of power here and not allow this to happen.” The police, who had been relatively restrained through much of the occupation, carted out protesters, and the bill was passed in the middle of the night. Walker signed it in a private session.
The idea of recalling Walker had been floated early in the protests. With the bill’s passage, it seemed clear to Dye that he and his colleagues in the legislature were not going to listen to the demands of the public, and removing them from office was the best option. But she was also considering what she could do, herself. “Even at the early stages, I thought maybe I should run for office,” she said. She was pretty happy with the legislators in her district, but after she spoke with a family friend who had been on the county board of supervisors, she realized that the supervisor for her area was a Walker supporter. She decided to jump into the race, though she’d never even worked on a campaign before. But her inexperience helped, too, as she was not wedded to the conventional wisdom as to who would vote and who was worth reaching. She spent hours each night knocking on doors and meeting people. In the spring of 2012, she won her election.
The recalls were rougher going. Walker had to be in office for at least a year before he could be recalled, so in 2011, activists focused on trying to remove some of the Republican state senators who were eligible. Walker supporters, meanwhile, targeted some of the Democratic state senators who had left the state to delay the vote. In total, six Republicans and three Democrats were up for recall in 2011; two of the Republicans, Randy Hopper and Dan Kapanke, lost their seats. Then, in the winter of 2012, the activists turned in petitions to recall Walker.
The shift to an electoral strategy was rocky. Early recall successes buoyed the idea of running against Walker, but by the time Walker could be recalled, the energy around the Capitol occupation had cooled somewhat. Still, Dye said, the effort put into the recall petitions was “phenomenal.”
There were a few Democrats who wanted the spot to challenge Walker. Most of the people I spoke with—not just Dye and Hanna, but other state union leaders as well—favored Kathleen Falk, the former Dane County executive, largely because she was the candidate who went the furthest in promising to reverse Act 10. Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee, won the primary but refused to commit to undoing the law—Hanna remembered confronting Barrett at a union meeting, but the answer he gave her, she said, was mostly meaningless. Although Mahlon Mitchell, the firefighter union leader and a hero of the protests, became Barrett’s running mate, the TAA ultimately chose to endorse Walker’s recall but not Barrett as a candidate. Despite the fact that the massive protests at the Capitol around Act 10 had led directly to the recall, establishment Democrats seemed to think that union rights were not a winning issue.
Meanwhile, from before the beginning of the campaign, outside money from big donors like Charles and David Koch had been pouring into the state to support Walker, who was able to define the recall while the challengers were still seeking a candidate. Walker challenged the very idea of a recall, arguing that it was inappropriate to try to remove him from office over Act 10, and it worked. Hanna spent the recall day canvassing voters; by the time she reached the Capitol just fifteen minutes after the polls closed, the election had already been called for Walker. Though they had succeeded in flipping one more seat and turning the state senate away from Walker’s allies, he was still governor. In Ohio, where the similar bill itself, rather than a politician, was on the ballot, voters overwhelmingly came out in an off-year election and overturned it, by a larger margin than the one by which Governor John Kasich had won office.
To Dye, many of the questions asked after the recall missed the point. It was not a question of whether electoral strategy was worthwhile or whether other forms of action were necessary, but rather a need for more of both. “We were fighting for people who are actually hurting in the moment and we should have been going at them on every level,” she said. In her own life, she took up that strategy, serving on the Dane County board and giving up her legal practice to become a full-time political activist. After the election, she took a job as the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin, learning the ropes of running a nonprofit—which were very different from turning up at the Capitol for a free-flowing protest—and then, after a year and a half, she became research director of the nonprofit progressive advocacy organization One Wisconsin Now. “Being here almost brings me back full circle to being in the Capitol those first days,” she said. The new position allowed her to bring together the issues she was passionate about, from labor to abortion rights. “All of us, the Black Lives Matter movement, the labor movement, reproductive health, are part of this Venn diagram that has so much more overlap than we acknowledge when we’re working in our silos,” she said. “We have to work together.”
But after the recall, it has been harder to turn out massive protests or to get people to see different issues as being connected. Some, like Hanna, were simply too burned out by nearly two years of work and the loss that came at the end. Others continued to be siloed into single issues, turning out when Walker proposed abortion restrictions but not to protest a so-called right-to-work bill that attacked the private-sector unions he had previously promised to leave alone, or to protest the right-to-work bill but not budget cuts to the University of Wisconsin system, or the voter ID law that would make it even harder to mount an electoral challenge.
Assuming that failing to recall Walker meant the whole effort had accomplished nothing would be shortsighted. Elections are easy to measure for political observers and pundits: there is a winner and a loser and there are a lot of exit polls to parse and murmur over. Counting how many Jenni Dyes were produced by the protests, and whether they counter the people who stepped back, is harder. In 2015, organizers with the Young, Gifted and Black coalition joined forces with Wisconsin Jobs Now and other groups to protest the police killings of young black Wisconsinites and the right-to-work bill together. They thronged the Capitol, the sight calling up memories of 2011. Jennifer Epps-Addison of Wisconsin Jobs Now told me, “What we need to do is make our case and build relationships between working-class white folks outstate and communities of color in Milwaukee, Madison, and Racine, to understand that we’re all in this together, and that these forms of institutional classism and racism impact everyone.”
In the winter of 2015, I walked through the Wisconsin Capitol with Jenni Dye. She pointed out the bench on which she’d slept, the spot outside where they’d come with sleeping bags when they were locked outside. At noon, a small group of people, mostly dressed in red, began to assemble in the rotunda. They unfurled banners over the edge of the balcony: one read “Solidarity”; the other featured a heart with the state of Wisconsin inside of it and read, “We’ll be here until [the state] gets better.” The Solidarity Singers gathered every day and sang protest songs—for the holidays, they had rewritten Christmas carols, singing, “O come all ye workers” to the tune of “O Come All Ye Faithful.”
“I don’t think that Scott Walker succeeded in dividing us and conquering us, but he did succeed in dividing us,” Jenni Dye said. “We’re not conquered yet. There are so many people who are still fighting harder than they were before Scott Walker was a name that they acknowledged or knew, but the divisions here are really deep.”
WE DIDN’T ALWAYS HEAR WHAT WAS HAPPENING IN THE UNITED States referred to as “austerity”; in Europe, the policy had a name and often brutal enforcement, while in the United States the metaphors of “belt-tightening” and “spending within our means” were more common. But the results were the same. The Obama administration proposed an economic stimulus plan early on, but it met with resistance in Congress from budget hawks squawking about deficits; the stimulus that did get passed wound up being, according to several prominent economists, too small to succeed. When it appeared that the Democrats in power weren’t doing enough to turn the economy around, the Republicans rode a Tea Party wave to victory in the 2010 midterm elections, sweeping Scott Walker, John Kasich, and Chris Christie, among others, into governor’s offices. They won largely because of their promises to do what the Democrats seemingly couldn’t or wouldn’t do: put people back to work.2
What the Tea Party actually wanted, though, was not very clear. While grassroots activists opposed the bank bailouts and stimulus spending, which they saw as handouts to the undeserving, researchers and pollsters found that many Tea Partiers had no problem with public spending on programs like Social Security and Medicare, which they felt were “earned.” They were not, despite the policies attached to the Tea Party brand, lining up to demand austerity cutbacks to popular programs; nor were they clamoring to dismantle labor unions once and for all, as so many Tea Party governors seemed bent on doing. Tea Partiers, for the most part, were even willing to support tax increases on the wealthy to keep Social Security functioning. Nobody campaigned on wage cuts, budget cuts, and the removal of union rights.3
Meanwhile, the wealthy conservatives who adopted the Tea Party name and poured money into funding events were spending lavishly on candidates. The Kochs, who supported Walker and many others, did have a particular set of policies in mind, as did many of the other rich ideologues whose money helped Republicans take the US House of Representatives and several statehouses. Austerity, to them, was less about cutting spending for its own sake, and more about cutting programs to which they were politically opposed while consolidating their own power. It often included selling off public resources and utilities to private companies and pumping public dollars, in some cases, to the very people who had created the economic crisis in the first place. A big barrier to that consolidation of power had always been the presence of labor unions, which despite shrinking clout still served as a force in the workplace and in politics for working people. The post-crisis shock moment seemed, to the powerful, to be the perfect time to wipe out unions for good.
The difference between the grassroots and the donor class became visible when plans like the overhaul of Medicare, proposed by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), failed to gain traction with the broader public, even though they were considered “Tea Party” policies. Debbie Dooley, the Atlanta Tea Party activist, complained to me about Scott Walker, who “calls himself a conservative,” for spending public dollars on the Milwaukee Bucks’ stadium, which she considered a handout to the team’s wealthy owners. Republican officials, including former house majority leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), occasionally found themselves facing an uprising from grassroots Tea Party candidates—Cantor lost a primary to a professor who proclaimed, “I will fight to end crony capitalist programs that benefit the rich and powerful.”4
Politicians argued that the cuts that came in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states in 2011 were necessary in order to bring about economic stability, but those cuts also revealed a host of ideological preferences. The financial crisis, not the salaries of teachers and social workers, had blown the holes in state budgets, but Walker and others blamed government spending, and particularly those public workers. They pointed fingers at bloated pensions, when in fact pension funds were missing cash thanks to the bankers who had caused the crisis: Ohio’s pension fund had bought mortgage-backed securities from Lehman Brothers, where John Kasich was an investment banker from 2001 to 2008, and lost tens of millions. Kasich became governor of the state in 2011 and pushed forward his own attack on collective bargaining rights. The crisis was a great opportunity to slice away the budgets that politicians aligned with the wealthy and powerful already opposed and take aim at the protections that workers had spent decades solidifying.5
The term “austeritarian” was coined by Greek activists, a portmanteau used to point out that austerity policies were often imposed by authoritarian means, on populations still reeling from the shock of a collapse. In Wisconsin, the attack on collective bargaining was the epitome of austeritarianism: though Walker argued that Act 10 would save the state billions, it is hard to argue that collective bargaining itself had a price tag the same way health insurance or a pension plan did. What the law did was to change the relations of power between public employees and their employer. Walker and his allies pushed through the bill despite thousands upon thousands of people pouring into the State Capitol in protest, cutting off public comment sessions, holding meetings that were supposed to be open behind closed doors, and celebrating the result of the power struggle to their backers. It was the undemocratic process that led Jenni Dye to see the protests as a counterweight to an electoral system that had not worked.
It wasn’t just Republicans. Working people felt let down by both parties—Democrats, as political scientist Thomas Ferguson noted, have delivered less and less for working people even as their needs grew greater than ever. After decades considering themselves the party of labor, Democrats had largely shifted to relying on wealthy donors, assuming that unions, a fading relic of a bygone era, would come along because they had no better options—benign neglect from the Democrats was better than the hinted-at destruction from the Republicans. Yet without a compelling alternative, Walker won handily, and continued to win, even after Act 10. Conservatives were prepared to attack unions, but liberals were not prepared to defend them.
Disconnected from workers, the Democratic Party was caught flatfooted, first by the financial crisis and then by the Tea Party. That Wisconsin Democrats’ solution to the Walker recall was to run the same candidate who had just lost to Walker in 2010 should underscore the problem—there was no pipeline for candidates who seemed both competent to do the job and able to excite a long-ignored working-class base while bringing in enough money to compete. The protests helped bring people like Dye into the political process, but she was not ready to run for governor. And it takes a lot of on-the-ground organizing and enthusiasm to counter the waves of corporate cash.
The big donors, Ferguson said, have been calling the shots in both major parties for a long time—from well before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision drew the attention of activists to the “money in politics” problem. What we often call money in politics is a problem of power and priorities. Unions spent millions to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats in 2008, but they got little for their efforts: labor’s biggest priority, a bill known as the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have streamlined the union election process, was tabled. Their contributions were simply dwarfed by much bigger donations that came in from bankers and corporate titans. Most of that money gets spent on TV ads, many of them negative ads that drown out useful information with a heady buzz of emotional appeals and near-falsehoods in ways that can increase cynicism more than they can encourage interest in an election. All the while, voter turnout has been plummeting, to the point where the 2014 midterm House elections drew only 36 percent of eligible voters to the polls. Even the Wisconsin recall, a dramatic national story powered by grassroots energy, drew a turnout of less than 60 percent. “It seems plain,” wrote Ferguson and Walter Dean Burnham, “that the American political universe is being rapidly reshaped by economic and cultural crisis into something distinctly different.”6
Labor continues to struggle when it comes to electing candidates to office. Ballot initiatives require less faith in the promises of an individual—it was easier to vote down the antiunion bill in Ohio than to oust Walker in Wisconsin. The pipeline problem remains when it comes to electing officials who have an authentic relationship with labor and who understand working people’s needs. After the failed recall, the Wisconsin Democratic Party’s next unsuccessful candidate for governor was Mary Burke, an executive at Trek Bikes who had run one winning campaign for school board, not exactly a working-class firebrand. Translating the groundswell of a movement into elected power will take more time, and requires the building of institutions rather than one-off campaigns.
Austeritarianism contributes to the lack of faith in electoral politics, the feeling that politicians are answering to someone other than the voters who elect them. And so Americans have turned to protests, to occupations and dramatic direct actions, in hopes of making change that way. “People are really taking to the streets instead of just going to the ballot box, and when they’re talking about the ballot box they want better choices,” Jenni Dye said. “Democracy is more than a full-time job.”
THE DECISION, BY WALKER AND HIS CRONIES, TO TARGET PUBLIC workers’ unions had been a long time coming. For nearly as long as there have been government employees, there have been conflicts about the political position of those workers, hand-wringing about their patriotism and loyalty, and attempts to squeeze more work out of them for less pay. The history of public-sector unions is often discussed as an afterthought to the industrial unions that dominated the New Deal era, but many of the struggles they undertook over the decades are being repeated right now.
The teachers’ unions of today were predated by teachers’ organizations that were established in the mid-1800s, beginning with the National Education Association in 1857. But it was not until 1897, when working-class Chicago teachers created the Chicago Teachers Federation (CTF; it later became the Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU), that teachers began to exercise some power. Almost all women—the result of decades of propaganda about the proper role of working women—the teachers were paid much less than men and could not yet legally vote, and yet through actions and strategic alliances with the mostly male labor movement of the time, they challenged a school board appointed by the mayor and pressured by rich citizens to keep school budgets low. They demanded not just higher wages, but more control over their own working conditions in the schools. Without legal collective bargaining, those teachers became community organizers, collecting petition signatures in their neighborhoods and challenging the “tracking” of working-class children into vocational education. They did strategic research, discovering that for-profit utility companies were costing the city millions in unpaid taxes, in a precursor of today’s battles over funding. Students protested on the side of their teachers, and male unionists supported them. From the CTF was born the American Federation of Teachers, the national union, in 1916.7
The ability to fire teachers was and remains a contentious issue. Tenure, or the right to due process before firing, was granted to teachers well before the right to collective bargaining, but beginning at the time of World War I, teachers who were insufficiently patriotic and unions with radical beliefs came in for special scrutiny. New York’s Teachers Union, known for its “social movement unionism,” was targeted after it challenged the austerity policies that came in on the heels of the Great Depression. Thousands of teachers were investigated for supposed communism, and many lost their jobs.
At the same time as the teachers were flexing their muscles, other public-sector workers were organizing. Wisconsin was the birthplace of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which was founded in 1932 by civil service workers. Early public-sector unions expanded during World War I and the Great Depression as federal spending did, rising, according to historian William Jones of the University of Wisconsin, from the same political crises that created the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935. In the 1940s, the CIO moved to organize public-sector workers at the same time as it began its “Operation Dixie” push into the South. Public workers had been excluded from the labor protections of the New Deal, including collective bargaining and Social Security, but many of the unions they formed, despite, or perhaps because of, this exclusion, had a vibrant organizing culture and a tradition of fighting for women’s rights and the rights of workers of color. They managed to bring quite a few local governments to the bargaining table.8
Radicals in the CIO merged two unions into the United Public Workers of America in 1946 and organized custodial and laundry workers, teachers, garbage collectors, hospital workers, and the mostly black professors at a few historically black colleges and universities. The union even fought for the rights of West Indian immigrants working in the Panama Canal zone. The public sector had been more welcoming to black workers and consisted of quite a few feminized fields, meaning that even without radical political beliefs, the union would have been pressed to organize women and African Americans, but the communist organizers made a particular commitment to egalitarianism.9
The United Public Workers of America union was expelled from the CIO in 1950 during the purges of leftists, and Public Workers members joined other CIO unions and AFSCME. The Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU, now known just as SEIU) absorbed the biggest Public Workers local, a militant Los Angeles union that represented janitors and garbage workers as well as hospital staff. In the 1980s, after a wave of privatization, that local would begin the “Justice for Janitors” movement, which succeeded in winning union contracts for mostly immigrant janitors through private contractors and provided a model for the organizing logic behind the Fight for $15.
Wisconsin was also the first state, in 1959, to pass a state law allowing collective bargaining for public-sector workers, a law that was imitated in states across the country and that solidified the gains that public-sector workers had made. President Kennedy issued an executive order in 1962 that allowed federal workers to unionize. AFSCME alone quintupled its membership through the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, a time when the rest of the labor movement was seeing losses as the beginnings of deindustrialization crept across the country. By the 1970s, public school teaching was the most-unionized profession in the country. Strikes picked up, too: between 1950 and 1961, AFSCME recorded 200 of them, and between 1960 and 1980 there were more than 1,000 teachers’ strikes.10
In addition, during the 1960s, public-sector unions bucked the trend in the broader labor movement to be disaffected with the era’s social movements. AFSCME organizer Jerry Wurf, later the union’s president, had deep connections to the civil rights movement, helping to found the New York branch of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Later he brought Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis to march with striking sanitation workers. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which won collective bargaining for New York City teachers in 1961, also had early civil rights connections, though it wound up in a battle with black activists over “community control” of schools that soured relations for decades. For the most part, labor’s gains both in power and in diversity came through the growth in the public sector.
As the economy began to stumble in the 1970s, ending the long postwar boom, public-sector workers became targets. The fiscal crises in New York and other cities were blamed on fat municipal budgets bloated with union pension dollars, and the resentment Americans began to feel against taxes was personified in the greedy public worker, whose union-won benefits began to look like an unearned privilege—particularly when those workers were black, Latino, and women, groups that were already objects of deep resentment. The schools, sites of battles over desegregation and busing, made a particularly easy target, and battles like the one the UFT fought in Ocean Hill–Brownsville pitted the union against the community, allowing union opponents to begin a long-lasting trend of painting themselves as the ones who truly cared about children of color. The unions, which had gotten out of the habit of organizing alongside nonmembers, suffered for it.
All of this came to a head in 1981, when Ronald Reagan broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike. PATCO had endorsed the Republican president against Jimmy Carter after experiencing rough relations with the Carter administration, but found that its endorsement carried little weight. The strike was already technically illegal under a little-used 1955 provision banning strikes by government workers, and Reagan deemed it a threat to national security and ordered the strikers back to work. When they refused to comply, he fired over 11,000 of them and banned them from public service jobs for life. It was one of the most prominent examples of politicians biting the union that fed them, but more importantly, it signaled to both the private and the public sectors that it was open season on unions. “It’s such overkill—they brought in the howitzers to kill an ant,” one controller said.11
The frequency of strikes plummeted after PATCO in both sectors. Attacks on unions increased, breaking them down faster than simple deindustrialization would have done. Inequality spread—the decline in middle-class income share has tracked almost exactly with the decline in union membership. The public sector, however, hung on to more of its gains than the private sector: at the writing of this book, over 35 percent of public workers were union members, compared to under 7 percent of private-sector workers. In 2010, public employees came to represent more than half of all union members in the United States.12
It is no surprise, then, that the public sector came in for greater attack than ever in the wake of the financial crisis. Many who had always been ideologically opposed to unions made their move while people were still in shock from the crisis. Public workers had long been stereotyped by the broader public as privileged and, particularly in the case of teachers, unfit for their jobs. With working people everywhere pressed for money, it was all too tempting to turn to what some call “negative solidarity,” which focuses on tearing down those who seem to have it better than you rather than demanding that your circumstances improve. That public-sector workers still make less than comparable workers with private employers does not seem to matter. In Wisconsin, before Act 10 took effect, public workers made 5 percent less, on average, than their private-sector counterparts. Afterward, their wages plummeted, in some cases by an additional 10 percent.13
Contrary to what the Scott Walkers and John Kasichs of the world have argued, the labor movement for a long time saw itself as a social movement to represent all working people, not just an organ to win raises and better health insurance for its members. In 1938, the CIO’s newspaper declared, “The interests of the people are the interests of labor, and the interests of labor are the interests of the people.”14
It wasn’t just propaganda that led to unions being perceived as a narrow “special-interest” group. For decades after the New Deal was passed and the postwar compromises struck, the majority of the nation’s unions did stick primarily to collective bargaining for their members. The willingness of some union leaders, from American Federation of Labor (AFL) founder Samuel Gompers to longtime AFL-CIO president George Meany, to assume that the role of the union was as partner in capitalism—to cut deals with corporations and cozy up to longtime opponents like Richard Nixon—certainly contributed to that image. An insider strategy for labor didn’t always lead even to short-term gains, as PATCO discovered in 1981. It also, as Stephen Lerner, architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign, said, made unions miss the bigger picture and underestimate the challenge they faced. In 1947, the Labor Management Relations Act (or Taft-Hartley bill, as it is known) prohibited a laundry list of union tactics and legalized the passage of so-called right-to-work laws, which diminish union funding by requiring unions to represent everyone, while allowing workers to choose not to pay fees to the union. Since that time, legislative restrictions on unions have been part of a long-term strategy to eliminate unions entirely. But unions tended to think deals were still possible. Why, Lerner asked, would you make a deal with someone who wants to kill you?
In Wisconsin, people from inside and outside of the labor movement stood up for something more than just the right of nurses and teachers to negotiate their salaries. The Wisconsin uprising was the awakening of a sense, long dormant, that labor unions are still a counterweight to the power of big money in American life. “Without the ability to organize, to have some group with some organized voice to say, ‘No, this is wrong,’ then [decent health care and working conditions] can go away, not just for union members but for everybody,” Cindy Clark said. Wisconsinites stood up for the idea of working people coming together to counterbalance the power of the billionaire class.
Union activists in Wisconsin even considered a general strike—the ultimate expression of labor as a social movement, a strike that extended across all workers in a given location. The South Central Labor Federation as well as many activists on the ground called for it, and while the general strike did not officially happen, reporter and Wisconsinite John Nichols argued that the mass protests came close, and that an actual general strike would have been possible.15
And in Chicago, where the teachers went on strike in 2012 and challenged the austerity budget and the conditions in public schools, the union made issues of the common good part of its bargaining process, bringing its particular leverage to bear on an institution on which the whole city relied.
Teachers come in for particularly heavy criticism when they dare to make demands about their working conditions. In part, this response dates back to an ideal, promoted by early reformers like Catharine Beecher, implying that teachers ought to be selfless because their love for the children comes above all. When teachers and other care workers strike, this same ideal is used against them and they are declared insufficiently caring. Wealthy “education reformers” and politicians argue that they, instead, are the ones who care the most about students. “Teachers have been an easy target, primarily because we’re not used to fighting,” said Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. “We’re used to saying, ‘Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it because we all care about what’s best for kids.’ We’re supposed to think that the elite, who are very wealthy and very well educated and don’t send their children to public schools, care more about black and brown children they don’t know?”16
The CTU organized like a movement—within the community—talking to parents and students and incorporating their needs and desires into a broader political strategy; when the teachers shut down business as usual in the city, those parents understood that the teachers were not just looking for higher wages and better health insurance.
A strike succeeds by stopping production, even when “production” isn’t the construction of widgets but the schooling of children. It also, as writer and political strategist Matt Stoller argued, is a visible demonstration of labor’s power and struggles, something largely missing since Reagan crushed PATCO. “People might only like unions when they see strikes, otherwise all they hear about is backroom negotiations,” he wrote. “Perhaps effectively striking is actually the way to force people to ask questions about what kind of country they want to live in.” If a protest is a request, a strike is a demand.17
The CTU strike, like the uprising in Madison before it, created space for labor to think about itself as a force to fight for a better economy for all, and to sway political opinion by making public demands coupled with action.
IT DIDN’T TAKE KENZO SHIBATA LONG, AFTER HE BECAME A TEACHER in 2003, to realize that something was wrong with the Chicago school system. School closures shuffled students around, forcing them into classes with students from rival gangs; under those tensions, violence in the Bronzeville high school where he taught had increased. When he began to research the reasons for the closings, he discovered that Arne Duncan, at the time CEO of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), and Mayor Richard M. Daley were proponents of closing “failing” schools and replacing them with new charter or contract schools. But to Shibata, those very policies seemed to be causing the problems.
Chicago’s schools had been a battleground for years. The city was an early laboratory for the “education reform” agenda of more testing and more accountability, which usually meant firing teachers when their students’ test scores didn’t increase and handing schools over to private companies. The city’s public schools were deeply segregated—over 70 percent of the black students attended schools that were over 90 percent children of color. Education reformers argued that schools should be run more like corporations. The Chicago schools had a CEO rather than a superintendent, Shibata noted, because the job didn’t have to go to an accredited educator. Instead, the head of the schools was installed by the mayor, who through “mayoral control” of the schools appointed the school board as well. Duncan, who later became President Obama’s secretary of education, was one of the very public faces of “ed reform,” which Shibata began to understand as a plan to put public resources under private control.18
Shibata tried to turn to his union as a way to take action. He began blogging about his experiences as a teacher. Then he reached out to the editor of his union’s newsletter, offering to write articles, but got no response. A colleague of his, Jackson Potter, invited him to a meeting of like-minded educators at the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers hall, the home of the union that had led the 2008 occupation of Republic Windows and Doors. The problems in the schools, they agreed, were part of a broader agenda happening across the city, one of privatization of public goods and consolidation of wealth, and the union wasn’t doing much to help. They started a book group to learn more about the issues they faced, and the first book they read together was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, in which she tells the story of neoliberal policies imposed by governments on peoples reeling from crisis.
That book group grew into a caucus within the union that called itself the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE). At first, Shibata said, they aimed simply to push the existing CTU leadership to step up and challenge the rhetoric coming from the authorities who were blaming the teachers for the crumbling, underfunded schools. They began to organize their coworkers and to listen to their complaints, and they made connections between everyday problems—like a lack of paper or air conditioning—to the austerity budgets that were being passed. The financial crisis, Shibata said, had become an excuse for the “reformers,” allowing them to speed up a process that had been underway for a while. Taking a page from Klein, in outreach to union members CORE argued that the crisis was being used “not just to bust our union but to defund our schools and essentially sabotage the system.” The existing union leadership, however, which had been in power for nearly forty years almost without interruption, seemed more interested in consolidating its own power than in mobilizing its members; according to Shibata, it became apparent that making real change within the union would require taking it over.
In 2008, as it organized with parents and community activists around the next round of planned school closures, CORE ran a warm-up campaign, nominating two of its members as pension trustees. Early on, Shibata used social media as an organizing tool, mobilizing members to post messages about CORE on Facebook. CORE used the race to educate members about the importance of the teachers’ pension, since teachers in Illinois are not covered by Social Security. Their candidates both won, and CORE moved into the union leadership election with confidence.19
CORE member Karen Lewis was chosen to run for union president. Charismatic, funny, and fierce, Lewis had been the only black woman in her Dartmouth class, and thereafter she had spent twenty-two years as a high school chemistry teacher. She was backed up by Jesse Sharkey, another early CORE member. Though the papers would focus heavily in the coming years on Lewis as a personality, it was the ground organizing that CORE had built up that led to its win in the spring of 2010, and it was a tradition the members kept up as they took over running the union.
“To shift unions from the service model to an organizing model takes not just a few people that want to do it; it takes the will of rank-and-file members to become empowered in their schools and in their union,” Lewis said. CORE staff cut their own salaries in order to create an organizing department; Shibata took a position in communications and began holding social media training sessions for members. He taught them how to get the message out about their own schools and struggles and helped them feel more involved in their union.
CORE had only a short time to strengthen the CTU before Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor of Chicago. When he took office in 2011, he almost immediately took aim at the union. Jennifer Johnson, a high school teacher on the city’s North Side at the time, said, “He made it very clear that the teachers union was public enemy number one. ‘Chicago Students Get the Shaft’ was his first headline about us.” Meanwhile, a massive education reform bill was making its way through the state legislature, one that targeted the Chicago teachers in particular. It required the union to get 75 percent of the union’s membership to vote yes in order to authorize a strike, a bar that the bill’s supporters figured the union would never be able to cross. Like Walker’s bill in Wisconsin, Senate Bill 7 was about power, but disguised as a cost-cutting measure. It was designed to strip the union of its most potent weapon.
But Emanuel and the state legislators had badly underestimated the CTU. An organized, militant union that was in constant touch with its membership was a relative rarity, even though Chicago teachers had a long tradition of such work. A union that understood its fight as political, as a challenge to the austerity agenda that was now in such vogue that the Democrats who dominated Illinois politics were all in its sway, was nearly unthinkable. In addition to its internal organizing, Johnson said, the new leadership had created a research department. That department tracked city spending, and the union began criticizing the Tax Increment Funding system by which property taxes were diverted from public schools to building projects and subsidies for private businesses. The CTU put out a report, entitled The Schools Chicago’s Children Deserve, that called for smaller class sizes and more counselors, nurses, and social workers. It criticized the continuing segregation that routinely sent the poorest children, most of them black and Latino, to schools that were falling apart.20
In preparation for negotiations, the teachers held a massive rally on May 23, and a sea of educators and their allies showed up in red CTU T-shirts. “There were probably 8,000 people marching through the streets of downtown to signal to the city that our platform is for real, we care about kids, we’ve got the power of numbers,” Johnson later said. Shibata, at the rally, heard someone shout, during Lewis’s speech, “Karen for mayor!” to thunderous applause. That moment, to him, crystallized what their fight was about: it was bigger than a union contract. The same bill that had raised the bar for a strike vote had also said that teachers could only strike over their own pay and benefits; but the CTU had done its work organizing in the community and made sure that the city knew its demands. The 2012 contract bargaining process was carried out by a team of between thirty and forty teachers, classroom educators who could back up their demands with evidence. The strike vote, when it was taken, saw 90 percent of the teachers vote yes.
“The community had a better sense than normal that we weren’t just striking over a pay raise, we were striking because we wanted to call attention to serious inequality in our schools,” Johnson said. “It struck a chord with people. There was some of that baiting thing, we didn’t care about the kids, but we had already undercut that argument by making ourselves the educational experts in our communities. Sixty-seven percent of [Chicago Public School] parents supported us in the strike. That’s pretty unheard of.”
The workers in the Walmart warehouses were on strike at the same time, and some of them joined the teachers on marches and on the picket lines, connecting the Walton family’s support for the education reform agenda to their opposition to the power of workers on the job. Parents and students joined the teachers, too. Israel Muñoz was a senior at a high school on the Southwest Side when the strike began. “There was a lot of talk about so much inequality in the education system, so much emphasis on testing,” he told me. “I really connected with a lot of these issues because I had gone to Kelly High School experiencing all that.” He supported the teachers and began to organize among the students for a union of their own.
The mainstream media was squarely opposed to the strike, with even normally liberal pundits expressing concern that children were being harmed by missing classes. But Shibata and the members he’d trained used social media to get out their own story. They shared video clips from the picket line (a “strikebot” made by two robotics teachers at Lane Tech got a lot of attention) and refuted the idea that their strike meant they didn’t care about the kids.21
The strike lasted nine days. Nine days of educators in red lining the streets of the city, in rich and poor neighborhoods, black and white and Latino neighborhoods. Journalist Micah Uetricht reported being given a free yogurt and a bus ride simply for wearing a red shirt by workers who told him, “We gotta support the teachers.” Rather than outrage, Chicago reacted with solidarity—and a little bit of glee. People seemed happy to see the powerful union so publicly challenge the mayor and the idea that they ought to make do with less. The energy of Occupy and its Chicago offshoots, too, contributed to the support for the strike, as the Wall Street connections of Mayor Emanuel fueled anger at policies that heightened inequality.22
The contract the CTU accepted wasn’t perfect, but the teachers counted it a win. Seventy-nine percent of them voted for the contract, which included provisions that guaranteed textbooks on the first day of class, held testing to the legal minimum, and held steady the amount that teachers had to spend on their health insurance. Emanuel had been defeated. But the mayor came back the next spring with an announcement that Shibata saw as “flexing his muscles”: Chicago would be closing fifty-four schools.
About 90 percent of the students in those schools were black. Lewis decried the closings as a racist policy, and the teachers joined with parent and student activists to fight for the schools. Israel Muñoz and some other students formed the Chicago Student Union, holding a march to Emanuel’s office during spring break to deliver a letter to him demanding that he save their schools. The school closings were much more disruptive to students’ education, Lewis argued, than the nine-day strike had been. “It wasn’t like these were the worst performing schools. It just seemed arbitrary and capricious.”
The school closings were austeritarianism at its worst. Emanuel argued that the closings would save money and that the schools in question were not only failing academically but also in disrepair—as though, Lewis noted, the building was at fault. Despite massive protests from the parents and students involved, the appointed school board persisted in the policy. “Public pressure only works if you have leaders who are accountable to the public,” Shibata said. The powerful people named to the school board, whose fancy résumés were constantly touted—Penny Pritzker, the Hyatt heiress, later became Obama’s commerce secretary—were not likely to care about working-class parents’ protests. “As much public support as we could have possibly had during the school closings campaign,” Shibata said, “it doesn’t always translate into the same kind of leverage that a large-scale strike could.”23
Shibata had realized back before the strike that something needed to change in the balance of power in Chicago. But it took the school closings to show, as the CORE members had earlier realized about their union, that maybe the only solution to their problems was to take power themselves.
“I hate politics, actually,” Lewis said in 2013. “For a long time I’ve felt we live in a one-party system. We just have two branches of it. The key is to use the political system to hold our elected officials accountable through mass movements.” But even that, Lewis noted, was an uphill battle. In 2010, after cuts to their pensions, the teachers’ unions in Illinois withheld donations to Democrats—and got Senate Bill 7. They shut down the city with a strike, and got school closures. They built power, and got only retaliation. “When you’re playing on somebody else’s turf, you don’t have control,” Lewis said. “So the key is to change the rules of the game.”
Emanuel was up for reelection in 2015, and Lewis began to seriously consider running. Other candidates who might have been able to challenge the incumbent were stepping back, unwilling to go up against the well-funded mayor and his Wall Street connections. Shibata was going to organizing meetings in local churches to collect petition signatures to put Lewis on the ballot, and other organizations and unions were showing interest in a challenge. The schools weren’t the only issue—there had been organizing around low wages, as Chicago had been the second city to join the Fight for $15 and had a particularly militant group of workers at its core, and long-standing fights against police brutality and prisons.
But in October, the news broke that Lewis had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, which would prevent her from running. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a Cook County commissioner, stepped forward and won endorsement from the CTU, and the coalition that had begun to form around Lewis shifted to support him. To Shibata, Garcia might not have been a dream candidate, but he was a local official with deep community ties in his neighborhood, the opposite of Emanuel, someone who would be accountable to the people and not to big donors.
“The big gift of Karen even thinking about running was that it changed so much of what was considered possible in many of our minds,” said Amisha Patel, director of the Grassroots Collaborative and a key part of that coalition. Garcia had not been central to a popular struggle the way Lewis had, but he was able to benefit from the momentum that Lewis had kicked off. SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana joined the coalition, as did the Transit Workers Union and Workers United. Community groups, too, jumped in, and together they built a new political organization, United Working Families. But other unions, including other SEIU locals, backed Emanuel. For many people, Patel said, the Garcia campaign was their “Obama moment,” because they were throwing themselves into electoral work for the first time. But the core of the coalition remained the same people who had been challenging the mayor for years.
As the center of the campaign, though, Garcia did not inspire the same excitement that Lewis had. Lewis had been a public figure for years at that point. From the time of the early CORE reading groups, she had put forth not just arguments for her union, but also strong arguments against the austerity agenda in the city, and a clear vision for a more economically and racially just city. Emanuel was still unpopular, but Garcia was not well known, and Chicagoans had little idea what he stood for. That allowed the negative ads that flooded the city to define him in the voters’ minds. “People realized that they weren’t going to be able to sell Rahm as much as they were able to cast doubt in people’s minds about Chuy,” Shibata said.
In the February election, Garcia got enough of the vote to force a runoff election. It was at that moment that more activists began to jump into the fight. SEIU’s state council reversed its earlier decision and endorsed Garcia. “It would have been really great to have had that from the beginning,” Patel laughed. Pushing Emanuel to a runoff forced him to spend time and money on his campaign that he otherwise might have pumped into getting his allies elected to the council. This opened up space for CTU and its allies to have an impact; CTU members ran in several aldermanic races, and Sue Sadlowski Garza and Tara Stamps also forced runoffs. In April, Garza won her race.24
Garcia did not, in the end, defeat Emanuel. There were fair criticisms of him as a candidate, but he managed to win 44 percent of the vote. It’s tempting to wonder whether Lewis could have won. Early on, she was polling higher than Emanuel, though during the course of what would undoubtedly have been a nasty election those numbers may well have changed. Her illness denied the city and the country the chance to see what a candidate who had a real base in an organized movement could have done in a major election. Lewis’s prominent role had given her the name recognition and connections to consider a run. But, Shibata noted, that itself demonstrated the danger of having too much invested in one strong charismatic leader—when that leader is removed, it is hard to fill the spot.
The leadership development within and around the CTU allowed for other leaders to step up, whether they be Garza, who won her seat on the council by drawing on her strong working-class roots and her family’s ties to the Steelworkers and the CTU, or Timothy Meegan, who did not win his race, but created a strong, independent organization outside of the Democratic Party in his North Side neighborhood. “They’re continuing to build, they’re supporting other candidates, but they’re also doing a lot of organizing on the ground. That’s a ward that I’m definitely going to keep my eye on,” Shibata said.
The campaign against Emanuel gave many of the organizers a taste for independent politics. They were disappointed both in Chicago’s storied Democratic machine politics and in the new Republican governor, multimillionaire Bruce Rauner. Rauner had ties to Emanuel and planned to bust public-sector unions. Austerity, after all, was a bipartisan game, as was market-based education reform. In the face of austerity, Patel said, it is important to put forward a positive alternative vision, to offer suggestions for where the money can be found, and to talk about what the schools should look like. In the fall of 2015, a group of parents, teachers, and advocates went on a hunger strike to reopen one shuttered school, Dyett High School; they offered a plan to create a green-technology-focused, open-enrollment school in partnership with the CTU and the Chicago Botanic Garden. They succeeded in winning a promise to reopen the school, but their own plan was rejected. They called off the strike after thirty-four days upon the realization, as strike leader Jitu Brown put it, “that they will let us die.”25
Facing such enemies, electoral politics is likely to remain part of the fight for the CTU and United Working Families. But it has not been and will not be the only strategy—2016 brought another stalemate in contract negotiations for the CTU and another overwhelming strike vote. The union was busy connecting the conditions in the schools to the police violence that killed seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald, and to Emanuel’s participation in a cover-up of that killing. Polls showed the union had three times the support in the city that the mayor did, laying the groundwork for yet another successful strike.26
On April 1, 2016, the CTU managed to pull off what, if not quite a general strike, was certainly the closest thing the country had seen to one in decades. Pulling together allies in at least 8 unions, including National Nurses United and AFSCME Council 31, and 40 community organizations, and building off of momentum from the successful campaign to remove Emanuel ally Anita Alvarez from the Cook County State Attorney office, the one-day strike saw 15,000 people turn out for a downtown rally that effectively stopped business as usual. Fast food and retail workers with the Fight for $15, child care and health care workers, and members of BYP 100 and other groups from the movement for black lives also joined the actions. Sarah Chambers, CTU member and teacher at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy, called it a “historic strike” and described picketing at the schools, direct actions around the city, and an end to the “broke on purpose” mentality starving the city’s people of public services.27
“This is one of the first strikes in a very long time where we’re pushing for progressive revenue. It’s not just about a specific contract; we’re actually fighting as a group for economic demands and we’re getting close,” Chambers said. “I’m hoping that what we do in Chicago with this massive strike will spread around the country, because the same types of social service cuts and austerity agendas are spreading throughout the whole country, and frankly, the world.”