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Poland’s chief rabbi sent a scathing letter to the mayor of Kazimierz Dolny for hosting a children’s bubble party on a site where Jews are still buried.
By World Israel News Staff
On June 1 – Children’s Day in many European countries – children in the town of Kazimierz Dolny in Poland enjoyed a festive bubble party that provoked the ire of the country’s chief rabbi, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported.
The reason: It was held on the site of a former Jewish cemetery, and several hundred bodies remain buried underneath.
Authorities had filled the former cemetery with bubbles, and the mayor posted a video of the party on his official Facebook page, the article said.
Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich sent a scathing letter to Mayor Artur Pomianowski on Tuesday, saying that “the party organized on the yard, which was after all fun on the graves, proves that for the municipal authorities, respect for human burial is not an important value,” according to JTA.
“Is this what we want to teach our children about how we treat the dead, our ancestors?” Schudrich said in conversation with the news agency.
Bartłomiej Godlewskia, Kazimierz Dolny’s deputy mayor, sent a letter of apology to the rabbi on Wednesday, the report continues.
“I regret the wrong decision to organize Children’s Day,” Godlewskia said. “We share a common history and a common home, and it was never our intention to hurt feelings — it was human error.
“I hope that this event will not interfere with our dialogue and cooperation in the future. I extend my apologies to you to the entire Jewish community.”
Józef Skrzeczkowski, director of the town’s Kazimierz Center for Culture, Promotion and Tourism, also offered an apology on Wednesday. “I declare that we had no bad intentions when organizing this event. We didn’t want to hurt anyone or hurt anyone’s religious feelings,” he stated.
It should not be surprising, however, that such an “error” occurred. The cemetery was destroyed five decades ago, although the bodies were not removed. The headstones were used for paving roads and as building materials during the communist era, JTA notes.
For the past five years, Schudrich told JTA, Jewish community representatives in Poland have been in discussion with the town’s mayors in an effort to move the bodies.
“We offered a really nice solution that would involve us helping to fund a new playground and moving the cemetery to an empty field nearby. But they keep stalling or canceling meetings and it seems like the town just doesn’t care,” the rabbi said.
“We deal with several cemeteries every week; 99% are resolved in a very positive and even sometimes quick manner. Kaziemierz is from the 1%,” he added.
Schudrich said that he would be “following up” on his request to meet with the mayor in order to find a solution once and for all.
The post Polish children enjoy bubble party on top of Jewish graves in event organized by town officials appeared first on World Israel News.
Israel soldiers are training in an Arab-Muslim country for the first time ever with 12 members of the IDF’s elite Golani unit in Morocco for an international exercise with 16 other countries.
The post WATCH: IDF soldiers train in Arab-Muslim country for 1st time ever appeared first on World Israel News.
Professor Robert (Yisrael) Aumann, a Nobel Prize laureate in Economic Sciences, discusses with ILTV the current Israeli judicial system and why he promotes legal reform.
The post WATCH: Nobel Prize laureate explains why Israel needs legal reforms appeared first on World Israel News.
The Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition members hold placards while picketing for union recognition on April 15, 2022, in Bloomington, Indiana. (Jeremy Hogan / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
The past two years have seen a fresh wave of graduate worker militancy marked by bold strikes, new organizing drives, and whopping union election victories. Indeed, the six largest union filings with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in 2022 were all for graduate worker unions.
Amid this surge, one union is showing up a surprising amount: the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, or the UE. Graduate worker union drives affiliated with the UE have popped up at Indiana University Bloomington, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, Princeton University, University of Minnesota, Stanford University, and elsewhere.
With around thirty-five thousand members, the UE is not a huge union. It was once the third-largest — and arguably the most left-wing and democratic — member of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, with around a half-million members in core industries, until it fell victim to postwar anti-communist purges, raids from other unions, and plant shutdowns. But the union revived itself by the 1990s. Famously, UE workers at the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago occupied their plant in 2008, and today the union boasts a range of affiliated locals across sectors and industries from California to Vermont.
Why is the UE — which prides itself on being an independent, member-driven union — proving to be a magnet for graduate workers right now? Truthout spoke to some UE organizers and members at the forefront of its graduate campaigns to hear what they had to say about their ongoing successes.
Key to the UE’s appeal for graduate workers has been its respect for local autonomy, its emphasis on rank-and-file democracy, its confidence in member-driven campaigns, its focus on facilitating worker-to-worker solidarity, and its old-fashioned, militant organizing playbook that has quickly proven itself in practice. Indeed, it’s not entirely accurate to say that the UE has organized thousands of graduate workers; rather, thousands of graduate workers have organized themselves, with UE affiliation serving as a vehicle that facilitates, connects, and strengthens these efforts.
“We stand in contrast to what we think of as a staff-led model,” said Valentina Luketa, an anthropology PhD candidate at Indiana University Bloomington and the UE’s national coordinator for higher education. “We lean heavily on workers and big organizing committees led by workers. All of our election successes have been the result of our graduate workers organizing themselves to sign cards and to make it to the polls.”
While graduate workers have been unionizing for decades, the past few years have seen a new organizing surge spurred on by several factors. The COVID-19 pandemic threw graduate workers into a period of crisis and uncertainty. Crucial decisions over their working conditions — from compensation to workplace safety — were controlled by opaque and top-down administrative whims. The sense of insecurity was worse for international students, who make up a huge chunk of the larger graduate worker population.
This crisis moment intersected with a shifting generational mood among graduate workers that was shaped by the post-2008 realities of economic precarity and more open to union militancy. The examples of the Amazon Labor Union and Starbucks Workers United were inspiring, and Bernie Sanders’s primary runs and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests broadened a sense of possibility.
Crucially, with the academic job market in perpetual crisis under a neoliberal higher education system that increasingly relies on low-paid adjunct labor, there has been a rising sense of the need to win good jobs through collective power now. A green light to unionize also came from the NLRB in March 2021, when it upheld the collective bargaining rights of graduate students at private universities.
A green light to unionize came from the NLRB in March 2021, when it upheld the collective bargaining rights of graduate students at private universities.
Graduate workers had organized with the UE before — for example, in the late 1990s at the University of Iowa — but this new context set the stage for breakthroughs in 2021 and 2022 that paved the way for the UE’s emergence as a graduate organizing powerhouse.
One pivotal development came at Indiana University Bloomington. In 2017, graduate workers there formed the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition to fight for issues like a living wage and a waiver for mandatory student fees. They later developed a relationship with the UE and, in late 2021, affiliated with them with the intent of officially unionizing.
Indiana is a right-to-work state, and Indiana graduate workers that Truthout spoke with said other unions advised them to wait for better conditions to attempt to unionize. But the UE encouraged them to fight for their union now despite the legal obstacles, and it offered to help.
“The UE was very much encouraging us, ‘just go for it’,” said Anne Kavalerchik, a fourth-year PhD student in sociology and informatics at Indiana and former project staff organizer with the UE.
The Indiana graduate workers began a card campaign in the fall of 2021 and waged a two-month strike for union recognition in March and April 2022. While the university has yet to recognize the union, the workers have won major gains in pay and other areas.
More importantly, their struggle forged a cadre of steeled organizers who could pass on their lessons to the rising wave of UE-affiliated organizing drives.
Another key fight around the same time came at MIT. By December 2021, a majority of MIT graduate workers had signed union cards to set up an NLRB vote. In April 2022, MIT grad students voted in favor of a union with a 2 to 1 margin.
This was a huge win: MIT is one of the world’s most prestigious universities and a major STEM school. Graduate unions historically have had tougher times organizing the sciences, but at MIT many of the union militants wore lab coats and crunched math equations.
Around this time, in late 2021 and throughout 2022, as UE-affiliated graduate workers from Indiana and MIT to New Mexico and Iowa were connecting with each other, and as interest from new schools was starting to come in, a critical mass was emerging for something bigger.
“That was the beginning within the UE of building a nationwide effort by graduate workers within the UE’s infrastructure to organize us across industry, with the intention to not only improve our working conditions, but to reclaim the educational missions of these institutions,” said Luketa.
The UE launched its Graduate Worker Organizing Committee (GWOC), which Luketa describes as a “robust infrastructure for worker-to-worker exchanges and training” that has been “the key to our success.” She said the GWOC is where the UE has “different campaigns talking directly to other campaigns to transfer knowledge” around everything from winning elections to bargaining strong contracts.
The GWOC reflects the UE’s larger organizing philosophy that’s appealing to a growing number of graduate workers: regular members, with assistance from the UE national office, driving the life of their union, expanding their collective movement through worker-to-worker organizing and support.
Through the GWOC, over Slack and Zoom meetings, graduate workers across institutions share advice and resources, organize trainings, coordinate attendance at rallies, and enlist campaign support. Kavalerchik says a meetup of UE graduate workers from several universities at the June 2022 Labor Notes conference was helpful in solidifying the UE organizer network.
“We’ve continued that into a network of organizers where every campaign has a pretty strong connection to all the other campaigns to make it really easy to organize,” she said.
While the UE national office offers legal and organizing advice built up over decades and provides on-the-ground staff support, its graduate efforts rest upon the workers themselves.
While the UE national office offers legal and organizing advice built up over decades and provides on-the-ground staff support, its graduate efforts rest upon the workers themselves, who are often already highly organized when they connect with the UE.
“The UE model is not finding a campaign and then having staffers paratroop in just to win an election,” said Kavalerchik. “The UE model is one where the workers are doing the hard organizing, the mobilizing work of building up their unions, and then UE is there to support in whatever ways it can.”
While places like Indiana and MIT were in the heat of their struggles, graduate workers at other schools were taking a growing interest in the UE.
University of Chicago graduate workers had been organizing themselves for years as UChicago Graduate Students United (GSU) before affiliating with the UE in August 2022. A big part of the UE’s appeal was the support it could offer while respecting the GSU’s history and autonomy.
“Having people come and consult and advise us on best practices is what we wanted,” said Andrew Seber, a sixth-year history PhD student at the University of Chicago and a UE staff organizer. “We were like, ‘Okay, tell us how to fish and then we’ll go and fish.’”
Seber said organizers from Indiana and elsewhere came to help and passed on crucial strategies like “how to do a successful walkthrough,” where union members who work in specific buildings and floors regularly walk by the offices and labs of their coworkers to talk about what the union’s doing.
These walkthroughs became “the core of our model” for organizing, said Seber, rooting the union in the space where people worked and keeping the campaign at the top of everyone’s mind. The walkthroughs created tight-knit, granular structures of support for the union that served as antidotes to the administration’s anti-union tactics. “There are some buildings at the University of Chicago that you walk into and it’s like, the Graduate Student Union runs this building, and there is no question about that,” said Seber.
Tactics like these also helped UChicago GSU build a strong base among STEM graduate workers. “People in the labs are working forty to sixty plus hours a week,” he said. “They have absolutely full-time jobs.” This was crucial for the union. “You’re not going to have a credible strike without STEM,” said Seber. “There’s no campaign without them. But also, they deserve a union just as much as everybody else.”
The UE campaign at University of Chicago culminated in March 2023, when graduate workers won their union with a 92 percent pro-union vote, with 1,696 voting yes against 155 no votes. They’re now starting to negotiate their first contract.
At Princeton University, graduate workers have been organizing for years through Princeton Graduate Students United (PGSU), which formed in 2016. In 2021, PGSU affiliated with the UE and a majority of graduate workers have now signed union cards.
Gaby Nair, a third-year PhD student in politics, said a range of grievances during the onset of the pandemic, especially the lack of transparency around university decision-making, intensified support for a union among graduate workers at Princeton. This came on top of issues like mounting housing costs and the lack of a neutral grievance procedure for graduate labor, all at an institution with a $35.8 billion endowment whose governance excluded graduate workers and other stakeholders.
Nair says Princeton graduate workers reached out to a few unions, but the UE held the most appeal for her. “The worker-led model was really persuasive for me personally,” she said.
Nair says Princeton graduate workers mostly spoke to other UE-affiliated grads in their initial discussions exploring affiliation with the union. The example of UE-affiliated graduate workers at MIT — a peer institution with many international students and a STEM focus — was influential.
“It felt like this campaign, their strategy, was really going to involve connecting grads to other grads and drawing on the knowledge of grad workers,” she said.
This grad-to-grad support has borne out at Princeton and beyond and has been central to the success of UE-affiliated graduate worker unions. Johns Hopkins grads joined Princeton grads at their union rally; Northwestern and University of Chicago grads supported each other’s card campaigns and attended each other’s victory parties; they, in turn, both helped the Johns Hopkins grads; workers from the Indiana campaign have supported and staff emerging campaigns elsewhere. The list goes on.
Luketa stresses that the lines of support — help with phone banking or passing on tips and tactics over Slack, for example — are always going in all directions, sustaining a vibrant web of worker-led solidarity. “There has been crossing paths of all of the campaigns simultaneously at the same time,” she said. “Literally everybody helps everybody.”
We’re just working really, really hard with a tried-and-true method, and making sure that every single worker is talked to and every single piece is covered.
Nair said that, more than anything, the ongoing victories for graduate workers across the United States have helped boost the determination of many Princeton grads to win their union.
“I think the most beneficial thing for the campaign at Princeton has been the recent success of campaigns elsewhere,” she said. “That has been really a powerful message in normalizing and making very positive grad worker unionization across the country. The UE has been an integral part of that recently, obviously — not the only union involved in the recent wave, but one that’s involved in pretty big victories.”
Kavalerchik stresses that the UE’s recent success in organizing graduate workers is not because of any secret trick, but the result of dedicated, worker-led organizing.
“We’re just working really, really hard with a tried-and-true method, and making sure that every single worker is talked to and every single piece is covered,” she said.
More broadly, the surge in grad worker unionization through the UE and other unions promises to have larger effects on the labor movement and progressive politics. The new graduate unions are big and militant. They are often located in major cities from Chicago to Boston to Baltimore, and their examples could inspire others nearby and anchor solidarity efforts. Moreover, thousands of pro-union graduate workers who have experienced organizing drives will disperse into hundreds of other workplaces, bringing their union consciousness with them.
For now, the UE isn’t just fighting to help graduate workers gain more power and better working conditions. It’s hoping to transform academia altogether.
“There has been a very strong sensibility within all our campaigns that our universities have been surrendered to neoliberal logic that puts profits first and education, students, academic workers, and other campus workers second,” said Luketa.
“Within the UE, we have a bigger imperative here: to reclaim the educational mission of all of our institutions.”
Standard practice in journalism is to tell readers when an article has been amended or corrected — whatever the reason.
By Rachel O’Donoghue, Honest Reporting
The Times of London craftily edited its recent review of Roger Waters’ concert in Birmingham after the piece appeared to excuse the musician’s antisemitism.
The piece — written by music critic Mark Beaumont — was published on June 1 and caught the attention of HonestReporting over Beaumont’s thinly-disguised attempt to whitewash Waters’ long and well-documented history of antisemitism.
However, it can be revealed that the original version of the review was even more problematic and was swiftly and sneakily amended by editors at The Times to remove elements that seemingly dismissed the accusations of anti-Jewish hatred against the former Pink Floyd rocker.
The initial headline of the piece, “Roger Waters review — ignore the online hate, this was majestic,” was changed to “Roger Waters review — if you can ignore the rants, this was majestic.”
The original headline and its meaning were clear: people should “ignore” the antisemitism allegations leveled at Waters because they are spurious and the criticism he has faced is nothing more than a concocted “online hate” frenzy.
A later amendment radically altered its meaning — readers are told that Waters frequently rants in an unhinged fashion and that only “if” they can ignore such diatribes, will they enjoy the show.
And this is not the only stealthy edit made.
The first two paragraphs of the piece were also subtly changed to remove Beaumont’s obvious attempt at sanitizing Waters.
In the original version, no reference was made to Waters’ so-called “Pink paranoia” when he suggested that his critics are being directed “from Tel Aviv.” Instead, the comment stood alone and uncontextualized, suggesting the writer believes Israel really is manipulating the coverage of Waters’ tour.
Additionally, the amended article included adjectives like “raving” and “alarming’ to describe Waters’ incessant fixation with Jews and Israel, as well as removing Beaumont’s obvious insinuation that social media users are unfairly victimizing Waters (“Blame Twitter for the lurch towards condemnation over context”).
Standard practice in journalism is to tell readers when an article has been amended or corrected — whatever the reason.
Normally, an article that has been edited after publication will include a time-stamped footnote at the top or bottom of the page that states the piece was altered, although not necessarily revealing the specific change.
The Times’ failure to do this is perhaps indicative of the newspaper wishing to cover up the fact that it initially published a piece that attempted to rationalize and ultimately defend Roger Waters and his dangerous antisemitism.
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The canvas sign covering the memorial stone called the prime minister “a failed and corrupt dictator.”
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu filed a police complaint Wednesday against anti-judicial reform protestors who covered over a memorial stone for his father earlier in the day.
“Vile people vandalized the memorial in honor of my father today,” Netanyahu said in a statement. “We filed a complaint with the police. The time has come for them to stop trampling on every norm of fairness and decency.”
The protesters attached a canvas sign over the wording of a stone at a junction of Begin Boulevard in Jerusalem. Its top line said, “Junction named for the father of the dictator,” with the line below it stating, “The father of a failed and corrupt dictator who has become boycotted in Israel and the world.”
The stone underneath said that it had been named for “the noted historian, Zionist and Jerusalem lover, Benzion Netanyahu.” The memorial was placed there in 2013, a year after his death at age 102.
According to Hebrew media reports, the culprits were IDF veterans of special operations units who held a short ceremony early in the morning to “rename” the interchange. Journalist Ben Caspit, a longtime critic of Netanyahu, tweeted that the message to the prime minister from “the most militant and creative group” of anti-reform protestors was: “Wake up now and shelve the coup d’état, and immediately stop the attacks on the High Court and the gatekeepers, because you won’t be able to lie to history.”
While tens and even hundreds of thousands have shown up every Saturday night for months in Tel Aviv and other cities to demonstrate against the government’s planned reform of the judiciary, much smaller groups have gone to other, strategic venues.
In January, a leftist activist left a letter on Netanyahu’s father’s grave calling the prime minister “demented and weak” and slamming him for “enabling a group of racists, fascists, homophobes and serial criminals to drag the State of Israel into being a failed kleptocracy in a bad case, or an isolated dictatorship in the worst case.”
On Friday, some 250 people demonstrated in front of the prime minister’s home in Caesarea. The protest turned violent after police used force to break it up, with video clips showing officers shoving and beating several people. The authorities said they had received no notice or request for a permit for the protest and were therefore called to disperse the crowd.
Four people were arrested, and when requests went out on social media to support the detainees, dozens answered the call and went to the police station where they were being held. The police then arrested another six people at the scene.
Israel Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai appointed a team of senior officers to investigate the allegations of police brutality.
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Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis attends a rally Tuesday, September 11, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois on the second day of the Chicago teachers’ strike. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune / MCT)
Twenty years ago, Chicago was in the process of one of the greatest — and most misguided — experiments ever attempted to reform public education in America. It was an effort to completely reshape city schools in the image of the market by emphasizing school-to-school competition, merit-based pay, and a disastrous game of survival of the fittest by closing schools that didn’t test well or meet certain criteria set by the business class. If successful, it would have reshaped Chicago in what would later become the new normal in New Orleans, where the city swapped its public schools for charters after reformers took hold following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Chicago mayors have since closed, reconstituted, and turned around (when all staff were fired and rehired) over two hundred schools, almost exclusively in the city’s black communities. This has created incalculable harm by exacerbating violence and displacement, greatly undermining confidence in one of our most treasured public institutions. It was over the same period that Chicago Public Schools opened 193 privatized charter, military, and contract schools.
In May 2008, as all of this reform was getting underway, myself and Al Ramirez, an elementary school teacher and union delegate from Irma C. Ruiz Elementary School, invited ten members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) into a spartan room inside the United Electrical Workers union hall, on the Near West Side of Chicago, to consider the state of our union.
Many of those present were elected delegates at their schools like Stacy Davis Gates at Roberto Clemente Community Academy, Kenzo Shibata at Lake View High School, Jesse Sharkey, Wendy Boatman and Brian Roa at Senn High School, Jennifer Johnson at Lincoln Park High School, Jose Frausto at Enrico Tonti Elementary School, Norine Gutekanst at Whittier Dual Language School, Jay Rehak from Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, and Kyle Westbrook from Walter Payton College Preparatory High School.
We were frustrated and fed up with the CTU leadership because they did not put up any significant opposition when Mayor Richard M. Daley unleashed the first round of school closings in 2004. For years, community organizations like the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) had called out city officials for the educational apartheid that anchored their efforts to close schools.
The first attempt in 2004 was a plan to close twenty of twenty-two schools in the heart of the city’s black communities. Many of us had spent years working internally both within our schools and citywide to cajole and encourage union officers and staff to provide organizing support and resources for rank-and-file union members, alongside community allies, to wage a fight against these existential attacks on public education. Those efforts had fits and starts but ultimately failed to generate a significant shift in strategy from the CTU.
According to Ramirez, a cofounder of what would become the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), CTU leadership “was not asleep at the wheel, they were joyriding.” Sharkey, who would later go on to lead the CTU but was then a union delegate at Senn High School, noted at the time that “if we continue down this path, we won’t have a union for much longer.” CORE would go on to hold its first public event on June 7, 2008, which featured a keynote address by Jinny Sims, president of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF), who shared how the BCTF had won an illegal strike focused on lowering class size in 2005.
A major reason for calling that first meeting was my experience as a union delegate at a predominantly black school that was callously closed by the district. That school, Englewood High School, was abruptly phased out (allowing existing students to graduate but not accepting any new students) by Arne Duncan, who in 2005 was then Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO. Largely on our own, we organized parents, students, and community members to pack school board hearings, share our experiences, and oppose the closing which we knew would destabilize the school community.
None of that changed the Chicago Board of Education’s ultimate decision, but the organizing and resistance built a network of educators, parents, and community advocates willing to form a new and powerful coalition. That experience launched a fifteen-plus year collective project to resuscitate the CTU and accelerate the resistance to years of chronic underfunding and the bipartisan effort to close so-called underperforming public schools in the city.
The closing of Englewood was part of a program called Renaissance 2010 (Ren2010), when some of the biggest and wealthiest companies in Chicago called for closing sixty to seventy schools and opening up some hundred nonunion charter and contract schools. Englewood, as one of the oldest black majority schools in the system with a storied past and graduates like Gwendolyn Brooks and Lorraine Hansberry, was a grand prize.
To justify the closing, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, published “Left Behind: A Report of the Education Committee,” which said there were “too few excellent teachers” and demanded “Chicago should have at least 100 charter schools, located predominantly in inner-city neighborhoods that are served today by mostly failing public schools.”
When Duncan called for the closure of Englewood, the CTU vice president at the time, Ted Dallas, told us to “get your resumes ready.” After Duncan announced Ren2010, based almost verbatim on the Civic Committee’s report, and called Englewood “a culture of failure,” the union tried to counter with a better plan to fix failing schools and remove so-called “bad” teachers.
To demonstrate that commitment, the CTU brought in the former president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers, Dal Lawrence, to tell the press that we should immediately terminate 10 percent of the teaching workforce. Lawrence asserted that the way to improve schools was to make tougher evaluation systems, police ourselves, and terminate ineffective teachers. Marilyn Stewart, the CTU president at the time, nodded approvingly. We played the video of the CTU press conference during that May 2008 meeting at the UE hall as the ten activists gathered there shook their heads in disgust.
We knew then what we know now: if workers want to shape their destiny, we must organize inside the workplaces where we have the most influence and maximize our deep connections as teachers to a broader set of social forces. That was the day we committed to form the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators as a way to revive the CTU in the mold of a fighting and organizing union, the only thing that could meet the challenges of the moment and set us on a better path forward.
The day after CORE was formed, in order to maximize the number of organizations working to stop Ren2010, we assembled a new coalition called the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM) alongside a host of social movement organizations including KOCO, the Pilsen Alliance, Blocks Together, Action Now, Communities United, Teachers for Social Justice, Designs for Change, Logan Square Neighborhood Association, Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, and Parents United for Responsible Education.
We called community meetings, led book clubs based on Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, conducted study groups (often attended by forty people) on our contract, and developed a constitution for the caucus that stressed community partnerships, democracy, and growing rank-and-file power to defend public education.
We learned from experienced unionists in Los Angeles and British Columbia that we could fight and win against seemingly impossible odds. Based on their advice, we held public events that even CTU leadership was compelled to attend. In the winter of 2010, a CPS insider shared us on a secret list of more schools that the district planned to close and enabled us to organize an event in the middle of a blizzard at Malcolm X College that five hundred people attended. These residents came to speak out against the efforts to extinguish their school communities.
We also demonstrated a deep and sustained commitment to “Save our Schools” (a slogan used by GEM on banners and literature) by sleeping outside in the freezing cold to secure our place to speak out at Board of Education meetings and ensure that the public and media knew our story and could popularize a counter narrative of educator and community opposition.
We sued the Chicago School Board in a pro bono case with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for the racially disparate impact caused from firing a disproportionate number of black educators at black schools. We studied the school budget and testified at CPS budget hearings about the ways neighborhood schools were being starved while privatized and selective enrollment schools received more resources. In other words, we built a “union in the community” meeting by meeting and event after event.
These years of frenetic activity and careful planning set the stage for the CTU leadership election two years later in 2010, when legendary former CTU president Karen Lewis and our officer and executive board slate swept the incumbents out of power in a runoff election. The results represented a sea change in the history of public education and the teacher union movement.
When Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor in 2011, the CTU’s newly elected leadership knew we would have to become strike-ready and curtail his efforts to legislate away our right to strike. Emanuel led an effort that resulted in a bill that made it impossible to strike unless 75 percent of our existing members authorized it. He then attempted to lengthen the school day by 20 percent without commensurate pay or resources. This created an incentive to achieve maximum unity, a standard we easily surpassed.
To add insult to injury, Emanuel attempted to eviscerate an agreement forged from seventy years of bargaining history by turning a three hundred–plus page contract into a fifty-page document stripped of rights that educators had endured multiple strikes in the 1970s and ’80s to win. As a result, we cleared the hurdle with over 90 percent of members voting to authorize a strike. Emanuel continued to demonize us by claiming “Teachers got a raise, children got the shaft” in a front page article in the Chicago Sun-Times, all but ensuring that a strike would be necessary.
Today, the CTU’s 2012 strike is often referenced as the dawn of an approach to contract negotiations known as Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG). While we started with more traditional proposals for lower class sizes and increased staffing, we experimented with demands for progressive revenue, equitable use of the Tax Increment Financing program and a teacher home visit program modeled after the Saint Paul Federation of Educators.
By 2015, we expanded those efforts and submitted proposals to pay $15 an hour to all school district employees, even those outside our own membership. The solidarity with the Fight for $15 campaign is one example of what Stephen Lerner, one of the founders of the BCG network and an architect of Service Employees International Union (SEIU)’s Justice for Janitors campaign, has argued is a necessary innovation in how unions must use their leverage to advance broader societal demands. Another example of this approach was the CTU’s demand for affordable housing for all of Chicago’s twenty thousand homeless students during our 2019 strike.
More and more unions are adopting BCG approaches as a result. In 2020, more than four thousand janitors in Minneapolis in SEIU Local 26 led a strike that focused in large part on environmental justice demands.
“The Minneapolis janitors became the first U.S. union to go on strike for climate justice. [. . .] Local unions across the country have responded to the global pandemic by articulating demands that meet the needs of their members and the communities they live and work in,” according to a March 2020 article in the Forge by Todd E. Vachon, Gerry Hudson, Judith Le Blanc and Saket Soni. Los Angeles teachers recently settled an agreement that similarly ramps up environmental justice provisions in their new contract, following a tradition started in the education sector during the 2012 strike.
The 2012 CTU strike encouraged teacher union locals across the nation, including those in red states without formal bargaining rights, to fight back. The last decade represents the most successful organizing project that the labor movement has experienced in a generation.
Community and union forces banded together and raised issues about inequitable funding, passed initiatives for progressive revenue that turned back decades of austerity that took the form of cuts to educational spending, and in some cases exposed educational apartheid in their advocacy and demands. The movement permanently disrupted the bipartisan neoliberal privatization agenda that produced record school closures, budget cuts, and the expansion of nonunion charter schools.
No fewer than twenty-five teacher strikes in the past ten years were launched to roll back the ongoing attacks on public education. The strikes have injected hope and momentum into the labor movement. From Arizona to West Virginia to Minnesota, teachers have waged city-based and statewide strikes that have led to unprecedented victories in school investment, class sizes, staffing formulas, and common good demands after decades of underfunding, privatization, and demonization of public school teachers and staff.
As scholar Eric Blanc has noted, “a total of 425,000 workers struck in 2019, with a strong majority (270,000) again coming from the education sector. And this number does not include the numerous examples of school districts such as Las Vegas, where unions organized credible strike threats but management avoided walkouts by granting major last-minute concessions.”
In many of these efforts, teachers won because they have run strong contract campaigns focused on what organizer and author Jane McAlevey has referred to as “structure tests,” such as trying to ramp up the number of members wearing red on Fridays, engaging in informational pickets with parents, attending citywide rallies and events, all culminating in strike votes and strike action. Organizers engaged every member to take part in escalating actions that advanced a clear set of public good demands.
In 2018, numerous reports portrayed the West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky school walkouts as an extension of the new community orientation of the teacher union response to budget cuts and efforts to expand privatized school options. There was a renewed sense that collective action could turn the table on decades-long attacks against public education.
Many activists see the CTU’s strike in 2012, and the formation of CORE in 2008, as initial flash points that set the course for these later actions. For example, Rebecca Garelli, a strike captain at Talcott Elementary School in 2012, went on to lead the Red for Ed statewide strike actions in Arizona years later as a science teacher. Additional evidence of CORE and CTU setting the stage was the proliferation of locals demanding a similar set of aspirational goals. Reports titled “The Schools Saint Paul Children Deserve” and “Schools LA Students Deserve” and “Schools Oakland Students Deserve” were all modeled after our 2012 report titled “The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve.”
Additionally, the strike created a wave of new rank-and-file teacher caucuses across the country like the Baltimore Movement of Rank and File Educators, the New York Movement of Rank and File Educators, the Caucus of Working Educators in Philadelphia, and a national network called the United Caucuses of Rank and File Educators (UCORE) coordinated by Labor Notes.
Most of the demands advanced by educators in red states like Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Arizona went beyond the narrow confines of traditional bargaining and often included the needs of public school families and even other workers. Though formal collective bargaining is prohibited in West Virginia, teachers there refused to end their strike until all of the state’s employees received the same raise they had been promised. Additionally, Arizona teachers organized for a ballot initiative that would block tax cuts that had defunded their schools, while North Carolina teachers called for Medicaid expansion.
In April 2023, a majority of Chicago voters opted to elect a new mayor, Brandon Johnson, an educator and CTU organizer who had been a key player in the fight against school closings and austerity. His election was a testament to the damage done by school closings and the rejection by voters of the neoliberal school agenda. For example, Emanuel’s popularity plummeted in the aftermath of his fifty school closings in 2013. As local school council cochair of Harper High School, Clifford Fields, stated during the 2017 fight against the last round of school closings, “If these schools have to go, the mayor has to go.”
The last twenty years of education reform policy have focused on privatization and destabilization of public schools in Chicago and nationally — and Chicago helped lead the way in the resistance to it. Now, with the election of a CTU member and middle school teacher as mayor of the nation’s third-largest city, the Johnson administration can build on the work of CORE and the new CTU to bring forth a new era of investment and support for sustainable community school districts that foster equity over competition.
Happy fifteenth birthday CORE — we needed you then, we need you now — may the next fifteen years bring similar advances and victories.
Cars are spaced out at Selman Chevrolet in Orange, California, on Thursday, November 11, 2021. (Jeff Gritchen / MediaNews Group / Orange County Register via Getty Images)
The supply chain disruptions caused by pandemic lockdowns have been a leading cause of the economic chaos of recent years, feeding the rage of consumers paying sky-high prices for suddenly scarcer goods. But they’ve also been a bonanza for the firms making those goods, who have outright admitted to using the headlines about inflation to tack on added price markups to their products, whether it’s eggs, airplane tickets, or electricity.
Maybe no product has embodied today’s inflationary pressures quite like cars have, as shortages of parts coupled with continuing strong demand for vehicles has sent their prices soaring. While we’ve been told that firms are simply passing along higher production costs to consumers, car dealers have also been making record profits, with Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond president Tom Barkin telling the New York Times that carmakers and dealers had “discovered that a low-volume, higher-price model was actually a very profitable model.” A Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) study from this past April determined that dealer markups contributed majorly to inflation in the price of new cars.
This is backed up by the words of the executives of the country’s largest dealerships themselves, who on earnings calls have explicitly talked about selling cars at inflated prices and making a tidy profit. It points to the need for robust government action to provide relief for consumers against such private sector greed.
Take CarMax, the largest used car dealer in the United States. On an earnings call this past April, CEO Bill Nash explained how the firm’s “extensive price elasticity tests,” which look at what happens to the level of demand when prices are raised or lowered, convinced the company it could safely get away with the very low-volume, higher-price model Barkin spoke about. The company had “determined that we could have sold a few more cars, but we actually would have made less money,” Nash explained.
On an earlier earnings call from December 2022, Nash responded to questions about other competitors lowering their prices to move cars off their lots and how that would impact CarMax’s strategy. Nash again cited the firm’s determination that they would have made less money, concluding that “what I’ve always said is . . . what we’re going after is profitable long-term market share gains.” He mentioned that the firm had price-tested both up and down, which “gives us confidence that we made the right decision from a profitability standpoint.”
“In a lot of cases,” Nash said about his competitors’ strategy to sell more units by dropping prices, “it’s not sustainable over the long term because you’re just not making the money that you need to.”
It’s a similar case with Lithia Motors, as of last year the largest dealership group in the country. Asked in a February 2022 earnings call if he was “seeing any hesitation at all among consumers to the elevated prices,” executive vice president Chris Holzshu replied, “Absolutely not.”
“Demand is very high right now, and we’re taking advantage as much as possible in both new and used in that capacity,” he said.
Asked if the firm was selling above the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), the cost that carmarkers like Ford or Nissan recommend dealers should sell a vehicle for, CEO Bryan DeBoer answered, “We do have some stores that are charging over MSRP.”
“We allow our network to make the decisions closest to what their customer base is and what the supply and demand is in that local market,” he added.
AutoNation chief financial officer Joe Lower likewise told investors in February 2023 that “more than half of our vehicles were sold at or above MSRP” in the previous year’s fourth quarter, which had “trended down, but it’s still far higher than historical levels.” The quarter before that, CEO Mike Manley noted that revenue was up 4 percent to $6.7 billion, “driven by higher average selling prices of new and used vehicles” and which had “more than offset lower sales of” both.
Two quarters earlier, when asked if inflation becoming a longer-term problem would entice the company to sell more inexpensive brands at lower prices, or if it would stick with “the premium side because those customers perhaps aren’t as bothered by inflation,” Manley replied, “It doesn’t really change my view on the balance that we have in our portfolio” and simply “reinforces we have a good balance.”
In the company’s most recent earnings call, Manley explained that the supply of late-model used cars had dropped, as had their turnover, since consumers were holding on longer to their cars. To offset this, “We focused on enhancing economics through effective staff-sourcing, reconditioning, speed to market, and of course, pricing,” he explained. Later, Lower explained that the firm wanted to “make sure that we maximize the inventory that we had” in terms of used cars, and that “with that, it means that we were even more diligent, I think, in terms of pricing.” According to AutoNation’s filing for that quarter, gross profit from used cars was $154 million for the first three months of 2023, up $18 million from the same period last year.
Coming straight from the mouth of executives of some of the country’s largest dealership firms, this would appear to corroborate the BLS study and confirm the suspicions of those looking at dealers’ record profits and sensing something is off.
As Bill Nash’s remarks about CarMax’s competitors deciding to lower their prices shows, these firms aren’t necessarily representative of the entire industry. But it’s hard to argue in light of all this that the inflated car prices consumers have been dealing with the past few years are simply because dealers are passing on their own higher costs.
Instead, executives at some of the country’s largest dealerships have been openly telling investors that they’re calibrating prices to what will net them the most profit, often by taking advantage of strong consumer demand to charge prices that are higher than they need to be — and explicitly rejecting an approach of selling more cars at lower prices because it’s less profitable.
What was once labeled a “conspiracy theory” — that much of the inflation we’re seeing is driven by corporate greed to feed record profits — is now more and more being widely acknowledged as reality. But unfortunately, those in power are still yet to do much about it, whether instituting price controls to prevent corporate price gouging or passing a windfall tax to claw back the inflated profits that result. And it’s the ordinary American worker who’s being stuck with the bill.