The strike will occur this fall if the city’s school system doesn’t meet their demands, which are: A 20% pay raise, a 4% pay raise they claim was stolen from them, and then another 5% pay raise on top of that. Chicago has been on Time’s list of America’s most bankrupt cities since 2010.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year rescinded a four percent pay increase and pushed for a longer school day. CPS has since proposed a five-year contract which guarantees teachers a two percent raise in their first year and lengthens the school day by 20 percent.
“They asked for a 20 percent increase in our school day and year, so we asked for a 20 percent concomitant raise to that. They stole four percent of our raises from the last contract, so we asked for that. Then we asked for a five percent raise,” said Lewis.
The new proposed school day would increase to 7 hours for elementary and 7.5 hours for higher grades, and would increase the school year to 180 days. Chicago currently has the shortest school day and school year of any major city, according to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The average Chicago teacher already makes just shy of $75,000 per year. The average American works about 250 days per year, and Chicago public school teacher salaries put them in the range of attorney salaries, well above the city’s median salary for full-time workers, $53, 518. Chicago public school administrators make, on average, $120,659. The unions forced the strike vote to come ahead of a report in July which might have found ways to compromise.
Good luck, Rahm. Perhaps the mayor will have a Reagan moment this fall.
Did they also ask for skittle spewing unicorns?
Are the going to wear HOODIES????
They need to go on strike FOREVER – break the stupid unions
Good, good for them. How can we encourage this strike.
It’s for the children…
If they go on strike and the school system hired strike breakers, we will finally be able to say the teachers’ unions have done something to benefit schoolchildren.
If people are shielded from the consequences of their bad choices, they will never learn to make good choices.
Let Chicago burn.
Oh, this will end well.
Wait, the school year wasn’t already 180 days?
Yippeee! More fat people waddling through the streets. Chicago’s gonna smell ripe. If the EPA was serious about air quality they would force these people to wear expensive air scrubbers over their large frames. Belonging to a public-servant union won’t be against the law, but it will be prohibitively expensive. Yummy food for the socialist herd! Mooooooooo, oink, oink.
Haymarket 2012: because some things are too good to do just once.
Rahm will roll over like the good little democrat he is. They will come to an agreement in the middle, which was the plan all along. And this union will get a 12% pay raise when the rest of Americans hurt.
I’ve seen a couple of Democrat governors be tough with unions; it’s rare but not impossible. When we had dramatic budget shortfalls due to the oil price collapse in the mid-’80s, Democrat Steve Cowper went toe to toe with the unions for an entire term. That said, he was a Democrat and wouldn’t use all the tools in the shed against them; we could easily have decertified a couple of them and made the World a better place but that was too much the “union buster” for any Democrat. Likewise, Democrat Governor Knowles was pretty tough with the unions in his last couple of years; first because money was still tight and a Republican Legislature (that I was working for) made it even tighter when it came to money for unions, and, second, because even Democrats have to actually run the government and the Administration was simply sick of the unions’ guerilla theater and workplace disruptions. That was the only time in my career under both Ds and Rs that I was ever allowed to just take the gloves off and go after individual union leaders and activists; the union had crossed the line into personal attacks against Democrat appointees and it was no holds barred.
We’ll see with Rahmbo; if he lets school start before the strike occurs, he’s just playing out a charade with the union. If you’re going to confront a teacher union, you CANNOT let school start and have all the citizens give up their babysitters. Once the kiddies go back to school, the citizenry will demand that you pay any price and bear any burden to get their babysitters back to work. Generally, teacher strikes with a Democrat government, and that would include practically every school board in the Country, are merely a charade. The administration and the union let school start and run a few days and then take the babysitters away for a few days and the hue and cry from the public gets them back to the table or into interest arbitration and the union gets most of what it wanted and gives the babysitters back for a few years. Most states have a mandatory school year and teachers know they’re going to get 180 days of pay even if they do strike for awhile. If an administration is serious about taking a teacher strike, it has to keep them off work for six weeks or more so they actually start to miss payments and run out of money. Teachers, like most public employees, have no significants savings because they have a secure retirement and to cash out leave, annuities, and other benefits, they have to quit their jobs, something they’ll try to avoid as long as possible. Few public employee unions have strike funds, so if you can put teachers in a position where they’re missing car and mortgage payments, they’ll come to Jesus and do so quickly. Otherwise, they just enjoy those last days of summer in the full knowlege that they’re going to get what they want and it isn’t going to cost them a dime.
Sure would be interesting to see Rahmbo have a fight to the death with Chi teachers’ unions just as O is running for Prez … . Will O “fly over” Chi like he did Wisc.?