The Chicago teachers’ strike was an impressive victory at a time when teachers unions across the country are getting rolled. Professor Steven Ashby explains why it worked:

unionists across the country noted that the foundations for the teachers’ victory were laid over the past two years, as the CTU launched a “contract campaign” to educate, organize and mobilize its members. Every school established an organizing committee. Every member was talked to, their concerns discussed, their activism encouraged. In May the union put 6,000 teachers in the streets of downtown Chicago. In June the union overcame a unique anti-CTU law, Senate Bill 7, and turned out 92 percent of its members to nearly unanimously give the leadership strike authorization.

And during the strike, nearly all of the 26,000 teachers participated in enthusiastic, daily marches; picketed daily at schools; and met regularly to discuss strike issues and actions. They were joined by sizable numbers of supporters who came as a result of two years of the union building strong ties with community and parent organizations, and honing the message that the union fought first and foremost to defend a quality public education for every student.

It can’t be overstressed how critical this organizing was. An awful lot of unions don’t do this kind of organizing before a strike – and it’s not hard to understand why if you’ve ever been involved in it. It is lots and lots and lots of work. Endless meetings. Endless knocking on doors – including in Chicago winters. Endless meetings with community supporters. Not most folks’ idea of fun. But as the Chicago teachers’ experience showed, this kind of hard organizing can really pay off. The politicians who passed Senate Bill 7, which changed strike authorization votes from requiring a majority of members to 75% of members including absentees counting as no votes, thought they had made teachers’ strikes impossible. Because of CTU’s kick ass organizing, they blew right by it.

Another issue that was critical to success, which Ashby doesn’t talk about, is that the teachers’ union embraced what Stephen Lerner calls “connecting collective bargaining to the common good.” Micah Uetricht explains in a great new lefty rag, Jacobin:

The Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), a reform CTU leadership slate, took over the union in 2010, explicitly campaigning on taking a more militant and grassroots stance against neoliberal reform. The city has become ground zero for free market educational experiments—and for pushback from parent and teachers. Conditions were ripe for the rise of leadership that would push the union’s agenda to the left.

True to their campaign promises, CORE’s agenda has focused on much more than teachers’ salaries and benefits. Even now, when the CTU can only legally strike over wages, benefits, and some parts of teacher evaluations, union leadership continues to emphasize their fight is about a holistic vision for education that unequivocally opposes neoliberal reforms.

At the union’s press conference on Sunday night announcing the strike, reporters asked CTU President Karen Lewis what the primary two or three issues that had become sticking points in CPS negotiations were. She replied that all issues, from compensation to smaller class sizes to the increasing reliance upon standardized testing to understaffing of positions dealing with “wraparound services,” like social workers and clinicians, were causing the impasse.

This is huge – and it’s often hard to pull off. Striking is hard, scary, and exhausting, both physically, psychologically, and financially. And these days if you mess up a strike, it can cost you your union – not to mention your job if you were particularly active. So getting people to put their butts on the line for issues where there isn’t a direct payoff can be a good way for a local union president to get voted out of office unless they’ve done lots & lots of organizing of members to make sure enough folks are on board (and unlike politicians, when local union presidents lose their jobs they don’t get cushy lobbyist deals). In the long run, it’s the only way unions are going to survive let alone come back. But it’s a long hard road to take – and unfortunately an awful lot of local union presidents don’t know how to do it.

The last factor that really helped the teachers were the preceding corruptions of Wisconsin protests and Occupy – signs, Ashby argues, that we may be on the cusp of another social movement.

One key ingredient in the making of historical turning points is that people begin to view street protests as normal instead of weird. Instead of viewing a mass march on TV or the occupation of a building as strange and scary, many people watch those same events and think to themselves, “Good for them. That’s what it takes to get anything done in this country. Maybe I’ll join them.”

You could feel that if you picketed or marched with the Chicago teachers — the constant horn honking in solidarity, the waves and smiles of people from building windows or porch stoops, even the nods of approval from police officers.

Is this really a sign of things to come? I sure hope so.

A useful reminder by Larry Mishel via Dean Baker about why Chicago teachers, who say that that the real issue is their students’ education, aren’t negotiating & striking over them:

I’ve heard many folks complain that Chicago’s teachers are only concerned about their wages and benefits and not over the education received by the children. As my friend Larry Mishel reminds me, there is an important reason that the teachers’ union is only talking about wages and benefits in the context of the strike: it’s the law.

These are mandatory topics for negotiation under U.S. labor law. Issues about how the schools are run fall under management prerogatives. While the union and management are free to discuss these issues, the union cannot legally strike over them. Therefore if the union were to explicitly put forward conditions that directly related to the quality of education as a reason for the strike, the city could pursue legal action against the union and its officers for conducting an illegal strike.

It’s not that Chicago teachers don’t have ideas about what could be done to improve the quality of education – check out this report for more details. But they have to be very careful about how they raise the issue of quality education if they don’t want to break the law. Mess up 20

Lots of unions have built union-community coalitions – sometimes as part of organizing campaigns, other times as a temporary alliances to pass or stop particular bills. Most of these union-community coalitions haven’t lasted long as genuine coalitions. It’s not too hard to understand why: it’s pretty hard for an organization where its leaders are elected by the members & they have a real budget to consistently spend a serious amount of resources on other folks’ needs.

But in the last year, there’ve been signs that this may be changing. Caring Across Generations is bringing together home care workers and the people they care for, tying together the issues of healthcare reform, homecare workers’ rights, and immigration. And according to In These Times, the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) is also stepping up to the plate.

A year and a half ago, ATU began shifting resources into organizing coalitions with transit riders to support public transit. With the policy resource center Good Jobs First, ATU has held two rider organizing “boot camps” for activists and union leaders from 95 cities. Last month, those efforts entered a new phase with the launch of Americans for Transit, a new national organization backed by ATU and [Good Jobs First]. [ATU Pres. Larry] Hanley chairs Americans for Transit’s Board; GJF Executive Director Greg LeRoy is its secretary-treasurer. They tapped Andrew Austin, the former field director of Washington State’s Transportation Choices Coalition, as the organization’s founding executive director.

You might not find this that surprising. Considering the nonstop onslaught against unions with members who work for the public, its hard to imagine how they would survive without public support.

“No matter how much money we put into electoral politics,” said Hanley, “if we can’t change the attitudes of people…we’ll lose. It’s just a matter of when and how hard.”

What’s unique about this to approach is that ATU is making it a priority.

ATU’s new focus comes with a cost: a shift of resources away from organizing more drivers—public sector or private—into the union. While ATU has continued to do some new worker organizing, Hanley says, “I could go out and organize 100,000 people and spend a fortune trying to get them contracts, but what am I doing to change the overall picture by doing that? Not enough…we’re on a trajectory that has to be turned around too quickly.”

That’s not something you hear out of a union president very often.

Already, they’ve had some small victories.

Austin highlights his group’s success in getting a King County, WA Republican councilmember to back a tax increase in order to stave off a 20% service cut. He says aggressive turnout efforts, including leafleting on buses, paid off when riders formed a line “almost a mile out the door” to attend the first hearing on the issue. “The story in all the major media switched from about King County Council wants to raise your $20 car tabs to pissed-off bus riders angry about losing service…the story never went back.

It’ll be interesting to see if they can sustain this focus – and ensure that bus and other mass transit riders’ needs are taken as seriously as union member’ needs. It’s a hard balance to pull off, especially for an organization where if members don’t feel like their needs are being taken seriously, they can boot out their local president (I sometimes wonder what some of my progressive brethren who complain bitterly about union failings here would do if they faced the same pressure from the folks who write their checks). Here’s hoping for success on their new journey.