By John F. Di Leo -
Ever since the dawn of the age of unions, it has been a given that, even if society allows the concept of strikes against private business, it is illogical to allow striking against the government.
Government employers are special cases, with monopoly status, providing necessary services (at least in theory). Everyone knows you cannot allow employees of the military, the police, the fire stations, the schools, the gas and electric utilities, etc. to strike. Society simply is no longer civilized, after awhile without these building blocks of a safe and civil society.
And even so, some states do foolishly, self-destructively, allow such entities to collectively bargain and even to strike against the common good.
We Illinoisans are in this situation today. Even as I write, the 25,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union are beginning their second week of striking against the city of Chicago.
This hasn’t exactly closed the schools – the schools remain open, to serve the free meals on which Chicago’s students have become dependent. They may not need to go to any of those classrooms, but what they really need is the cafeteria.
Chicago’s teachers are striking for three sets of demands:
• the kind of salary and benefits issues that are normal for strikes,
• tangential issues like additional school nurses and social workers that may be relevant to the schools but aren’t proper for the teachers’ collective bargaining function… and
• completely irrelevant “progressive” political goals, like demanding that the city build more “affordable housing” and otherwise expand the welfare state in the already largely socialist economy of Illinois.
This is off the charts.
The expanded list of demands is part of a socialist agenda being presented in recent years as “collective bargaining for the common good.” Similar to the outrageous “intersectionality” concept popular across the extreme left nowadays, it’s part of a Democrat party goal to tie all issues together, to insist that every election, every strike, every organization, be united in the common cause of driving America to be more leftist in every way. They think that anytime you focus on the matter at hand, you are missing an opportunity to make progress on a hundred other aspects of the socialist agenda.
It would be humorous that it’s causing such a rift in Chicago, as it’s an intraparty battle between fellow leftists (it’s not like Republicans or even moderates have a seat at this table)… except that it showcases such a genuine threat to our nation.
Their goal is to use every opportunity to further all leftist causes. They want more social workers in the schools to push abortion and transgenderism. They want more lawyers in the schools to help illegal aliens agitate for the privilege of avoided well-deserved deportations.
They want higher property taxes, income taxes, transfer taxes, sales taxes, all in order to squeeze the remaining companies and individuals so that everyone plummets to the same “lowest common denominator” of the economic ladder. As both Chicago and Springfield cry out that there’s no money for all their demands, the union happily declares their proposed compromise: there’s no need to fight, BOTH jurisdictions can raise taxes!
For the first time, more than a few people are finally beginning to realize that bankruptcy is the real goal here… 25,000 teachers can’t all be so bad at mathematics that they don’t realize the unsustainability of their demands. They are careening toward bankruptcy, full speed ahead, without even a handbrake to apply… counting on the state or even the federal government to bail them out of their tens of billions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities and other financial sinkholes.
This is a city that has plummeted in population from 3.5 million at its peak in the 1950s to less than 2.5 million today, a city that has consciously driven its middle class to the suburbs and become a home for only the very poor and a few of the very rich. A taxing model that requires a middle class to fund it simply doesn’t fit in Chicago anymore… if indeed it ever did.
So the teachers’ union has brought things to a head, at what is arguably the worst time for it: a time ehen there’s a brand new socialist mayor in charge, when there are no moderates anymore, and it is just various branches of the ultra Left who must fight it out among themselves.
The public wants to support the teachers. The vast majority of Americans spent eight, nine, even 12 or 13 years in rooms led by America’s teachers. But despite the affinity we all have for them individually, it has become impossible to deny that as a group, they have gone too far.
In Illinois, not only do teachers get several times the vacation days and holidays that people in the private sector get… Their healthcare costs are infinitely more heavily funded by their employer than ever occurs in the private sector… and they can retire in their late 50s… while we in the private sector are often forced to accept the fact that we will never be able to retire. Given the above, it is more and more difficult for the average voter in the bankrupt state of Illinois to feel anything but scorn for the outrageous greed of this teachers’ union.
In addition, it has become painfully obvious that the teachers’ complaints about their often miserable conditions are the fault of their own policies, and that their current demands would only make such problems worse, not better:
Yes, teachers, it must be hard to teach a classroom in which so many different languages are spoken at home. But this teachers‘ union supports the massive illegal immigration that exacerbated this challenge, and their demands of an influx of pro-alien attorneys would draw even more into their classrooms.
The same goes for their complaints of large class sizes. Yes, teachers, it must be hard to teach a room designed for 25 that’s filled with 35 kids. But that surplus is your own fault, by insisting that Chicago be a sanctuary city, in a sanctuary county, in a sanctuary state. You have insisted on turning your classroom into a magnet for multitudes; how can you then complain about their presence there?
Yes, teachers, it must be heartbreaking to leave the classroom filled with children from broken homes, children whose parents, siblings, other relatives or neighbors are abusers. But it is your policies that have opened the doors of the prisons, flooding your neighborhoods with convicted criminals whose ridiculously short sentences don’t keep them away from your charges. The criminality in your hallways, coat rooms, and playgrounds is caused by the very gangs whom your destructive policies have nurtured. It is hard to feel sorry for the victim of a crime, when that victim voted to set the criminal free.
At this writing, it is impossible to forecast how long this particular strike will last. It could be over this afternoon, or it could take weeks to resolve. But already, it has provided one key public service, in answering one of the great questions of our time:
While the CTU has been on strike, the city has kept the schools open, so that nonunion staff could continue to serve the free meals to which these children and their families have become accustomed. There may be no classes being held in the classrooms, but there is plenty of taxpayer-funded food being served in the cafeteria.
So the schools are full of students, despite the strike. They may not learn anything, but they’re all being fed their three squares each day at the public trough, same as usual. So the parents are happy now… reassured that, no matter how long the strike goes, their kids will continue to be dependent on their fellow man for basic sustenance.
For decades, we have wondered about our big cities’ public school establishments. We have wondered whether there was really ever any interest in getting kids an education, or if the parents just view the schools as daycare nowadays.
Well, we have our answer now, don’t we?
Copyright 2019 John F Di Leo
John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer and actor. His columns are regularly found in Illinois Review.
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