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Fight for $15 and the heroes in company uniforms

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“What’s disgusting? Unionbusting! What’s outrageous? Poverty wages!”---a chant often heard at Fight for $15 actions

Sometimes heroes come dressed in company uniforms: perhaps MacDonald’s, or maybe Subway, Wendy’s, Mrs. Fields or those Whole Foods distinctive black aprons. That kind of hero was out in the streets of Chicago on July 31 and August 1. They had walked off their jobs to support the Fight For $15 campaign led by the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC). 

WOCC is a new union in town. Currently with several hundred members and growing, it wants a $15 an hour wage for food and retail workers in Chicago. There are similar groups in other large American cities.

I had the privilege of picketing with WOCC at a Northside Chicago Whole Foods on July 31. I was with also WOCC on August 1 from early morning to early evening as WOCC strikers marched through the Chicago downtown, picketing a number of low wage workplaces and sharing their stories.

Fight for $15

“We want change! And we ain’t talking about pennies!”

WOCC members typically make minimum wage or only slightly above. Minimum wage is a poverty wage and despite the common stereotype that minimum wage jobs are for teenage pocket money, the majority of minimum wage workers are adults. Nearly a third of minimum wage workers are supporting families on pay that is below the official poverty line.

Some people might question why walking off the job for a 1 or 2 day strike is such an act of heroism. But a Wendy’s worker put it this way, “I work at Wendy’s everyday. I mean everyday! I get $8.25 an hour. I have 3 kids and can’t provide the basics for my family.”


This Wendy’s worker is already living in poverty and his family is struggling to survive.  The loss of his job because of company retaliation could be catastrophic. Jobs are tough to find in this economy. He and other WOCC workers are taking huge risks to fight for a better future. Striking even for a day or two is a courageous act when the striking workers are a still a minority of the retail and food workers in the city. 

“Hey workers, tell your story. Tell the whole wide world this is union territory!”

John Jackson works at both Walgreens and Chic-Fil-A. His workday begins at 5:30 am and ends at 9 pm. Walgreens pays him $10.22 and hour and Chick-Fil-A $8.75.

“The reason why I am striking today is that I have to work two jobs to take care of my family. I have a 5 year old son and a 4 year old daughter. And when I get home, I’d like to see them. I don’t see my kids until Friday night. Society says they want a father in the household. All I want is to be able to work a one shift job and take care of my family and be a great father.”

It is not only low wages that are a problem. Low wage workers normally receive few or no benefits.They are also are subjected to a demeaning lack of respect. 

Matthew Camp, a Whole Foods cashier, described how Whole Foods uses a point system to diminish the personal lives of its employees: 

“We started organizing here at this Whole Foods location against the point system. It’s an unfair attendance policy because we don’t have sick days. If there is any reason why we miss a day of work, it goes on our work record as a demerit. So if we are sick and we decide we don’t want to handle peoples’ food today because we don’t want to get them sick or get our co-workers sick, we get a point. If we get hurt on the job, we get a point. If a friend or family member gets sick--or dies, and we go to take care of them or go to the funeral, we get a point.

What kind of life is that for us to live?"
Whole Foods Strikers

At Jason’s Deli on Dearborn Street near City Hall, WOCC protested the firing of Shakita Moore, who had objected to racial and gender harassment from managers and co-workers. Moore, an African American, said that she had been subjected to inappropriate touching  and repeatedly,”…. threatened with 'a punch in the face'".  The managers and co-workers involved were never disciplined.

Other female WOCC members have also reported similar kinds of harassment at other businesses.

A striker named Alexis called her downtown Mrs. Field’s store, ”...one of the most corrupt businesses I have ever worked for.” She explained that checks are often wrong or not paid on time. In addition, the store was without air conditioning for three weeks even though the workers labor in front of hot ovens every 8 hour shift.

“When the working class is under attack. What do we do? Stand up fight back.”

Fight for $15 was able to shut down a Wendy’s, a Subway and a Mrs. Fields during the August 1st action, but many of the businesses where they picketed stayed open, even after some workers had walked out. 

WOCC members hope their acts of courage will help cut through the terrible fear that grips many low wage workers and keeps them from resisting the injustices being done to them. Many workers fear that as bad as things are, they could always get worse because of company retaliation. Courage is not evenly distributed among the human species. It usually takes a bold few to awaken it among the majority.

Living wage is a human right

But is this fear justified? 

According to Tammy Binford who writes frequently on employment law, the Fight for $15 strikes may be protected actions under the National Labor Relations Act. She and other labor law experts have urged companies to be cautious about retaliation. One Missouri legal firm issued a statement saying:

“Even though failing to report for work or even walking out during the middle of a shift impacts an employer’s operations and may in fact violate an attendance policy, depending on the circumstances, an employer may actually be prohibited from disciplining [employees] or questioning them about such protected activities.”

However the reality is that companies already get away with illegally firing workers for union activities. One recent study estimated that about one third of union organizing campaigns result in illegal firings. These can take months or even years to go through the legal system. When companies are fined for illegal activities, they just accept that as the cost of doing business.  

A manager can always find a reason to fire someone. Everyone makes mistakes and a mistake that would ordinarily be overlooked, can mean termination for a pro-union worker. It doesn’t even have to be a mistake. Managers can sabotage something and blame it on a pro-union worker. Managers can promise favorable treatment to another employee to make up lies. The possibilities are endless.

Our legal system depends upon how much you can afford to pay for “justice”. Powerful corporations have deep pockets. Low wage workers have empty pockets. No wonder 79% of American workers think they would be subject to termination for joining a union campaign. The fear is out there and yeah, it is very real.

As of this writing 60 Walmart workers have been fired for going on strike in actions sponsored by Our Walmart, an employee group fighting the retail giant for a better life.

“When workers rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back!”

While WOCC members do hope for some protection through the legal system, they know they can’t count it. So WOCC workers are building a culture of solidarity, where working people look out for one another, care for each other and stand up for one another. One of the chants often heard on the picketline was directed to non-striking workers,” You’re not alone! We’ve got your back!” 

I saw an example of this at the Walgreens at the corner of State and Washington in the Loop when Walgreens workers already on strike persuaded all but 1 of the remaining employees to join them. I watched as tearful, but joyful workers walked out the front door to join their striking co-workers and receive a heartfelt welcome from WOCC members. It was one of those small moments of love and solidarity that are part of any movement building.

Fight for $15

A culture of solidarity is not easy to build in our dog-eat-dog-cat-eat-mouse economy when competition for even the lousiest jobs can be fierce. Turnover is high in the low wage world and it’s often hard to get to know co-workers very well. There are barriers of race, gender, immigration status, language, religion, age and all of the other things that divide us. Then there are the everyday personal hurts and betrayals that can make us cautious around other people.  

Solidarity requires a level of trust that some people find almost frightening. But once it happens, it is a transformative experience. Solidarity does not imply uniformity. Naturally there will be disagreement and conflict as workers figure out how best to resist. But if there is an atmosphere of mutual respect, these normal disagreements can be resolved in ways that make solidarity even stronger.

This kind of solidarity can build a movement that in the face of terrible repression can not only survive, but prevail. During the civil rights movement days they called it “building the beloved community”:

“It is a positive force confronting the forces of injustice, and utilizes the righteous indignation and the spiritual, emotional and intellectual capabilities of people as the vital force for change and reconciliation.” ----The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change

Get up. Get down. Chicago is a union town!

When they can, WOCC will shut down a workplace to draw attention to injustices. This is the classic labor tactic to force management to negotiate. But even when they cannot shut a store down, WOCC members draw attention to how these companies create poverty through their employment policies. They want to inspire workers to join strikes, but they also want to reach the general public.

Fight for $15

In a big city like Chicago customers have often choices. There is evidence that Walmart’s terrible reputation has cost it customers who can shop at companies like Costco who have more humane employee relations.  If companies retaliate against striking workers, it can rebound against them as customers protest on social media, write angry letters to newspapers or choose other places to spend their money.

WOCC members hope the power of expanded solidarity will win them major gains. After a WOCC action on April 24, a number of WOCC members did see small improvements in their workplaces. No one in WOCC has any illusions that gaining the $15 an hour wage will be quick or easy.

“No burgers! No fries! We want our wages supersized!”

Robert Wilson Jr, a worker at the Navy Pier MacDonalds told of not getting a promotion for seven years and then receiving a manager’s blue shirt and an additional 25 cents an hour after becoming involved with WOCC:

“Yeah, we need a lot more. This organization [WOCC] backed me up and gave me the courage to do what I have to do to get what I deserve. This business has skyrocketing profits but all we get is chump change.”

Crystal, a striking worker at Nordstrom's told of her experience with WOCC:

“I’m here to stand with my co-workers and because I know striking works. Before the last strike when Nordstroms found out about it they gave us a quarter raise to try and keep us from going on strike. So I said thank you for the quarter but I’m still going on strike. Yesterday I was offered a promotion that will come with, I think, a $1.25 an hour raise. Again I said thank you and I went on strike.”

A solidarity culture can still have a positive effect within a workplace even if it has not yet won significant material gains.   Workers who have hope for the future feel better about themselves and others around them. This can reduce workplace stress and make hard alienating work less unpleasant. And management, please take note: For those who work directly with the public, it can result in a better customer experience. 

“What’s outrageous? Poverty wages!”

WOCC members are often asked how receiving $15 an hour wage would change their lives. Some common themes come up. Here are a few. People talk about wanting to adequately provide for their families and spend more time with their children. People want to go to school to achieve career and personal goals. They are concerned about health issues and having access to medical care. They want more rest and relaxation and be able go out to a movie or a club, or even take an extended vacation.

Yet huge companies making mega-profits treat these modest aspirations as if they were dangerously subversive ideas, a threat to the very existence of American capitalism. Through their own lobbying teams and through trade groups like the National Restaurant Association, the Chamber of Commerce and the American Legislative Exchange Council, they spend millions to enforce poverty upon American workers.

They take aim at minimum wage standards, health and safety regulations, wage-hour laws, discrimination laws, the right to join a union and so much more. What they cannot achieve by legislation, they achieve by attacking the government agencies charged with enforcing labor laws or by financing deep pockets lawsuits in the court system.

“I’ve been at Macy’s for 3 years and I just received a 25 cent raise as a result of the April 24th strike and that’s a small victory...but that is not what we are fighting for. We are fighting for $15 an hour. The people who run these companies aren’t struggling to raise their children and live their lives, but we’re the ones making all of this money for them. So we shouldn’t have to struggle either.”----a Macy’s worker

Poverty is a policy. With the power of wealth large companies help shape US economic policy and the result one of the worst poverty rates among comparable nations. In Chicago, the neighborhoods with the most deadly violence are the poorest in the city. In Chicago one third of the children live in poverty when family income is the best single predictor of student success. Thanks to the ravages of poverty with its physical and mental stresses, there are Chicago neighborhoods where the health of the residents is worse than in some countries in the Global South. The list goes on…

Now imagine a Chicago transformed by a drastic reduction in poverty, a Chicago that has fought for $15 and won.

“Strike! Strike! Strike! Organizing is a right!”

When the heroes in company uniforms strike for $15 they are striking on behalf of low wage workers across the city. They are striking for an economic recovery that starts from the bottom up instead of being stalled at the top with bank bailouts and obscene CEO bonuses. Along with other low wage workers across the nation, WOCC is on the frontlines of a non-violent war on poverty. They need the solidarity of the rest of the working class who will also benefit from rising wage levels. The rest of the working class can also learn from the militancy of the WOCC example.

“It’s not just us out here fighting, there are people across the country going through the same struggles, maybe even worse struggles, than us.We’re making history right now, we’re showing that minimum wage isn’t enough, this poverty wage isn’t enough." ----Andrew Little, stockroom worker at Victoria's Secret.
 In the classic French film The Wages of Fear, four desperate men drive a  truckload of explosives over a dangerous mountain road, risking their lives for a paycheck. Our wages of fear are the poverty level paychecks that are enforced through intimidation and reprisals. But the dysfunctional economy they have created with vast wealth at the top, grinding poverty at the bottom and a shocking economic inequality can also be socially explosive.

Societies that allow such vast inequalities have historically experienced social upheavals that include civil disorder and even revolution. Today’s mega-corporations would be wise to calculate that possibility into their future financial projections.

Fight for $15
August 1 strike rally attended by WOCC and allies from around Chicago.


Sources consulted

"We Are Slowly Dying": Fast ­Food Workers Launch Strike for Living Wage and Right to Unionize Democracy Now!

Fast-food worker strikes continue to spread in major U.S. Cities by Tammy Binford

Stop the Bullying, Wal-Mart Bloomberg Businessweek

Fast Food Strikes Catch Fire by David Moberg

Standing up for Shakita by Trish Kahle

Dropping the Ax: Illegal Firings During Union Election Campaigns, 1951-2007 by John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer

Worker wages: Wendy's vs. Wal-Mart vs. Costco by Emily Jane Fox

 The King Philosophy bv the King Center

A WGN radio interview with Whole Foods striker Trish Kahle

Can McDonalds Make A Profit While Paying $15 An Hour? by Bryce Covert

 


Is Fight for $15 making unions cool again?

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"I think what's very amazing about this campaign and what a lot of people have not really talked about is that it is making the union movement cool again."---Lorraine Chavez of Fight for $15

It was a warm late August afternoon when I got to Federal Plaza in Chicago for the most recent Fight for $15 strike rally. Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech alternated with urban dance mixes booming from the speakers as the DJ made last minute technical adjustments. The stage was set with a colorful banner across the back as organizers handed out red balloons to anyone who wanted one...or even two or three. 

Members of Action Now and other community allies were waiting for the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC) strikers to arrive. WOCC is the Chicago group coordinating the Fight for $15 campaign in the Windy City. Fight for $15 is seeking a $15 an hour wage for fast food and retail workers.

Soon a bus pulled up with one group of strikers. Two more groups soon came on foot to cheers as the crowd grew to about 250-300. Billed as more of a celebration than a rally, there were short speeches (translated from Spanish and English) mixed with throbbing music, indigenous drumming, story-telling through dance and explosive spoken word poetry.

What? No dull speeches from high ranking union officials in expensive suits?

Fight for $15
Poetry at Fight for $15: August 29 2013

Instead WOCC members eloquently communicated how they need $15 an hour to support families as well as individuals. They were countering  a myth spread by some in the business media that low wage jobs are “teenage” jobs and thus unworthy of family supporting paychecks.

Tell that to WOCC members like this immigrant from Belize:

“I'm fighting for $15 because I have a family to support.... $15 will mean that I can take care of my kids and my family who comes from Belize and take care of my family that [still] lives in Belize.”

 As Whole Foods worker Matt Camp pointed out in a recent interview, only a small percentage of fast food and retail workers are teens working summer jobs: 

“Most of us are in our late 20's and early 30's. Many of us support families or are paying off massive college debts. Some of us have worked in this industry for decades and still make less than $10 an hour.  It is time that we renovate the image of low wage workers, and indeed the image of American workers generally, to the rest of the country.”
Fight for $15
Matt Camp (right) at Fight for $15: August 29 2013

Besides, there are teens working in fast food and retail who live in impoverished families where their income puts food on the table for their siblings and the adult(s) in the home. There are also teens who have children themselves. Not every working teen is saving up for the latest electronic gimcrack. 

WOCC members are very aware that if they win, it could improve their communities dramatically. Charles Brown of Action Now put it this way:

“In 2012 Chicago had 506 homicides and what I discovered is that of cities in America, Chicago has also has the third largest poverty rate in America. We know that poverty creates the conditions for violence and crime. Raising wages in Chicago for low wage workers which can create good paying jobs is the most effective way to save lives and build stronger families and neighborhoods."
Fight for $15
Action Now! at Fight for $15: August 29 2013

Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky took it a step further saying that $15 an hour would enable workers to buy things and create millions of new jobs,”So when you win this fight for $15 an hour and a union, America wins too."

Fight for $15 could reduce violent crime, improve family life and be a job creator for millions? That sure looks good to me.

Although Fight for $15 organizers had originally planned for strike actions in 35 cities, the number exploded to at least 58 on the August 29 strike date. In an interview held a few days after the August 29 strike, WOCC organizer Lorraine Chavez attributed this growth to the lingering effects of the 2008 financial crash and the subsequent Great Recession.

Lorraine Chavez
Lorraine Chavez at an earlier Fight for $15 action

According to Chavez, since many workers lost their middle level jobs and were thrust into the low wage sector, Americans are waking up to the possibility that this could be their future too. This creates more support for efforts like Fight for $15.

Chavez is optimistic about Fight for $15 for another reason:"

”I think what's very amazing about this campaign and what a lot of people have not really talked about is that it is making the union movement cool again."

The US labor movement and a rebirth of cool

The popular use of the term “cool” came out of the world of jazz in the 1940’s. Jazz has its roots in the African American struggle and has long been associated with rebellion. Jazz involves improvisation, experimentation, opening up to myriad influences, taking chances and breaking rules.

In that sense, Fight for $15 is very cool with its bold campaigns of minority strikes, noisy public demonstrations and civil disobedience; its willingness to throw out the old union rulebook and experiment. It is simultaneously pushing for a rise in the federal minimum wage while also fighting for a living wage on the state and local levels. It is also directly confronting mega-corporations like McDonalds, Burger King, Darden, Macy’s, Target, Sears, Subway, Victorias’s Secret, Forever 21, Walgreens etc.

Fight for $15
Fight for $15: August 29 2013

As one UFCW official explained to me, no one really knows how to organize low wage workers under the present economic conditions. So the union movement needs to try different strategies and tactics. He marveled at the idea that Fight for $15 doesn’t organize a union first and then strike, Fight for $15 strikes to organize a union. He wants to start a Fight for $15 in his own geographical area and mobilize direct action by the growing number of low wage workers.

Fight for $15 draws public attention to the dangerous income inequality in this country, building on the shift in public conversation that resulted from Occupy Wall Street. Veterans of the Occupy movement still lament the fact that it left no national organization behind it.

Perhaps Fight for $15 and the other union efforts of low wage workers are that organization being born. When I was in the Occupy movement, I heard some activists write off the labor movement as useless or even worse.

It’s true union membership has shrunk to a small minority of the American workforce. It’s true that the leadership of the AFL-CIO has failed to meet the challenge of 21st century capitalism. Many workers either know nothing about unions or have absorbed considerable anti-union propaganda.

Lorraine Chavez explains how Fight for $15 is beginning to change that sad reality:

“[Here is] a generation of folks in their twenties and thirties who never grew up with a union, have never had union jobs and maybe their parents had union jobs but lost them. They are looking at the union movement, not as something that's stodgy, old and past its prime, but as something that's exciting and new and the way forward for hope in our lives."

Fight for $15 is making the union movement cool in other ways besides experimenting with bold strategies and tactics. In a segregated city like Chicago with its often insular neighborhood culture, Fight for $15 is multi-racial, multi-generational, multi-gender and includes both documented and undocumented immigrants. There are workers who speak only English, workers who speak only their native language and workers who are multi-lingual. Fight for $15 has members with very little formal education and members who have or are working on college degrees.

Fight for $15 is a microcosm of American diversity, especially when compared with the CEO’s and top management of the companies it is fighting. Its vision of broad solidarity among diverse peoples rejects the traditional American racial and gender caste system. It is in direct confrontation with the dog-eat-dog-cat-eat-mouse neo-liberal individualism which currently drives US capitalism.

It is social justice unionism at work.

Fight for $15
Fight for $15: August 29 2013

Fight for $15 has begun to generate a fierce sense of pride among its members. Disparaged as mere burger flippers and cash register ringers, they are now part of a working class liberation movement that is global in scope. A McDonald’s worker here can compare their situation with McDonalds workers around the world. Cashiers and stock clerks at posh clothing chains can make connections with their counterparts who manufacture those clothes in Bangladesh or Honduras.

How might $15 an hour affect the American economy?

Winning $15 an hour for the fast food and retail sector would push wages up for other workers and could result in a major restructuring of the American economy and society. 

This has happened before in US history when unions became cool. In the 1930’s a rebellion of mass picketing and sit-down strikes began in the giant manufacturing plants of the time. It pushed the government into passing sweeping New Deal social legislation and resulted in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) which set out to organize the unorganized.The rebellion involved years of often bloody confrontations with Corporate America.

1937 sit-down strikeThe 1937 UAW-CIO sit-down strike in the auto industry

CIO organizers were told that low wage industrial workers were not suited for union membership because they were “unskilled”, “uneducated”, or “just dumb foreigners”. Fast food and retail organizers hear similar things today.

But the CIO had a broad vision of social justice unionism for the low wage workers of the Great Depression. Millions eventually joined the CIO. Like the Fight for $15 movement today, many CIO members were immigrants or the children of immigrants. The CIO’s success in auto and steel inspired workers in other sectors of the economy, including restaurant and retail workers, to stage their own mass pickets and sit-downs. The CIO working class victories contributed to the great economic boom of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

The union movement becomes cool when victories seem possible. That is the challenge set before Fight for $15 and the low wage workers movement of today.

To remain cool, the union movement must organize

Jazz is cool, but jazz is also hard work. It is is more than just experimentation and improvisation. It’s also long hours of practice and improving one’s musical skills. It requires cooperation among the musicians. It’s about give and take and musicians being able to inspire one another. In short, it takes organization.

Fight for $15
Music at Fight for $15: August 29 2013

The union movement, with its vision of worker solidarity, is not all that much different. It takes bold creative action, cooperation AND organization. The question of how Fight for $15 organizes has become the subject of debate among labor activists and their allies.

The tactic of minority strikes when not all workers walk off the job is one of the weapons in the Fight for $15 arsenal. These strikes are considered to be “protected concerted activity” under the National Labor Relations Act(NLRA) passed in 1935 as part of the New Deal.

Fight for $15
Fight for $15: August 29 2013

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is clear about its role in enforcing this right:

“The law we enforce gives employees the right to act together to try to improve their pay and working conditions or fix job-related problems, even if they aren't in a union. If employees are fired, suspended, or otherwise penalized for taking part in protected group activity, the National Labor Relations Board will fight to restore what was unlawfully taken away.”

Today’s fast food and retail workers are using labor rights won by low wage workers during the 1930’s working class rebellion. However enforcing US labor law is an issue as the NLRB is inadequately funded and its legal cases sometimes take years to resolve. So far there has relatively little open retaliation in the Fight for $15 campaign. However Walmart has fired 60 low wage workers who participated in minority strikes during the Our Walmart campaign.

Fight for $15
Our Walmart at Fight for $15: August 29 2013

The Fight for $15 minority strike tactic has come under criticism for being primarily a PR tactic and for exposing workers to company retaliation despite whatever the NLRB says.  One of these critics is Jarrod Shanahan:

“The problem is, a successful union drive comes from the workers themselves. And there is a gigantic difference between a union drive and a public relations campaign, which is what FFF is corralling these brave workers into.

 In a union drive, the bosses shouldn't find out that it's going on, or who is organizing it, until everyone in the shop has their back. That way if there is a move to fire them, everyone strikes.”

Shanahan and other critics also point to the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) as a problem. SEIU has been a major financial backer of Fight for $15 and has provided a small army of paid organizers to help direct the campaign. SEIU has a poor record of union democracy and has been involved in bitter jurisdictional fights with other unions. SEIU has also cut sweetheart deals with mega-corporations behind the backs of its own members.

In an interview conducted by e-mail, Chicago Whole Foods worker and WOCC activist Matt Camp addresses some of these criticisms:

“It's true that SEIU has earned its reputation as top down and bureaucratic, but in this case they are taking workers out to strike. And I don't think that this can be emphasized enough. Lately, organized labor has been bending over backward to avoid a strike, and here we have one of the strongest unions in the country telling workers 'Go out and strike, it's your right --- make your workplace better' and not only that but providing us with PR and legal support. The effect has been nothing short of phenomenal.”

Trish Kahle, another Chicago Whole Foods worker, points out that that SEIU is not the only organization involved, citing the efforts of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the United Electrical Workers (UE), the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and various community organizations, as well as workers who take up the campaign independent of any organization. Workers centers around the country have also played a role.

The result has been a movement that varies widely around the USA.

Fight for $15
Trish Kahle(right) at an earlier Fight for $15 action

An inside look at Chicago’s Fight for $15 campaign

According to Matt Camp, Chicago is probably the city most focused on building a strong union structure.  WOCC organizers do tabling outside of targeted workplaces, talk to people on breaks or after work, and pass out flyers for events. They make use of social media like Facebook and Twitter. They organize movie screenings.

At WOCC meetings workers discuss their individual struggles in front of a sympathetic audience, rejecting the idea that their plight is their fault. There is a Woman’s Caucus,”...where issues specifically related to women in the workplace are hashed out.”

Fight for $15
Speaking out at Fight for $15: August 29 2013

Camp also does not disparage the media PR campaign saying that its an important part of their organizing:

Our media focus plays a huge role in this in terms of getting the word out and putting the bosses on notice. Since we practice minority strikes, we can't really hurt sales, production etc. But publicly criticizing our employers for their abuses is a powerful weapon in our hands and the more media we have, the more public scrutiny our employers come under and the more likely they are to not retaliate and also to make concessions.  Also, we have to inspire other workers in other workplaces to take action.”

Developing worker leadership is another important part of WOCC’s strategy. Lorraine Chavez calls it the “most rewarding parts of this campaign.” Initially the “natural leaders” came forth, the ones willing to talk to other workers and bring them into the struggle. Then another group of leaders emerged from the workers who were recruited by the initial “natural leaders”. WOCC has done education on unfair labor practices, and brought in guest speakers on the history of the labor movement (especially the  Chicago story).

According to Chavez, WOCC used the the August 29 strike to deepen leadership training:

“Workers from across the city got together and met each other for leadership training on how to be a spokesperson, on how to effectively organize other workers, and many of the worker leaders were leading those very workshops. It is an extremely moving and inspiring process.”

WOCC’s initial focus was on the downtown Loop and trendy Magnificent Mile with its many expensive retail outlets. This was later expanded to neighborhoods like Logan Square, Albany Park and Brighton Park as more workers became involved and community organizations came out in support.

Fight for $15
Brighton Park community supporters at Fight for $15: August 29 2013

WOCC members can point to small successes because of the strikes. Workers at some companies have received promotions. There have been small and sometimes more substantial wage increases. Some companies have improved breakrooms and provided lockers for workers. At Whole Foods, management backed off from a hated points system for absences and was forced by the NLRB to post an official notice informing Whole Foods workers of their union rights. WOCC members report getting more respect from managers.

And workers at a Dunkin Donuts won an especially cool concession from management. Air conditioning.

Looking toward the future

Fight for $15 is part of a growing and diverse low wage workers movement that also includes car wash workers, farm workers, home healthcare workers, adjunct college teachers, Walmart workers, warehouse workers, factory workers, port truck drivers and more. Many of these are workers of color and many are women as one would expect given the USA’s racial and gender caste system.

No one can predict if this growing movement can gain the organizational strength to confront some of the wealthiest corporations on this planet---- and win big.

But one thing is certain, the most exploited and oppressed workers have played a crucial role in this country’s development. The abolition of slavery totally transformed this nation, slaves being the no-wage workers of their day. The abolition of child labor and the first worker health and safety laws came out of the struggles of low wage workers. The struggles of low wage workers helped pave the way for Social Security, unemployment compensation and workers compensation. Low wage workers were were important participants in the civil rights movement which made racial and gender discrimination illegal and helped lead to such social reforms as food stamps, Medicaid and Medicare.

Low wage workers have been involved in some of the most important socio-economic transformations in this nation’s history. They have often been in the forefront of the union movement. Now low wage workers are challenging a 21st century economy gone mad with corporate greed and excess. They are on the frontlines of a class war. 

It would be really cool if the rest of us joined with them.

Fight for $15


Photos of Fight for $15 by Bob "Bobbosphere" Simpson

Sources consulted:

Fast food strikes go super-sized in clash over wages by Jeff Cox

Fast Food Workers Fight For $15 an Hour by Jarrod Shanahan

Labor Day 2013: Things Have Never Looked Worse for Workers—Or

Brighter by David Moberg

Right-Wing Media's History Of Attacking The Minimum Wage by Craig Harrington

Fast Food Workers Strike: What is and what isn’t the Fight for Fifteen campaign by Adam Weaver

Assessing the Fight for 15 by Trish Kahle

Don’t fear 15 by Curtis Black

Fast Food Strikes Hit a Record 58 Cities, As Campaign’s Tactics Are Debatedby Micah Uetricht

Interview with Whole Foods worker and WOCC organizer Matthew Camp

Interview with WOCC organizer Lorraine Chavez

 

The Perfect Storm that is engulfing our biosphere.

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There is a Perfect Storm engulfing the biosphere, the convergence of  neo-liberalism, climate change and militarism. It is  many times more devastating then the one of book and movie fame.

In October of 1991 a confluence of powerful weather systems created a monster storm in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. It killed the entire crew of the fishing boat Andrea Gail among other storm casualties. Journalist Sebastian Junger used the phrase “The Perfect Storm” as the title of his book about this unusual weather event. The book became the basis for a Hollywood film of the same name.

The Perfect Storm

Since then the term “perfect storm” has entered the language to mean any catastrophic collision of natural, political, or social forces that combine into a disaster greater than the sum of its parts.

Lasting only a few days, the 1991 storm was centered along the US eastern seaboard region. Neo-liberalism, climate change and militarism is “The Perfect Storm”  projected to last for years to come and one of planetary proportions

Domination of the global economy by powerful corporations and financial institutions created neo-liberal capitalism or neo-liberalism for short. It is the latest evolutionary restructuring of global capitalism, which has shown a remarkable ability to adapt to changing conditions.

The destructive effects of neo-liberalism

We can see the direct effects of neo-liberalism in the collapsing factories and deadly fires in the Bangladeshi garment industry.  We can see them in the privatization of public education in the USA and the proliferation of corporate dominated charter schools.We can see them in the melting polar ice caps as well as the number and intensity of extreme weather events. We saw them in the Iraq war; a war for control of oil resources.

Neo-liberalism seeks to reduce everything to a market commodity. Its direct attacks on working class organizations like unions; its privatization of the public sphere; and its dismantling of public welfare have dramatically increased the global gap between rich and poor.

Lately institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have indicated that perhaps neo-liberalism has gone too far, been too destructive. But it is doubtful that even these powerful organizations have either the will or the means to restrain it.

Perhaps most frightening, neo-liberalism has also contributed to global environmental degradation, most notably climate change. Its profits are heavily fueled by coal and petroleum.

The least worst case scenario for this planetary vandalism is grim enough. The worst case scenario is a mass extinction more severe than the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, when the majority of the earth’s living organisms perished because of sudden climate change.

The social effects of neo-liberalism have fueled civil resistance including strikes, occupations, mass marches and riots. From Occupy Wall Street, to Tahrir Square; from the mass strikes in South Asian garment factories to the thousands of striking teachers who jammed the streets of Chicago; from the indignados of Spain to the student strikers of Chile; from the anti-nuclear marchers of Japan to the shack dwellers movement of South Africa, the resistance to neo-liberalism is truly global.

But neo-liberalism’s global plunder have also been at the root of ethnic and religious strife, as well as wars among nations. The competition for scarce resources has led to desperate acts and appalling violence, often encouraged by authorities who find it a useful form of social control. 

As a result, an outrageous amount of the planet’s resources have been diverted into militarization. This includes the militarization of police, who now appear in armored vehicles and have easy access to automatic weapons if tear gas, plastic bullets, sound cannons and riot clubs prove inadequate for suppressing mass protests.

Even the corporate media has shown some recognition of the dismal state of capitalism today.
 
Time Magazine had an article entitled Marx’s Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World. Forbes published one called The U.K. Riots And The Coming Global Class War.Bloomberg BusinessWeek released this one: What Would Karl Marx Think?. Fortune faced up to climate change with this apocalyptic piece,”Cloudy With a Chance of Chaos”,

Oh, and lets not forget the Pentagon, always preparing for the next war(s) as shown in this report,”An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United  States National Security”.

Excerpts from some this writing would not look too out of place in your typical socialist publications. Liberals, progressives and socialists alike might be wondering if socialism is perhaps around the corner. 

So what about socialism?

Not so fast. The socialist movement is not in great shape. The twentieth century socialist movement broke up into roughly three groups: Soviet-style repressive  “communism”, social democracy and a small number of dissident socialists who embraced neither model.

Soviet-style authoritarian regimes mostly collapsed into typical capitalist countries. Those that did not, like China or Vietnam, became authoritarian market economies under repressive state domination. Vietnam is now a major destination for global corporations seeking cheap labor.

Social democracy still exists in some countries, with Scandinavia being its jewel in the crown. Social democracy did tame the worst excesses of capitalism where it took root, but its social welfare systems are now under attack from neo-liberal pressures. Social democratic parties now generally collaborate with the austerity pushed by global neo-liberalism, often as a kind of austerity-lite.

An extreme example would be the USA whose Democratic Party emerged from the Franklin Roosevelt years with a social democratic platform, but which today gives little sign that such a thing ever existed.

Both major trends of the 20th century socialist movement represent no threat to the dominant neo-liberalism of the 21st century.

As for the dissident socialists who yearn for an economy owned by the working class and a society governed in a democratic fashion, they remain a minority with relatively little organizational influence. At least not yet. But many of their best ideas have permeated the global justice movement.

Ironically, classical Marxism teaches that socialism will emerge from highly developed industrial bourgeois societies. But what if industrial civilization is creating the very economic and environmental crises that will result in its self-destruction? An old labor song says,..”we will build a new world from the ashes of the old.”

But what if the ashes are dangerously radioactive or chemically poisoned?

From global resistance to global revolution?

So what does the future hold for the diverse civil resistance confronting today’s global Perfect Storm? The World Social Forums reveal a global justice movement with competing visions of how to build economically cooperative egalitarian societies that are environmentally sustainable, appropriately technological, and practice participatory democracy. 

With the global neo-liberal elite waging a brutal well armed class war against the rest of humanity, can global resistance transform itself into global revolution? No one can say with any certainty. That is a feature of revolution, not a bug. They can erupt unexpectedly, surprising both those who welcome them and those who fear them.

The clock is ticking for finding solutions. Normally cautious scientists are ringing a clanging alarm bell about climate change while normally cautious economists are doing the same about the accelerating wealth gap between rich and poor. Even ex-generals are raising their voices against the colossal waste of human life and resources resulting from runaway militarism.

In truth, The Perfect Storm is already raging in some parts of the world.

One model of resistance and transformation

Recently climate activist Tim Decristopher visited Chicago and gave a well received talk. He stated bluntly that it is too late to stop dangerous climate change. We may be able to limit its most extreme effects, but at this point that’s the best we can hope for. So what do we do?

He pointed to Occupy Sandy as an example. When Hurricane Sandy devastated communities in the NYC area, members of Occupy Wall Street organized themselves into the Occupy Sandy relief effort, already having a network of experienced individuals with access to resources. Working directly with residents, some of whom were socially and politically conservative, they showed what was possible.

Occupy Wall Street and its new allies were able to organize Occupy Sandy as both a survival and a resistance group, one prepared to clear wreckage, search for survivors and rebuild; but also to make demands on the State as people learned how to wage an egalitarian cooperative resistance.

Dechristopher was directing his remarks toward environmental groups, but they apply to any socio-political organization. His point? That groups with experience, imagination and cooperative socio-political relationships are best prepared to deal with crises. 

70,000 years ago humanity faced the possibility of total extinction when a huge volcano in Sumatra exploded and disrupted the earth’s climate for a time. A fraction of the human population survived. We can only speculate on how they did it, but I suspect it was because they had deep experience in cooperation within their small tribal groups.

We must apply that human ability to cooperate in the face of danger to an entire planet. The Perfect Storm of neo-liberalism, climate change and militarism will not go away on its own.

Dr. King once spoke of the “fierce urgency of now.” BTW, now means NOW.


Bob "BobboSphere" Simpson has been a socialist since childhood.

The Turnaround: race, class and masculinity

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I was 4 chapters into the George Pelecanos crime fiction novel The Turnaround when a sudden chill ran down my spine. Omigod, this is the story of the Ken-Gar 5. I had to put the book down as my mind traveled to 1972 Kensington, Maryland where an ugly racial incident ended in tragedy. I had lived in nearby Wheaton until my teen years and was writing for a local underground paper when that racial clash exploded. Our paper, the Spark, had covered the story and talked to witnesses.

Three young white men, all from neighboring working class Wheaton, had driven into the small black section of Kensington called Ken-Gar on a hot summer night and thrown a firecracker at a group of black residents while yelling racial epithets. The firecracker landed near the 4 year old daughter of one of the blacks. The three whites sped down Plyers Mill Road through Ken-Gar thinking they could easily escape in their souped up fast car. 

They thought wrong. Having never been in Ken-Gar before, they didn’t realize that Plyers Mill Road dead-ended. There was only one way out of Ken-Gar. Back the way they came. After turning around and driving a short distance, they found the street blocked by angry neighborhood residents.

The Turnaround in 2012
Ken-Gar's turnaround in 2012

Similar nasty racial incidents happened frequently in Ken-Gar, but perpetrated by racists who knew they had to turn their cars around and toss their abuse on the way out. Shots had also been fired into Ken-Gar by persons unknown, but presumed to be white racists firing from across the railroad tracks that ran next to the community.

This time the incident ended with one white man shot dead, another badly beaten and one who managed to escape into a nearby wooded area. Five black men were indicted for the killing and the beating. The shooter was eventually sentenced to 10 years in prison, although at the trial he claimed to have fired at the street, not at a person. Maybe that was true. Maybe not. It all happened very fast. 

The Ken-Gar community petitioned for the release of the shooter while also issuing a statement of regret for the death and injuries that had resulted from the confrontation.

Author George Pelecanos wisely decided to alter the basic details and fictionalize the characters. Ken-Gar is renamed Heathrow Heights but remains a small isolated black community in Maryland’s southern Montgomery County.  Much of the story is placed in the present day with the characters much older.  The title of the the book, The Turnaround reveals multiple meanings as the novel progresses.

The tracks next to Ken-Gar
The tracks next to Ken-Gar in 2012

 His fictional version raises critical questions about how race, class and masculinity shape our personal lives as well as the social milieu in which we live. Pelecanos sets up the fictional confrontation in Heathrow Heights by introducing us to three young white male characters and three young black male characters. 

The white men of The Turnaround

Pelecanos describes the white male teenagers of working class Wheaton in these words:

The fathers...worked service and retail jobs. Many of them were World War II veterans. Their sons would grow up in a futile, unspoken attempt to be as tough as their old men.”

The Gran Torino that roared into Heathrow Heights on that hot summer evening contained three of those white teenagers. None of them knew that within minutes Billy Cachoris would be dead or Alex Pappas would be badly beaten and nearly blinded. Or that Pete Whitten would outrun disaster.

Billy's dad recited nasty racist jokes, even on the steps of the Greek Orthodox temple. But Billy didn't hate black people. He feared them.  He would try to prove his manhood by driving into Heathrow Heights.

Pete Whitten had college plans and financial ambitions.  Whitten didn’t fear black people. He looked down on them...and on his own white friends. It was his idea to drive into Heathrow Heights, toss a cherry pie at the first black person in range and shout,”Eat this, niggers!” 

When the confrontation begins, he will desert his friends and escape into the woods. A man had to know when the odds were against him. A man looked out for himself and puts is own interests first. A man could not be endangered by a foolish mistake involving people who were his social or racial inferiors. That was Pete’s idea of masculinity.

Alex Pappas was in the back seat, sinking down so as not to be seen. The white boy talk from Pete and Billy that evening about pussy and “banging black whores” had bored him. Alex respected his girlfriend Karen who was trapped in a bad family situation. He wanted to be comforting her after another family blowup, but she was home caring for her baby half-sister. So instead he was stuck with 2 guys he didn’t even really like very much.

John Pappas, his Greek immigrant dad, a marine veteran of the WWII Pacific campaign, was the owner of a small diner just off Dupont Circle in DC.  His dad was in the diner everyday laboring along side of the racially mixed crew. Alex worked there also. John Pappas believed that masculinity was defined by work:

”Work is what men did. Not gambling. Not freeloading or screwing off. Work.”

He paid his employees decently in cash and helped them out financially when they needed something extra. That’s what men did. Took care of their own. In return his employees were as fiercely loyal to him as he was to them. His spouse Calliope was a stay-at-home mom. She kept the household together with a complete trust in her husband, a trust that was returned in kind. As Pelecanos puts it, if John was the workhorse, it was Calliope who kept the stable clean.

Although hardly a flaming liberal, John was no racial bigot. Nor was he a cruel sexist who abused his wife. Alex had tried live up to his father’s definition of manhood, but it was an incomplete definition, one that left Alex adrift. John tried to isolate himself from the maelstrom of social change that characterized the 1960’s. So when it came to working out the social meaning of that tumultuous and confusing time, Alex was on his own.

Because Alex wanted to fit in, he tolerated the racism and sexism of his friends, though with no real enthusiasm. He would suffer a terrible beating on the streets of Heathrow Heights for his inability to resist what he knew in his heart was terribly wrong. A man adrift is a man in danger. 

The black men of The Turnaround

“I’d like to have my own gas station someday, make real money. Live in a place where redneck white boys don’t drive by my mother when she’s walking home from the bus stop up on the boulevard after getting off work. Calling my mother a nigger after she’s been on her feet all day, wearing that cleaning uniform of hers. She who never judged anyone.”----- James Monroe

Three black teenage residents of Heathrow Heights, James Monroe, Raymond Monroe and Charles Baker spent that hot Maryland afternoon before the racial attack drinking pop or beer. They talked about the girls they wanted to experience, though none of them had girlfriends at the time.

James worked part-time at the local Esso service station, pumping gas and cleaning windshields in those long ago days before self-service. He was the first black teen hired by the owner. James took great pride in his work. A man needed a job to follow the masculinity code that James embraced. A man also needed to go the extra mile on that job. Not for the boss. But for his own sense of self-worth.

This impressed the service station owner who offered to pay half the tuition for a mechanics class. James was following in the footsteps of his dad Ernest Monroe, a bus mechanic at DC Transit. Ernest, handy with tools, took pride in keeping up their small bungalow by making prompt repairs and keeping it freshly painted. That’s what men did. Fixed what was broken.

Ernest spent evenings with his wife Alameda, watching TV and reading the Washington Post. Ernest Monroe never met John Pappas, but they would have understood each other. A man stays faithful to his spouse. A man works hard to support his family. A man lives a quiet life within a cocoon of work and home.

Alameda cleaned houses for white families. She was a proud Christian woman, even expressing compassion for the wounded George Wallace, lying in a hospital bed at the nearby Holy Cross hospital after the 1972 assassination attempt.

It was Ernest who told James to look after Raymond who was struggling with his own masculine role. Raymond had a juvie record  for vandalism and petty theft. James hoped to get Raymond a job at the Esso station and put him on the right path to manhood, especially because Raymond was spending too much time with Charles Baker.

Raymond was young and unformed. Baker’s influence would be toxic.

Baker, the child of an abusive family, carried a dangerous smoldering rage in his heart. Baker had once attacked a young man armed with a box cutter who questioned his manhood, breaking the man’s arm over his knee.  For Charles, manhood was anger and aggression, both verbal and physical. Fuck with Charles Baker and he would introduce you into a world of pain.

James thought Charles Baker was on a hell-bound train and didn’t want Raymond along for the ride. James believed that a man needed to put some boundaries around his machismo. James had tempered some of his early anger at white people by working and going to school with them. They were not his friends, but he learned that at least some of them were  OK. 

All three young black men shared one thing though, an increasing frustration with the white boys who drove recklessly through the neighborhood tossing objects and screaming racial epithets. Men should not allow that to go on unchallenged. Violence must be met with violence.

Raymond was especially stressed because his mom had recently been a target of verbal abuse. Charles called them “white bitches” and offered to “shoot the motherfuckers.” Raymond felt a need to impress Charles, something that James noted with trepidation. 

James thought the white boys were cowards, too scared to get out of their fast cars. But James also had recently bought a gun,”...just to scare those punks.” He had no desire to kill anyone, just to frighten them off.  But plans involving men and firearms easily go awry. That evening Charles urged that the gun be fired at Billy, already lying on the street bleeding from a blow to face. And it was Charles who would smash the face of Alex Pappas with his fist and his boot.

Masculinity and Race

Gender and race are both social constructions. In the USA of 1972, those social constructions were undergoing a major remodeling. The young people of Wheaton and Heathrow Heights were now living in a world where rigid gender and racial hierarchies were being challenged.

Wheaton’s population was overwhelmingly white. Wheaton young white men normally had little contact with black people. In their white isolation, a culture of white masculine supremacy was easy to maintain with its racist jokes and a variety of racial epithets. Part of that culture was verbal harassment and vandalism, as well as physical assaults on the small number of black people in the area.

For some of Wheaton’s white male population, masculinity included the Wheaton white boy tradition of visiting Swann Street or 14th and T Streets in DC to engage the services of black prostitutes. Treating them in a disrespectful degrading manner was all part of the “experience”. Billy and Pete loved talking about it. Alex was embarrassed by it.  The masculine code for dealing with young white women was generally very sexist, but racism made their treatment of young black women even worse. Sexism mixed with racism made for a nasty brew.

People like Pete and Billy and to a lesser degree Alex, did not understand what throwing a pie at a black person really meant to the residents. Their white isolation blinded them. After Pete Whitten ran, Billy got out of the car and tried to apologize.. But what was a minor prank to the 3 Wheaton boys, was deeply hurtful to the Heathrow Heights community.  The white boys would pay for the sum total of racial incidents that had plagued the community.

The civil rights and black power movement had led to a greater assertiveness. While neither SNCC or the Black Panther Party had ever been in Heathrow Heights, their indirect influence was felt there. James, Raymond and Charles were not “political” but felt that as black men, it was imperative to stand up against any gross manifestations of white supremacy. 

James thought that ignoring minor racial affronts was part of maintaining his masculine dignity. A man didn’t sink to their level. Raymond was still figuring it all out. But for Charles, his earlier ordeal of domestic neglect and sexual abuse had removed any inhibitions about violence.

Part of their code of black masculinity was a strong desire to protect the dignity of their mothers. Maryland’s history of slavery and segregation included a brutal tradition of exploiting black women. Defending their community from attacks is what men were supposed to do. If that meant whipping some white boy’s ass, then so be it.

Both the black and white young men grew up thinking that violence was part of manhood. A man had to be tough, even if he was not the aggressor. Ernest Monroe had taught each of his sons to “walk like a man”, showing confidence at all times. In both Wheaton and Heathrow Heights, fighting among young men was not uncommon. A man had to be prepared to defend himself, his friends and his family. The threat of violence was accepted as part of everyday life. 

This came in handy when the US government was scouring the country for soldiers to fight in the Vietnam War. Communities like Wheaton and Heathrow Heights sent more young men to fight than the upscale Montgomery County communities like Chevy Chase or Potomac.

The Heathrow Heights residents petitioned for the release of the shooter, a proud black man who had been driven to desperation by the racist attacks on the community. But they also expressed regret for the death of Billy. What the white boys had done was wrong. But no one deserved to die that night. In a better world, a non-racist world, none of it would have happened.

Except for Pete Whitten, all the survivors of that violent night in Heathrow Heights would bear the consequences of that violence for decades to come.

When the book switches to the present, we find out how it affected each one of them.

Alex, permanently scarred in the face and plagued with guilt over Billy’s death, abandoned his dreams of becoming a writer and instead took over the coffee shop. He mourns for his son killed in the Iraq War. Another pointless death in the often gray world of Alex Pappas. He delivers free pastries to the wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, finding some solace in that. He is still adrift in ways he does not understand.

James Monroe was sentenced to prison for 10 years for the shooting. Because he stabbed an inmate in a prison altercation, he pulled another 10 years. His dream of opening a service station dashed, he works in an unheated semi-legal garage for minimum wage.

Charles Baker went to prison for a shorter time after the Heathrow Heights confrontation, but became a career criminal and returned to prison several times. He forms opportunistic relationships with black women whom he exploits, using charm to lure them into to the traps he sets.

Much like Alex, Raymond is also consumed with guilt. He saw what incarceration had done to his brother James and the death of Billy continues to haunt him. Still grieving for his wife who had died of breast cancer and worried about his son deployed to Afghanistan, Raymond finds some solace in his physical therapy work with wounded soldiers at Walter Reed.

The only one to escape unscathed was the amoral Pete Whitten, who unlike the amoral Charles Baker, had the advantage of being white and headed for a law career. He is now a prominent and wealthy member of the bar. He has long abandoned the scruffy world of Wheaton for the comfort of upper class Chevy Chase.

The living characters meet again in the 21st century to resolve for better and for worse, what had begun in the Heathrow Heights of 1972. Pelecanos mixes both tragedy and hope in that unexpected reunion, as the book hurtles toward a climax of both violence and reconciliation.

The civil war in the working class

The fictional confrontation of The Turnaround as well as the real events that inspired it were one more battle in an ongoing civil war: the civil war within the working class. It began in the colonial legislatures of 17th century Virginia and Maryland when black and white labor were separated into a racial caste system.

White supremacy was born then and became closely tied to the already prevailing male supremacy. White male supremacy developed traditions that were self replicating, aided by a ruling class who used these as a means of labor control. That pattern spread, adapting to changing times in a Darwinian evolutionary fashion.

There have been many instances when white labor and black labor have maintained a sometimes precarious solidarity. But all to often it is been white workers fighting to keep their higher status against efforts to achieve racial parity.This civil war within the working class has left deep scars on the USA.  Even today, it is hard to have a rational public discussion about race, as if the nation is suffering from a massive case of PTSD.

This civil war pitting one part of the working class against the other has come with a price tag, one that goes beyond the countless personal tragedies that have resulted. A weakened and divided working class has ceded  too much power to the wealthy. As a result, the US working class standard of living lags behind other comparable nations. 

Although not conscious of it, Billy, Pete and Alex were soldiers on the wrong side of that civil war. Drafted into a system of white male supremacy at birth where even a pie becomes a psychological weapon of war, they failed to challenge that system. In real life some white people in Wheaton and the surrounding areas did openly challenge the racism of that time, becoming race rebels and allying with black activists. But they remained a minority, however well intentioned. 

Ending this civil war within the working class is imperative. The ravages of neo-liberal capitalism cannot successfully be confronted with the present level of racial division, despite the gains that have been. After all, we did elect a black president, even if he has proven to be a disappointment to many. 

George Pelecanos writes crime fiction, not socio-political analysis. But as The Turnaround reaches its conclusion in the present day, Alex, Raymond and James are struggling not to forgive and forget, but to forgive and remember---and move toward positive action together. The women in their lives will become involved too. They have to be. The men cannot do it alone. 

We now know that as a social construct, gender is a spectrum, not a set of rigid categories. Sticking with rigid gender roles like traditional masculinity and femininity is the road to perdition. It won’t do a damned thing to end racism. Or overcome neo-liberal capitalism.

Distorting the bitter history of racism and sexism only helps the wealthy minority who profit from them. Neo-liberal capitalism produces far too many people with the cold blooded class arrogance of a Pete Whitten combined with the violence of a Charles Baker. They fill the halls of power from Washington DC to Wall Street.

We can do better.


Ken-Gar in 2012
Ken-Gar in 2012

This review first appeared in Red Wedge Magazine

Sources consulted

Twisted” by George Pelecanos- New Yorker magazine: An account of his own years growing up in the Wheaton area. Requires registration to read entire online article, but available in full in the print edition. 

5 Ken-Gar residents arrested for murder after racists attack their community by the Spark Collective (October 6 1972)

Ken-Gar has a long history of harassment by white racists” by the Spark Collective (October 31 1972)

“Slaying Puts End To Prank: Youth Killed After Throwing Firecrackers”

by Edward Walsh- Washington Post (Aug 20, 1972)

“Ken-Gar Residents, Officials Discuss Slaying of Youth, 18” by Claudia Levy- Washington Post (August 31 1972)

“Trial Opens In Death at Kensington” by LaBarbara Bowman- Washington Post (Nov 27, 1973)

“Didn't Intend to Kill Youth, Suspect Says” by LaBarbara Bowman- Washington Post (Nov 29, 1973)

“Man, 28, Guilty in Slaying: Manslaughter Is Verdict in Ken-Gar Case” by LaBarbara Bowman- Washington Post Dec 1, 1973

“Leniency Asked In Ken-Gar Death” by The Washington Post staff writers (Jan 4, 1974)

“Ken-Gar Killer Gets 10 Years” by Martha M. Hamilton- Washington (Feb 21, 1974)

Obituary for Gene P. HopkinsWashington Post (November 13 2011) Hopkins pulled the trigger that night in Ken-Gar.

Colorful balloons and courageous resistance

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"I'm proud that this Neighborhood Schools Fair came from neighborhood parents--- from neighborhood moms. And that they invited people from all over the city to be involved."--- Kim Bowsky, Chicago Public Schools teacher

You might not associate colorful balloons and a room full of school displays with a bold act of resistance, but that is what happened at Roberto Clemente High School on a gray drizzly November day in Chicago. It was the Neighborhood Schools Fair, a testament to the love that Chicago has for its neighborhood schools  and their critical importance to the city. 

It’s been a tough year for the education justice movement in Chicago. A lot of heartbreaks. A lot of tears. Fifty schools closed. Massive layoffs of teachers and other education workers. Sit-ins and multiple arrests. Parents frantic about their children's’ safety going to school. Deep emotional ties among favorite teachers and their students broken. A steady stream of insults and lies coming from City Hall and the Chicago Public Schools(CPS) top brass.

The movement really needed affirmation. Something positive and joyful. Thankfully a small circle of activist women who call themselves “The Badass Moms”,  or BAM, got together and hatched the idea of a one day exposition where neighborhood schools could set up displays, hold workshops and talk about their successes and their challenges. 

Clemente High School display
The Roberto Clemente High School display

Rousemary Vega, one of the BAM’s, told me that the goal was to create a web of relationships among neighborhood schools to build for a better educational future. This web would cross traditional racial and neighborhood lines in one of the most segregated cities in the USA, where neighborhood insularity and distrust of “outsiders” is the stuff of legend.

The Fair was not sanctioned or supported by CPS, who is hell-bent on privatization via charters and turnarounds. At first there was fear that neighborhood schools might be afraid to participate in such an event, given the long history of CPS ruthless retaliation.

Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy located in the Little Village neighborhood

But in the end  60 schools participated, an act of moral courage by principals and school workers whose jobs can hang by a thread in the repressive totalitarian structure of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS).

The importance of neighborhood schools in working class communities

I spoke to a number of individuals at the Fair and asked them why neighborhood schools were so important, especially in already distressed working class communities

Valerie Leonard, a West Side Chicago activist with the Lawndale Alliance explains:

“The importance of neighborhood schools is how they keep communities together. More and more we are seeing an attack on our neighborhood schools in North Lawndale. At one point almost every school in North Lawndale was a neighborhood school and now we are down to about 1/3 AUSL and charter schools. We are seeing less accountability to the parents and less accountability to the community.”

Lawndale Alliance
Lawndale Alliance

Sherise McDaniel believes that neighborhood schools build community. A parent activist at the North Side Manierre School, she was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that challenged   the massive school closings because they discriminated on the basis of race and disability. Although the suit was thrown out, it raised important issues that remain unaddressed by CPS.

“I’m at a school that extends out to the community, to the families, the kids. Everyone gets involved. We go there after school to celebrate special holidays. The principal cares. He gets food boxes together for those who need help...All of us don’t have the money to send our kids to private schools. We need these places. Kids shouldn’t have to go across town to go to school.”

Chris Ball, a parent at Oscar Meyer School and  a member of the education advocacy groups, More Than A Score and Raise Your Hand explains that living close to a school means more parental involvement, a key factor in the success of any school.

The struggle to defend Chicago’s neighborhood schools

Earlier in 2013 CPS closed 50 neighborhood schools, mostly in impoverished African American and Latino neighborhoods where disinvestment has already taken a heavy toll. Thousands of parents, teachers, students and concerned individuals registered their opposition to the proposed closings in a series of public hearings.

I went to a number of those gatherings.

Save our schools
A meeting in the Austin neighborhood

Parents described how they attended Local School Council meetings late into the night, determined to create the best possible school environment for the children. This was often after a day spent at exhausting blue collar labor. 

I heard from teachers and parents who spent many hours writing grant proposals for cool programs in science, art, music, writing, sports and other innovative initiatives to compensate for meager CPS funding.

I heard how people with strong neighborhood ties going back generations joined with newcomers to partner their schools with NASA, the Chicago Symphony, the Old Town School of Folk Music, the Joffre Ballet, the Lyric Opera, Roosevelt University, University of Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum and more. 

None of this heartfelt dedication meant a damned thing to CPS.

As I walked around the Neighborhood School Fair I could see how surviving neighborhood schools had students building robots, doing complex science experiments, studying world languages, creating innovative art and storytelling projects, researching social justice issues in their communities, becoming engaged in all kinds of music and so much more. Exactly the kind of rich exciting learning that education is supposed to be about. 

This is exactly the kind of education that CPS seems determined to stamp out with their school closings, rigid scripted curricula, endless standardized tests, stultifying methods of data collection and their highly politicized methods of evaluating both teachers and students. All of this flowing from powerful corporations dead set on privatization, especially in urban working class environments.

Educators fear for the future as privatization grows

Erica Clark of Parents 4 Teachers believes that CPS is engaging in a deliberate attempt to destabilize  neighborhood schools and push people toward charters, selective enrollment schools and magnet schools that do not accept all children. This is often presented as an example of parental “choice”, but as Clark points out:

"Neighborhood schools are not on a level playing field  in terms of funding; in terms of support from CPS and in terms of their ability to promote themselves and attract new students.”

Clark also believes that neighborhood schools or community schools as they are also called, are probably the most democratic institutions we have:

“They accept everyone, each and every child, regardless of race, class, whether the children speak English or need language services, whether the kids have special needs or whether they have disciplinary problems.”

Steve  Serikaku, a retired CPS school administrator, sees a two tier system of education developing where students who are traumatized or have learning disabilities have the fewest options:

“What worries me is that they are opening up charter schools that don’t necessarily provide a better education. The students that are the most difficult to educate are being kept out of charter schools and so they are concentrated in the neighborhood school. It serves two purposes and shows how much "better" the charter school is. It’s like segregation of a different kind.”

Bob Simpson and Kim Bowsky
Me interviewing Kim Bowsky

Kim Bowsky of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), the CTU Black Caucus and the Coalition of Rank and File Educators (CORE) elaborated on the theme of democracy and what it takes for democracy to be successful:

“Public education means access for all. We don’t mean just access to a building, but access to the ideas of democracy; meaning you have to have people who are global thinkers, be able to deal with diverse ideas and able to work out education and cognitive problems in a safe environment...by turning our backs on neighborhood schools, we’d be turning our backs on what we want for humanity.”

Public education as a democratic right

The USA has had close to a full formal democracy since the triumph of the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. Citizens, (with some state exceptions: like having a prison record) have the right to vote and to join social movements. But formal democracy alone does not guarantee that people will make wise choices.

As Kim Bowsky points out so eloquently, a successful democracy requires people who have been educated to study, think and question so they are not afraid to confront complex problems. It means creating the possibility of rich full lives where people can pursue cultural and leisure interests. It means having the tools to challenge exploitation in whatever form it takes. For democracy to succeed, human minds must be liberated from the oppressive aspects of society. Democracy requires education for liberation.

The first attempts at education for democracy came early in our nation’s history. Labor unions in the North demanded free public education so that their members could fight for better working conditions as well as a genuine life outside of work. Meanwhile in the South slaves secretly organized reading groups to teach literacy as part the struggle against human bondage. These efforts created what were essentially underground neighborhood schools.

In 1920’s Chicago there was a clearly drawn class divide over public education. The city’s Commercial Club wanted narrow vocational education and a minimum of taxes on business. The then powerful Chicago Federation of Labor agreed that vocational education was a good idea, but also wanted a much wider curriculum. Labor saw both the possibilities of social change as well class mobility in an broadly educated working class.

Beginning in 1960’s Chicago, African Americans and their allies battled to create a school system that was based on racial justice despite strong pushback by the Chicago corporate elite and other racist whites who preferred segregation and inequality.

My introduction to education for liberation

In 1975 I was hired to teach English and history at an adult education center on Chicago’s West Side. The school mostly served the  West Side though any adult could enroll. Many of our students were on public aid and we provided them with an actual high school diploma once they completed their coursework.

They were some of the most dedicated and motivated students I have ever worked with.

The school was unabashedly radical and used the  education for liberation model pioneered by Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. Students played an important role in the governance of the school. We wanted them to gain self confidence, to study, to think, to imagine, and to cooperate in creating a better school experience.

We wanted them to graduate with the tools to transform their world, no matter what career goals their education was furthering. What was the point of preparing students for a status quo of racism, gender oppression and poverty?  We wanted them to take both democracy and liberation to heart.

The city authorities eventually closed us down in a particularly nasty fashion despite protests from the community and even some politicians. Education can be a threat to the wealthy and powerful when taken seriously. It was my first school closing. It was  a heartbreaker.

Audience at the Austin-Lawndale hearings
The Austin area meeting to save Henson and other West Side schools

Last winter on a cold clear night in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood I watched a young woman come to the microphone and try to save her neighborhood school. The church was packed with people who came to oppose the massive school closing plan that CPS had concocted. She was speaking on behalf of the respected Mathew Henson School where the school motto was “Education is liberation! Peaceful! Positive! Productive!”. There was that word again. Liberation. Henson was among the 50 schools that were eventually closed.

Neighborhood schools and education for liberation

“Our struggle is against systems of power that have been historically used to deny, regulate, and prohibit access to the most basic human rights that should be granted freely to members of society regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or religious belief. We accept the reality that such struggle will require sacrifice from all involved.”---- from the mission statement of Social Justice High School

Among the people I talked to at the Neighborhood Schools Fair was Amy Livingstone,a first year teacher at Social Justice High School in Little Village, better known as SOJO. She described SOJO as:  

”...a place where students can really use what they are learning in class to go and better their communities and return to deal with the different issues they are facing a SOJO. SOJO lets students learn those concepts and critically assess them and then take them back to help them in their own lives.”

SOJO was the product of a long battle by residents of the largely Mexican working class community of Little Village.

Earlier I had spent time at the North-Grand High School display where students demonstrated their engineering capabilities with whirring robots that the students had constructed. This was an example of North-Grand ‘s pre-engineering program which is designed for students to “solve real world problems” and “make meaningful and pioneering contributions to their community and beyond.”

North-Grand High School

Phil Cantor, a member of both CORE and Teachers for Social Justice was on hand to talk to parents.

According to student  Saul Rodriquez North-Grand gives students a chance to sample a variety of engineering challenges, "I like hands-on building classes, and I think this was a great opportunity to start doing that. It's a great way to expand my mind in engineering."

North-Grand is located in the Humboldt Park neighborhood and 95% of its largely African American and Latino student population is low income.

Two different neighborhood schools. Two different approaches to opening students’ minds to the possibilities of positive change for themselves and their communities. Two different approaches to education for liberation. But the neighborhood school model can only provide templates for the liberation of human minds. It is up to fallible human beings to make that liberation happen.

Across Chicago, neighborhood schools vary greatly as they grapple with the problems of poverty and racism that affect the majority of Chicago students. Some have weak leadership resulting in chaotic learning environments. Some are virtual dictatorships run by fear and intimidation.

 The “fear and intimidation model” was even apparent at the Neighborhood Schools Fair where several teachers were reluctant to be quoted, nervously referring me to the school principal instead.

The best neighborhood schools, those that have come closest to the ideal of education for liberation, actively involve students, parents, teachers and the community. The Chicago Teachers Union under the leadership of CORE advocated for this in its detailed proposal “The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve”.The respected Chicago school advocacy group Designs for Change has solid research that backs up the success of those kinds of neighborhood schools.

The newly formed Chicago Teachers Union Latino Caucus
The newly formed Chicago Teachers Union Latino Caucus

But both the CTU proposal and the Designs for Change research were met by silence from the top. Fear and intimidation is how the CPS leadership prefers to work, with the full backing of Chicago’s financial elite. 

But why?

Public education has always been contested terrain. According to Dorothy Shipps, author of School Reform Corporate Style: Chicago 1880-2000:

“To a remarkable degree, Chicago’s corporate leaders have shaped the city’’s schools while constructing its economic and downtown development priorities, it’s response to racial segregation, and even its urban mythology...If corporate power was instrumental in creating urban public schools and has had a strong hand in their reform for a century, then why have those schools failed urban children so badly?”

Chicago’s  corporate elite has always fought for a narrow top down authoritarian approach to working class education, the kind of education they would never permit for their own children. Mayor Emanuel’s children go the Chicago Lab School with its rich innovative curriculum, where standardized tests are rare and which has a unionized faculty.

Now it seems the corporate elite has grown weary of trying to dominate public education in the face of stubborn resistance by those who fight for quality working class education. The elite want a private system of charters and turnaround schools that don’t have Local School Councils and CTU members, all the better to gain the more complete control that has always eluded them. And according to public school advocate Diane Ravitch, such control could be very profitable.

Sherise McDaniel of Manierre School sure thinks it’s all about the money:

“They want to privatize everything. They want those charter schools. I really feel like the Mayor wants to break the union. I think it’s all about unionbusting. Money for friends. Money for friends’ contracts...”

I’ve heard similar things from working class people around the city. It’s about driving out Black and Latino working class people. It’s a land grab. It’s about destabilizing communities for gentrification and real estate profits.

I would add another reason. The Chicago corporate elite is terrified by the prospect of a working class that has been educated to liberate itself and discover its power to shape society for the greater good.

What would a Neighborhood Schools Fair look like in a better world? A world where teachers, students, parents and community work with local administrators to shape the best possible neighborhood school policies. Where an elected school board and downtown central administration works hard to see that all schools get an abundance of resources and moral support. Where young people across the city are excited to go to school because it fires their imagination, their creativity and their desire to learn. 

Just let that sink in for a while, because that’s the world the Badass Moms of the 2013 Neighborhood Schools Fair are working towards.

Education is liberation! Peaceful! Positive! Productive!...

Children are more than a score
Children are more than a corporate test score

Bob "BobboSphere" Simpson is a retired high school teacher with experience both on the West and South Sides of Chicago.

Sources Consulted

Moms Organize Fair Touting Neighborhood School Extracurriculars” by Quinn Ford

The West Side of Chicago says NO! to school closings” by Bob Simpson

School reform, Corporate Style: Chicago 1880-2000 by Dorothy Shipps

The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve by the CTU Quest Center

The Big Picture: School-Initiated Reforms, Centrally Initiated Reforms, and Elementary School Achievement in Chicago (1990 to 2005) by Designs for Change

Wall Street's Investment in School Reform by Diane Ravitch

Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the rise of Chicago’s 99% by Kari Lydersen

Interviews with Neighborhood Schools Fair participants conducted by Bob Simpson

A Child’s Paradise Lost

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Tree

“Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. In all my works I take the part of trees against all their enemies”.---- J.R.R. Tolkien

It was the largest tree my seven year old eyes had ever seen. Stately thick limbs spreading out into a huge leaf canopy that seemed to reach skywards forever. Beneath was a small clearing of grass and dirt where I could admire the tree house that the big kids had built, complete with  small boards attached to the tree to make a ladder upwards. 

The tree house was sturdily built with a strong platform, a roof of boards and a glassless window where one could look out on the rest of the forest. And best of all was that the big kids who built it told me I could use it anytime. I have no idea how old these kids were, probably no more than 12 or 13. But they were nice big kids, not the like the bullies I often encountered in Glenmont MD of the 1950’s.

These big kids were also kind enough to reveal another wonder of the forest. The nearby creek. It was not especially wide, maybe 6-8 ft across and no more than a foot deep. But it ran crystal clear with glittering flecks of mica and small stones scattered across its sandy bottom. 

It also contained marvelous creatures I had never seen before. Crayfish. They were small, no larger than the minnows that swam nervously about. The big kids would hold crayfish in their hands and watch them snap their tiny claws in defiance. I had no desire to catch one myself. Seeing one amidst the rocks was enough for my curiosity. Besides they were fast and experts at concealment when they detected any motion from above.

It was a Child’s Garden of Eden. And I had no idea someone actually owned it. I was familiar with peoples’ yards. They surrounded the small bungalows of the neighborhood and were clearly part of each family’s property. Some even had fences around them.

But a forest was a whole different matter. A forest simply was. I didn’t know that somewhere a deed was being scrutinized. Title searches were underway. Papers were being signed. Money was being transferred.

So the machines came to the forest. Bulldozers. Earth movers. Dump trucks. If you have seen the films Ferngully or Avatar you know how how quickly green can turn to brown. Choking dust now filled the hot summer air. I pretended that the construction machines were monsters out to devour everything in sight. I would run from dirt pile to dirt pile in an effort to evade them. If the operators even saw me, they ignored my presence.

I found a large pit filled with muddy viscous water. Knowing nothing about hydrology, I was certain that they had imprisoned the creek here. Then I saw movement in the water. Some kind of insect larva. It was about 2 inches long and had legs. I was certain it would die in the foul water of the pit. So I scooped it up with a discarded can.

At home I transferred it to larger jar with water from our garden hose. I knew nothing about the chlorine that was dissolved in it. I tried feeding the tiny creature small bugs and bits of table scraps. It was dead in a couple of days. I buried it under a rock in the field behind our house, thinking that it been doomed in the pit anyway. At least someone  had mourned its passing.

A few months later a paperback book caught my eye on the rack at the Wheaton Pharmacy where I normally went to buy candy. It was The Web of Life byJohn H. Storer. Originally published in 1953, it was a popular introduction to the science of ecology, the interrelationships among plants, animals and the earth itself. I laId down 35 cents and rode my bike down the sidewalk of Georgia Ave to go home and read it.

I didn’t understand a lot of it. But I understood enough. When the machines came they didn’t just destroy trees and a creek. They had destroyed an entire complex world. Eventually I realized that my own house, built in 1951, was part of the same destructive onslaught. And that driving nails into a tree for a treehouse ladder is not good for the tree. Things are never simple, are they?

I began following the political battles to save wilderness areas and national parks in the pages of the Washington Post that my dad brought home after work. I wanted to become a park ranger. A defender of wilderness. I never became that park ranger, but several enviro-groups now have my credit card number and if you shove a petition in front of me that says save whatever, I’ll add my signature. I go to meetings and conferences. I sometimes hold hand written signs at demonstrations.

Small acts of resistance to be sure; acts of resistance that I can trace partially back to the sorrow I felt about my child’s paradise lost. But only partially. I also recall the joy and wonder of a seven year old at the existence of trees and crayfish. Nearly 60 years later it is with both sorrow and joy that I think about our biosphere.

Unlike in the films Ferngully and Avatar there is no mystical force of nature we can call upon. I like to think that the wonders of nature that remain, plus our animal instinct for survival, may be enough to develop the planetary consciousness necessary so that in the distant future, our descendants will look back and say,”This is when things changed. This is when humanity reached maturity and wisdom.” 

That’s a hopeful thought. I think I’ll hang on to it.

 

 

Fight for $15: The New War on Poverty

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“Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings.”-- Nelson Mandela

The USA has a new War on Poverty, but this one is not led by a US president, but by the low wage workers of this country. The Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC) is a part of this national movement, demanding $15 an hour and a union for retail and fast food workers. This Fight for $15 campaign is a key part of the larger low wage workers movement.

Fight for $15 in Chicago

Way back In 1964,  President Lyndon Johnson declared in his State of the Union address,”This administration today, here and now, declares an unconditional War on Poverty in America.”

As part of his War on Poverty, Johnson proposed an ambitious set of social programs rivaling those of Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression of the 1930‘s. Johnson’s War on Poverty ended in surrender beginning in 1968 because of the costly Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon.

Although it did not end poverty, the first War on Poverty was not the total failure that many critics label it. Largely a response to the Civil Rights Movement, it gave us such critical social programs as Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start and the Food Stamp Act. Today the USA has some of the worst poverty of any wealthy nation, but it would be far more devastating without these programs. 

Just ask today’s fast food and retail workers, many of whom depend on Medicaid and food stamps because of their poverty wages. Now low wage workers’ groups like WOCC are taking up the unfinished business of ending poverty in this country by raising wages and organizing unions.

The low wage workers’ movement is very diverse and includes adjunct college professors, car wash workers, port truck drivers, janitors, farmworkers  and more. I recently learned that one third of bank tellers live in poverty. Maybe they’ll be the next to join.

December 5, 2013: A day to fight poverty in Chicago

“I get paid on Thursday and I’m out of money by Thursday”-- a Chicago Sears worker and WOCC member

I hopped off the Damen Ave bus into the 6 am frigid darkness of West Side Chicago. It was the national McStrike Day when fast food and retail workers in approximately 100 towns and cities were expected to walk off their jobs. The bright lights of the corner McDonald’s were augmented by those of TV camera crews. I could hear chants from the handful of Fight for $15 demonstrators already on the sidewalk:

“Beat back the Mac attack!”
“Hold on, wait a minute, let me put some $15 in it!”
“Hold the burgers, hold the fries, I want my wages super-sized!”
A few minutes later 3 school buses pulled up, literally packed with WOCC members and supporters. More people continued to arrive and I counted over 200 people on the sidewalk and on McDonald’s property, holding signs and chanting. 

 

Fight forn $15 in Chicago

A 10 ft hand-made puppet of The Grinch was the center of much attention and many cell phone cameras. Trucks, buses and a cars on busy Chicago Avenue honked their horns in support, gaining cheers from the picketers.

There were a few workers inside the McDonalds despite the call for a strike. Because of the artificially high unemployment in Chicago, some workers  are afraid to protest because they fear being replaced in retaliation.

Fight for $15 in Chicago

Local TV stations had set up microphones on the sidewalk as other media people walked about conducting interviews.  Jessica Davis, who is a single mom with two children said:

”It’s embarrassing to go home to your family with how little [money] you have to bring to the table...I am six credits away from a Bachelors degree in sociology but I can’t finish because I can’t pay for it.”

Davis must rely on food banks and Medicaid to survive. Akilarose Thompson told the UK Guardian:

“It is so depressing. You put a smile on because you're in customer service and you have to. But on the inside it really breaks you down when you're always at work but you're always broke." 

Another MacDonald’s worker facing a wage cut told the crowd,” Stand up and fight because we can’t take it no more!” 

As the sun rose over the buildings to the east, WOCC organizer Caleb Jennings led the Grinch and the WOCC picketers in a march around the McDonald’s before stopping at the drive-up window, effectively closing that service for about 20 minutes. 

Shortly afterward WOCC members boarded the buses for the next destination, Snarf’s, a sandwich shop a few blocks east. Snarf’s had already been shut down by the workers when we arrived. 

Fight for $15 in Chicago

I spoke to Snarf’s worker Kate Ziegler.  Ziegler, who is also an actor and an artist, explained that Snarf’s has no clear policy on raises. Everyone starts out on minimum wage, but according to Ziegler, many people have never received any raises. 

After 2 1/2 years, she still only makes $9.50 an hour. She went on to say:

”Chicago is an expensive city to live in and I think it’s unfair how low the minimum wage is. Also, who decided to quantify retail and food industry workers to be paid so low when all of us work so hard?”

After saying good-bye to Snarf’s with the chant,” We’ll be back...we’ll be back!”, we headed for North Michigan Ave and a march through the the Loop, Chicago’s traditional downtown area. We loudly repeated chants like “We can’t survive on $8.25! Fifteen dollars will keep us alive!”, as we visited McDonald’s, Walgreens, Macy’s and Nordstrom, with longer stops at Sears and Wendy’s.

Fight for $15 in Chicago

At Sears, workers eagerly took the bullhorn to lead chants and tell their stories as we crowded around the State Street entrance, with the police keeping us from totally blocking it.

With the beat of WOCC drums and the sounds of chants as background, I spoke to Elmer Rayhead Jr., a worker at Walgreens. When asked why he became involved with WOCC he said:

”I’ve got to make a stand for my family so meeting up with WOCC, I finally have a voice and I can actually use it with a group of people who are on the same wave length as I am---people who are trying make something better for our families. It’s a voice that is going to be heard, instead of just me fighting up against the wall for a better living and a better wage.”

Alfred Dellahousaye, a worker at Forever 21 on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile told me that he was one of the original members of WOCC when it consisted of only 22 people.

“I joined just for respect in our workplace and unity and a living wage.  I believe everything is going up except wages. Gas is going up. Rent is going up. It’s really hard to manage your bills making a low wage of $8.25.”

WOCC membership is now over 2000 according to one WOCC activist I talked with.

At Wendy’s WOCC members had slipped inside before the main group arrived and according to a WOCC member, had attempted to pay for their orders with a massive amount of pennies. I watched as they were escorted out by police with no arrests. Although the police tried to keep the entrance open,  the sidewalk was so blocked I saw very few customers going in.

Fight for $15 in Chicago

I had to leave when the Wendy’s protest ended, but after a lunch break, WOCC headed for Chicago’s South Side and the south suburbs for more actions.

Poverty is as serious as a heart attack.

We are the backbone of the company. We watch the money come in everyday only to go home with just a fraction of it” ---- a Chicago McDonald’s worker

Poverty is no joke in Chicago. This is a city where 87% of the public school students qualify for free or reduced lunch and over a third live under the federal poverty line. Poverty is the biggest enemy of Chicago school student performance as outlined in a report by the Chicago Teachers  Union and Stand Up Chicago.

Poverty results in foreclosures and homelessness. It is associated with malnutrition. It destabilizes families and entire communities.  It is associated with domestic violence and street crime. Poverty also creates high stress levels which are exacerbated by the stresses of Chicago’s traditional racism and segregation.

Stress contributes to the health problems created by poverty by directly attacking the immune system. Rates of stroke, diabetes, coronary heart disease and cancer are  much higherin Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.

Poverty also contributes to more homicides as shown by the chart below, comparing murders in some of the poorest and some of least poor Chicago neighborhoods.

Poverty kills.

Chicago homicide stats

Poverty as a policy

“I want to say that we won’t stop until we get a livable wage. We’re out there in the cold. We’ve been out in the rain. The strikes will never end until we get what we are looking for.”---- WOCC member  Alfred Dellahousaye

WOCC members are all too familiar with the little ways powerful corporations enforce poverty in addition to their refusal to pay a living wage. Poverty is profitable. 

Kate Ziegler described how Snarrf’s set up a complicated rating system for determining raises where workers had to score at least the 90th percentile. It turned out that scoring that high,”...might possibly result a raise, so people still not get a raise.”

Snarff workers got 500 people to sign a petition supporting their strike for better pay from people in the large office building where the shop is located. According to Ziegler, “We sent them to corporate [headquarters] and we didn’t hear anything.”

Sears worker Roy Jackson is a commission employee in the Sears electronics department. He makes $6 an hour plus 1% commission on what he sells, which comes out to $7 on a $700 TV. He asked,” And just many $700 TV’s do you think I sell in a week? Or even 2 weeks?” 

Elmer Rayhead Jr. is a worker at Walgreens. He started at Walgreens in 1996 but has only seen small raises of 8 cents or 15 cents, so not much has changed for him. According to Rayhead,”Walgreens came to the conclusion this year that they are not going to be doing raises.”

Companies will often refuse to give workers regular hours and will change their shifts arbitrarily making it difficult for them to go to school and improve their job skills. They can fire workers who become ill rather than extending them sick leave.

Chicago Fight for $15

Companies will also retaliate against those who speak out to frighten others into silence. According to Tyree Johnson, a MacDonald’s worker with 21 years experience, his hours were cut to 12 a week:

"I gave the managers the respect, but as they see me on TV, and they see my protesting and talking to the media about McDonald’s, they hold that against me.”

Then there are the big ways corporations enforce poverty. All in the name of neo-liberalism, the latest incarnation of capitalism with its egregious excess for the wealthy and ruinous austerity for the working class. For example, the CEO of McDonald’s saw his income tripled to $24 million this year.

A portion of the mega-profits collected by corporations that pay poverty wages are invested in think tanks  who put out misleading propaganda against raising minimum wage, against unions, against Medicaid, against food stamps, against Social Security, against Medicare and against any efforts to overcome racial and gender discrimination.

Fast food and retail workers are stereotyped as deserving nothing but poverty because of their supposed lack of ambition, their supposed lack of education, their supposed personal irresponsibility and the unspoken inference that since so many of them are female and/or workers of color, their supposed social inferiority.

Fight for $15 in Chicago

High powered corporate law firms are hired to file lawsuits against efforts to limit poverty. Legislators are bought off through campaign contributions to pass laws that keep poverty firmly in place. Attempts to expand public employment to reduce joblessness  are stymied. Social programs like unemployment compensation and food stamps are slashed.

Money that should be going to pay a living wage to retail and fast food workers is instead being converted into weapons against them.

Our high rate of poverty is a policy of mega-corporations and their allies in government. As a life-long socialist, I personally believe that poverty is an integral part of the capitalist system, yet some capitalist countries have a much lower poverty rate than we do. So yes, our high rate of poverty is a policy. And it is a policy that kills. It is societal mass murder. Yet, those most responsible walk free and are rewarded handsomely for their efforts.

So what happens when we win?

“I believe that we will win! I believe that we will win!”--A popular chant at WOCC picket lines and rallies.

I’ve been a supporter of WOCC almost since its very beginning. While no one believes that winning this New War on Poverty will be easy or that the struggle will be won quickly, people are optimistic. And $15 an hour would be a good start toward making further gains through the union that WOCC members are organizing. 

Fight for $15 in Chicago

When I interviewed workers I asked them how their lives and the lives of other low wage workers would change when they do win that $15 and a union.

Alfred Dellahousaye:

“Man that would definitely change the world. We would  each have enough money to buy presents. Pay bills on time. Fill up the refrigerator. It would be great for everybody considering that minimum wage hasn’t been raised in I don’t know how long.”
Kate Ziegler:  
“I know that when people have more money to spend it’s better for the economy because they spend it more. I know that if I had more money it would make my life better and if it were more widespread, there would be better for the thousands of people who are worse off than me...I feel it would make the city feel happy overall because a lot of people are collectively disgusted about the low wages.”
Elmer Rayhead Jr:  
“Oh wow! For one thing we wouldn’t have to juggle. We have to decide whether it’s going to be rent or health insurance. Or car insurance. Or do we cancel the car insurance and the health insurance to pay rent. So we don’t have to juggle all that or we won’t have to tell our kids who will be disappointed that I can’t do Christmas or birthdays this year because I don’t have enough.”
As for me I see people with more time and resources for their children, their schools and their communities. People with more to spend in their neighborhood, helping small businesses stay alive and creating jobs. Fewer evictions. Fewer foreclosures. Less need for public assistance. Better physical and mental health. A reduction in personal violence. People furthering their education, becoming involved in hobbies and recreation, which besides being personally fulfilling, can also be job and income creators. 

I‘ll end with words from Julie McKelphin, words that so emotionally moved me as we stood shivering at the corner of State and Madison next to the downtown Sears:

“I believe in the humanity of man. I believe that people just need to be enlightened. I think at times people get so misguided by greed that they forget we are all connected. When one person suffers everybody suffers... We’re all here together on this planet. We all breathe the same air. When people start realizing that, maybe there will be more compassion.”

Bob "BobboSphere" Simpson is a retired Chicago schoolteacher and an enthusiastic WOCC supporter

Sources consulted

Chicago Fast Food, Retail Workers Walk Off The Job, Take Part In 100-City Strike by Ellen Fortino

Fight for the Future; How low wages are failing Children in Chicago’s schools by Stand Up Chicago! and the Chicago Teachers Union

A case for $15: A low wage work crisis By Action Now and Stand Up Chicago!

US fast-food workers strike over low wages in nationwide protests  by Adam Gabbatt 

Deadly Povertyby Steve Bogira

Concentrated poverty and homicide in Chicago by Steve Bogira

Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the rise of Chicago’s 99% by Kari Lydersen 

Personal interviews with several WOCC members conducted by Bob Simpson

A Chicagoland Black Friday Diary

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It was a cold clear Chicagoland morning with a sharply defined crescent moon hanging above the apartment complex in front of my Oak Park IL home. It was November 29th. Black Friday. A day devoted to mass consumption and mass hysteria in malls and shopping centers across the nation.

I turned on my bicycle flashers and rode down the street to the East Ave CTA Blue Line station.  I was headed for the Black Friday protest against Walmart's employment policies. The protest was sponsored by Our Walmart, an employees organization.

The train arrived quickly and within minutes we had crossed Austin Blvd and were speeding through the West Side of the city. I sat in the front car thinking about the relationship between poverty and the education crisis on the West Side of Chicago 

I had recently attended 3 meetings in North Lawndale sponsored by several community groups as the  largely Black and Latino West Side struggled to recover from a series of school closings.

The Walton family who owns Walmart has poured money into school privatization efforts in Chicago and must be held partly responsible for the 50 schools closed in Chicago last spring.

The Walton Foundation had even organized the hearings where thousands of anguished parents and teachers fought for their schools in front of stony-faced Chicago Public Schools( CPS) representatives who refused to answer any questions.

West Side Walmart at Cicero and North Ave West Side Walmart at Cicero and North Ave in the Austin neighborhood

Poverty is the biggest enemy of education on Chicago's West Side and the low wages paid to retail workers contribute to that poverty. One study concluded that 20% of the workers in the West Side's Austin neighborhood work retail. The low wages paid by Walmart sets the pace for other retailers in a race to the bottom.

The Walton family has the fucking nerve to pretend they "care" about our young people while pushing an educational agenda of rigid scripted curricula, standardized tests, privatization, layoffs and union-busting. Chicago has lost HALF of its African American teachers in recent years.

Walmart? The company who buys many of its products from South Asian sweatshops where workers die in fires and collapsing buildings? Where child labor is widespread? Who could possibly believe that Walmart cares about young people either in Bangladesh or on Chicago's West Side?

I'm supposed to write an article about the West Side education crisis in the coming weeks. I'll make sure to mention how the Walmart effect has helped further destabilize an already distressed working class community.

 It's racism. Plain and simple.

I arrived at the Workers United union hall on Ashland and headed for the room where we would hear the plan for the morning. There were already coffee, donuts, bagels and energy bars available. A steady stream of people came in as we chatted amongst ourselves. After about 20 minutes we got our instructions.

We would board three school buses and head first to the Walmart at North and Cicero in the Austin neighborhood.. There a representative would try to deliver a letter asking for a minimum of $25,000 a year for Walmart associates and an end to retaliation. The letter also included the recent NLRB prosecution of Walmart for firing and harassing associates who speak out and protest. Our second destination would be the Walmart on Broadway in the more affluent Lakeview neighborhood.

We boarded our assigned buses and headed out. The organizers had a rather clever plan. One bus would enter the North Ave Walmart parking lot as a diversion and after a few minutes the other two buses would come in a back way. I was on one of the 2 back way buses.

 The plan seemed to throw Walmart security into confusion. The main security guy greeted us as we got off our buses by waving his arms and repeatedly saying, "This is private property!"

Black Friday protest at a West Side Walmart Black Friday protest at a West Side Walmart

We pretty much ignored him and walked about the parking lot until we formed up into a picket line inside of their "private property"  about a 100 feet from the store. Walmart security permitted us to do that. The store had very little business coming in and out. The organizers then led us down to North Ave, a busy thoroughfare on Chicago's West Side where we could be seen by passing cars.

After picketing there we then boarded our buses to  go toward the Lakefront and the Broadway Walmart located in the affluent neighborhood of Lakeview.

I had a wonderful conversation with Alex, a former student of mine, who is an activist in the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) the group that is now the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).

We had seen each other around but really couldn't place one another. We finally figured it out with the help of mutual friend and played catch up about  the last 20 years of our lives. Both Alex and I had become political activists while in college. She is now a special ed teacher in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS).

CORE activists from the CTU supported the Black Friday protest CORE activists from the CTU supported the Black Friday protest

We arrived at the corner of Broadway and Diversey and formed  up to march on the Walmart Express about half a block up Broadway. These Express Walmarts are smaller neighborhood stores which lack the expansive parking lots of the outlying ones.

With about 125-150 of us in front of the store, the already pretty empty Walmart was basically closed down. The police made no effort to force us into a picket line. There were news microphones set up in in a parking space in front of the store.

Black Friday protest in Chicago Black Friday protest at North Side Chicago Walmart

After chanting and waving signs, the organizers led by Susan Hurley of Jobs with Justice began the press conference. Myron Byrd who is an associate at the Broadway Walmart gave an impassioned speech where he said,

"This is my store, I'm here to take a stand, because to think that Walmart is a good company to work for ... which it is until I saw the retaliation, unjust firings, and no living wage."

Byrd makes about $16,000 a year as a full-time associate. A youth organizer  from the community organization IIRON also spoke. She talked about how poverty on the South Side drives people to her food bank because companies like Walmart do not pay a living wage. 

Black Friday protest in Chicago Walmart associate Myron Byrd at a Black Friday protest in Chicago

A pre-selected group of individuals then walked out on to Broadway and linked arms in an act of civil disobedience. They sang freedom songs while photographers and news cameras surrounded them. Police stood off at a distance for about 15 minutes. The songs were variants of old civil rights songs like,"Before I'd be a Walmart slave, I'd be buried in my grave.

Black Friday protest in Chicago: People link arms and block the street in front of a Walmart. Black Friday protest in Chicago: People link arms and block the street in front of a Walmart.

 

Singing civil rights freedom songs at a Black Friday street protest in front of a Walmart. Singing  freedom songs at a Black Friday street protest near a Walmart.

I was very moved emotionally by their sincerity. The low wage workers movement is very much a civil rights movement of our time. Finally the cops moved in and twist-tied peoples hands together before leading them off to a couple of police wagons. The arrests all were non-violent and went smoothly.

Arrest at a Black Friday protest at a North Side  Chicago Walmart Arrest at a Black Friday protest at a North Side Chicago Walmart

 The short ride back to the union hall gave me a chance to talk to Alex  more as we compared notes about our lives as social activists. She remembered the times I'd stand up on my teacher's desk and do some passionate dramatics.

She said that along with two of her college teachers I was among among her favorites. I am always deeply moved when people tell me things like that and never know quite what to say, but thank you.

I had a dynamic high school social studies teacher named Mrs. Steffens who steered me in the direction of social activism. She had been involved with the radical United Electrical Workers union back before the repressive Taft-Hartley law and an organized redbaiting campaign decimated the union in the late 1940's and early 1950's.  I hold her in a special place in my memory. The beat goes on...

 I caught a ride back to Oak Park with neighbor named Pat and we got a chance to know one another better. I feel like these events are more than protest. They are a way to connect with other human beings in a society where connection  is so often seen as just a way to make money. It was a relief to be among passionate people who believe in the power of the working class to develop a system of morals and ethics that can transform this county.

As a life-long socialist, these events have come to have an almost spiritual meaning to me. As a teacher, I was very focused on both the intellectual and the emotional. If humanity is to progress beyond our current state of crisis, we will need both.

Solidarity forever.

 

Black Friday protest at  a Chicago Walmart Black Friday protest at a Chicago Walmart

 


Climbing Ben Nevis in the Scottish Highlands

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As mountain ranges go, the Scottish Highlands are not very high. None of its mountains top more than 4409 ft (1344m). In contrast Mt. Mitchell in the southern Appalachians is 6,684 feet (2,037m). Denali in Alaska is 20,320 feet (6,194m) and Everest in Nepal is 29,029 (8,848m).

Yet because of its northern location and ferocity of its weather, the Scottish Highlands is a center for training Everest-bound mountaineers.

Ben Nevis from Wikipedia

I had come to Scotland with Estelle Carol to see the land where some of extended family still live. And to climb Ben Nevis. As a young boy I had been made aware of my Scottish ancestry in a general way and had developed a sense of what it should mean to be a Scottish-American.

Scotland is a small country that has struggled for centuries to maintain its national identity in the face of foreign domination. It is not a naturally wealthy land and the weather can be harsh and unforgiving.

Scotland also has a long history of working class resistance as exemplified by the Red Clydeside and the life of John McLean.In my dad's hometown of Barre, Vermont Scottish immigrant stonecutters proudly erected a statue of Robert Burns, the radical Scottish poet who championed the working people of his time. To me being Scottish meant physical toughness and resistance to oppression, combined with a love of poetry, song and the natural world.

When Estelle and I climbed Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in the Scottish Highlands, we had no specific goals beyond just getting up the mountain on a warm summer day, but I think unconsciously I was trying to prove something to myself about my Scottish connections.

We checked in at a B&B in nearby Fort William, packed up food, water and extra clothing in case Scotland’s notoriously fickle weather gave us a nasty surprise. Our B&B host was friendly in the impersonal way of a professional innkeeper  and did not ask where we were off to.

We walked the short distance to the beginning of the Pony Track, the trail chosen by most tourists as it involves no technical climbing skills, just endurance and common sense when approaching the tricky final ascent to the summit. We signed in at the base and hit the trail.

Ben Nevis: photographer unknown

Postcards and photo books can only hint at how gorgeous the Scottish Highlands really are. To be enveloped on all sides by crags, peaks and mountain flowers  while breathing in  cool fresh summer air cannot be replicated in any media: print or electronic. We hiked steadily upward and the rugged beauty surrounding us banished the worst of our growing exhaustion.

Ben Nevis by photographer Adrian Ashworth

We ascended through a cloud bank as we approached the summit, slowing down as the mists obscured the trail. Walking off a Scottish cliff in the fog was definitely not in our plan. Upon emerging from the cloud we could see the summit and its cairn a short distance ahead.

All about us were the neighboring peaks interspersed with lochs and steep valleys. It was now mid-afternoon and as clouds gathered around the other peaks we could see soft glowing lights scattered through them. It was the sun reflecting off of the lochs and and shining through the clouds. We fell silent at what was one of the beautiful natural sites either of us had ever seen. Beethoven began playing in my head and for a lifelong atheist this was a truly spiritual moment.

We had to get off the mountain before darkness fell and the descent seemed surprisingly swift, perhaps because our minds were still reeling from the gallery of light and color we had just experienced. When we reached the road back to Ft. William, shadows were growing long and our feet were weary.

We knocked on the door of our B&B and our host let us in. In the reserved polite way of a B&B professional, he asked what we had seen that day. I told him we had climbed Ben Nevis. His reserve disappeared and changed to unabashed  surprise. After giving us a stern warning that we should have told him of our plans, he explained that he was a member of the local mountain rescue team.

After assuring him that we had signed in at the base and signed out properly, he was all smiles and congratulated us. We were no longer just a couple of Yank tourists, we had passed a test. We were friends. He invited us down to his den in the private part of his home. As he treated us to some excellent Scottish whiskey,  he shared tales of the mountain’s power and beauty. We were no longer 2 Yanks and a Scot, we were 3 human beings in awe of this planet’s natural wonders.

I have never donned a kilt and have no idea how to play the pipes but the glowing lights of the lochs in the Scottish mists will stay with me for as long as I live.

Ben Nevis by Ben Gardener

Photo credits to Ben Gardener, Adrian Ashworth and Wikipedia

Chicago sandwich workers fired 3 days before Christmas

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Workers at a Snarf’s Sandwiches, located inside of the Groupon Building on  Chicago's North Side, received a nasty surprise on the night of December 22.  Based on an e-mail they received, they logged into the online scheduling website only to find that Snarf’s was closing for a 2 week “remodeling” period  and they had been "terminated”

Snarf's remodeling

All 14 workers (or 20 according to the Huffington Post) had been fired without warning or just cause.  Sara Mergenthal was among those Snarf’s workers who reacted with anger and disappointment:

”It’s just so upsetting to me the way they would do that. I never thought of them as a fantastic corporation doing great things for the world, but I never thought they would do that to people who make money for them.”

 

Most of the Snarf’s workers at her location support the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC)  and had joined both the August and December 5 Fight for $15 strikes. Some workers had been at Snarfs for as long as 3 years. At the December strike Snarf’s worker Kate Zieglar told me she had been there for 2 1/2 years and still only made $9.50 an hour.

The December strike was able to shut down the store for the day. 

Snarf's ShutdownThe December strike

The strike issues were low wages, no sick leave, no vacation days and no rational system for raises. Snarf’s did institute a complicated rating system so that if a worker scored in the 90th percentile, they might get a raise. One Snarf’s worker told me that most people never got one.

Monday morning at the shuttered Snarf's

As soon as WOCC organizers got the word about the firings, they began contacting members and supporters to assemble at the Groupon Building on Monday morning, December 23. By around 9 am, more than 30 people had arrived.

Kevin Brown, a Snarf’s worker and WOCC organizer Hannah Joravsky laid out the strategy. Two of us would leaflet people around the building and urge them to call Snarf corporate HQ to protest the firings.The rest of us would go in quietly as a delegation and ask the Snarf’s manager inside to call corporate HQ and tell them to rehire the workers and pay severance.

Snarf's managerStore manager William Ravert listens to the Snarf’s workers demands

The shop was closed with a heavy iron gate adorned with a sign saying the it was being “remodeled”, though there was no sign of that inside. William Ravert, the manager finally appeared, and peered out through the grate as a WOCC representative told him:

“We are demanding that you put these workers back on schedule because you did not warn them and let them know there was going to be construction going on and we feel you are retaliating against them. There are more than 30 people here and there  are going to be even more people here if you do not call corporate and give these people their money back for the weeks that you took off. You also need to to give these people their jobs back.”

Hannah Joravsky then explained to the manager that WOCC will be filing formal charges, and will let all of the customers in the building know what happened to the employees who had stood up for their rights. Ravert then disappeared into the darkened depths of the store, after saying he would call corporate HQ. Snarf’s workers were skeptical that he would actually do it and figured he was probably just “running away”.

WOCC supports Snarf's workersInside of the Groupon Building Snarf’s

By this time a building security official was in the lobby and clearly unhappy. After some negotiations, the WOCC organizers decided that we should go the other Snarf’s location at Prudential Plaza near Michigan Ave downtown and demand that the manager of that store call the corporate office.

We meet the manager of the Snarf’s at Prudential Plaza

There were no customers in the store when we gathered around the front counter of Snarf's at the Prudential Plaza. After some haggling, the manager did agree to call corporate HQ in front of us. He even told us that he agreed with most of WOCC’s demands. 

WOCC at the Prudential Plaza Snarf'sHannah Joravsky (center) lays it out to
the manager of the Prudential Plaza Snarf’s

We left chanting, “We’ll be back! We’ll be back!” and gathered outside to plan the call-in to Snarf's corporate HQ. As I left, WOCC was meeting with the Snarf’s workers to plan further actions.  This the first mass retaliation against a WOCC protest and WOCC does not plan to  let this happen without a fight.

In addition, WOCC believes that Snarf’s actions violate federal labor laws and plan to make a case for that. WOCC has already filed an official complaint for a 3 day company enforced lockout after the December 5 strike, claiming that it was retaliation.

Huffington Post reported that Snarf’s corporate HQ finally did issue a response. Director of Marketing Jill Preston said that business had been bad and that the store would reopen as a hamburger joint. She said that while the company could not afford to pay $15 an hour, she also claimed that the workers “...do make a lot of money on tips.”

She expressed regret that no notice of the firings was given, but urged them to collect unemployment and ‘"...keep an eye out for the grand opening of the new store."

Since she would not guarantee that workers would be rehired at the “new store”, this cheery message came as cold comfort to workers like Kevin Brown, Kate Zieglar and Sara Mergenthal, all of whom had worked so hard to improve conditions at Snarf’s.

As we walked up the stairs away from the Prudential Plaza Snarf’s,  Sara Mergenthal told me that while Snarf’s management had always claimed that the workers were a part of the Snarf’s family she now knows that,”They really don’t care about us.”

Like several other Snarf’s workers she will be flying home with news for the family,"Merry Christmas, Mom. I’m unemployed."

Sources consulted

Snarf's Sub Shop Just Fired All The Employees At A Chicago Location Via Email, 3 Days Before Christmas by Kim Bellware

The Snarf’s At 600 W. Chicago Just Laid Off All Its Employees Via Email by Meg Graham

Fired Chicago sandwich workers continue the struggle!

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“When Snarf’s workers are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back!”

"When the working class is under attack? What do we do? Stand up fight back"

The chants rang out at noon on January 8 2014 in the ten degree temperatures left behind by the retreating Polar Vortex. But the bitter cold did not deter fired Chicago Snarf’s workers and their allies in the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC) from holding a lively picketline and press conference. 

Fired Snarf's sandwich workers comtinue the struggle with a Jan 9 2014 press conference

The 14 workers from a River North Chicago Snarfs had all been summarily terminated just 2 days before Christmas in a widely publicized mass firing. The excuse was that the store was to be “remodeled”.

Faced by a storm of bad media publicity, the Colorado-based Snarf’s CEO issued a Christmas Day Facebook apology. He promised that the workers would all receive a week’s severance pay. As of this writing there has been no sign of either the “remodeling” or the promised week’s severance pay. As Snarf’s worker Kevin Brown wryly pointed out,”If you get fired by e-mail, you apparently get apologized to by Facebook.” 

It is widely believed that the firings are in retaliation for the Snarf’s workers support of Fight for $15 and their participation in two national strikes. As a result, WOCC has filed two National Labor Relations Board complaints. One is for a forced lockout after the December Fight for $15 strike and the second because of the firings. 

Snarf’s workers and friends speak out at the noontime Chicago protest

“Employers should not retaliate against employees who seek to better their lot by engaging in organizing for a decent living wage.But ultimately there there is a bigger picture...This is bigger than Snarfs. This is bigger than me. Bigger than my co-workers.

Right now this is a story about what happens to people who stand up and make their voices heard. And I want to change the narrative in this country. And I want to make this about all of us. You CAN change how things are run in this country.”---- Lillian Henehan, former Snarf's River North assistant manager 

After we picketed the Prudential Building where another Chicago Snarf’s is located, Snarf’s workers and their allies spoke to the press. Kevin Brown, a fired Snarf’s worker, laid out their basic demands: 

  • We want to be reinstated.
  • We want to be paid a living wage.
  • We want fair back pay for when we were kept out of our jobs.
  • We want Snarf’s to recognize the right of its employees to organize.
Fired Snarf's sandwich workers continue the struggle with a press conference on Jan 8 2014

Brown called the firings “very unfair and very unprofessional”. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary professionalism means,”The skill, good judgment, and polite behavior that is expected from a person who is trained to do a job well.” 

Calling Snarf’s management “unprofessional” brings up some interesting points. Director of Marketing Jill Preston had claimed that,”We really regret our employees were given last-minute notice, but they were aware of the loss of business during the past year."

But if there really was a fall-off in business, why didn’t Snarf’s top management huddle with the employees to develop a plan to improve the situation? And if there really was a plan a place to reconfigure Snarf’s, why not work with the experienced employees and develop a transition strategy?  

Even the firings themselves were bungled. Did Snarf’s top management really think they could fire Fight for $15 activists two days before Christmas and not unleash a storm of bad publicity? At a time when they were planning a major expansion of the chain? 

All of this suggests major league management incompetence and unprofessionalism. 

And what if the firings were simply hastily planned punishment for union organizing...as the workers and their allies believe? And which of course Snarf’s management denies.

At the very least Snarf’s top management comes across as being incompetent and unprofessional. At the very worst, incompetent, unprofessional, mean and dishonest. 

Fired Snarf's sandwich workers comtinue the struggle with a Jan 9 2014 press conference

Snarf’s top management could take some lessons in professionalism from their own employees whom they fired. Fired Snarf’s worker Kate Zieglar, a veteran of jobs both in and outside of the service sector, described her 2 1/2 years at Snarf’s this way: 

“I can say that the work that all of us did was among the most stressful and multi-tasking type of work that used a broad array of skills that I have ever used.”

  Yet Zieglar went on to say that the one benefit of the job was the warm and personal rapport they developed with their customers, a positive experience that was widely noted throughout the River North office building where the Snarf’s is located.

Before the firings, Snarf’s workers obtained 529 signatures supporting their demands on a petition they circulated within their building. After the firings, customers expressed their shock and dismay by calling Snarf’s corporate headquarters and by writing messages on review websites. Zieglar quoted customer Stephanie Weber who wrote:

“The customer service at Snarf’s was by far the best thing that this restaurant had to offer, but they fired all of their wonderful employees. Now there is no reason to go there.”

Fired Snarf's sandwich workers continue the struggle with a press conference on Jan 8 2014

In highly competitive retail businesses like food service, customer satisfaction can mean the difference between business success and business failure. But the topdown tone-deaf management style of many American companies doesn’t seem to recognize that.  

If Snarf’s top management had any sense at all, they would repair the damage by reinstating the fired employees with improvements in pay and benefits, and use their experience to create a company culture that encourages unionization and worker participation in decision making while striving for the best possible customer experience.

Publicizing a combination like that could prove to be an excellent way to sell sandwiches as the American people wake up to the shocking inequality and economic fragility of working life in this nation.

 To support the fired Snarf’s workers please sign this petition.

 

Fight for $15 Snarfs workers

Education Apartheid: A West Side Chicago Story

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The massive school closings that have been part of CPS’s  broader strategy dating back to the 1990s have drastic consequences: they tear apart school communities, disrupt deep and strong relationships between students, parents, and teachers, and dismantle organizations which are often students’ only centers of stability and safety.”---The Black and White of Education in Chicago

Chicago’s historically working class West Side has never been an easy place. Because of its concentration of poverty, the struggle for survival has always been part of daily life. The West Side has also been a center of social activism: From the Haymarket martyrs, to the Jane Addams-led Hull House, to today’s anti-poverty activists of Action Now

Despite growing gentrification on the traditionally segregated West Side, most of the area remains majority Black and Latino.  In 2013 quality education became a battleground as the Chicago Board of Education closed 50 schools, most of them in Black and Latino neighborhoods.

Over the past 3 months I attended meetings on the West Side about what to do in the wake of the closings. These discussions quickly expanded into topics like charter school proliferation, testing abuse, gentrification, scripted curricula, the school to prison pipeline, and Common Core. Expert speakers presented solid data as a basis for future action.

Education meeting on the West Side
January education meeting on Chicago's West Side

Valerie Leonard of the Lawndale Alliance noted that,”The West Side has really taken a disproportionate hit. The West Side has 17%  of the [Chicago] schools, but we have absorbed 47% of the loss.” Chicago’s West Side was clearly a a major target in the war against public education.

This is the corporate driven so-called  “education reform”. Walmart even provided money and staff to aid in the Chicago closings.  West Side residents turned out in large numbers for public meetings and protests against the closings, but public schools with names like Henson, Emmett, Armstrong, Bethune, Pope, Duprey, Marconi, May, and Paderewski are now gone.

Nathaniel Pope Elementary School student
West Side Student from the now closed Nathaniel Pope School

At the  school board meeting where the 50 schools were closed, they were not referred to by their names, but by their numbers, as if they were incarcerated criminals in a bad prison movie.

The CPS leadership blamed “underutilization” and “budget woes” as the cause, but then announced that 31 new charter school were planned.  An internal document from Teach for America says that the number may eventually be as many 52 charters.

The Raise Your Hand (RYH) school advocacy group reported that “47 percent of CPS charter and contract schools” were below CPS ideal enrollment numbers. Neighborhood schools are closed for such “underutilization”.

RYH policy analyst Wendy Katten estimated that the new charters will cost upwards of $255 million over the next ten years.

Wendy Katten
Wendy Katten

Charters will not solve the “budget crisis” and are not a panacea for improving education. Neither will the corporate-backed “education reform” schemes coming from the Department of Education under Arne Duncan with the support of President Obama.

CPS bureaucrats did their best to sabotage public discussion

Public discussion on the West Side is hampered because CPS is withholding vital information. Inquiries about school budgets, Safe Passage funding, school utilitization and class sizes have gone unanswered. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have been ignored. A meeting with CPS operations chief Tim Cawley was promised but never happened.

CPS has been very busy on the West Side, but doesn’t want anyone to know exactly why. In a city with an unelected school board under the direct control of the mayor, dominated by the downtown wealthy elite, this is not hard to do. 

West Side education justice activists are generally disappointed with the performance of Black elected officials who are supposed to represent their community. They want Rahm Emanuel voted out in the next election, although who would replace him is not clear. They want an elected school board and and demand that TIF money go to communities in need, not to glittering hi-rises  downtown.  They want a real democracy in Chicago so that all communities can enjoy quality education.

Sit-in in front of City Hall
Sit-in in front of City Hall against unfair education policies

West Side residents have good reason to believe that much of this so-called  “education reform” can best be described by what the Chicago Teachers Union calls education apartheid:

“Schools more than 99 percent students of color (“Apartheid schools”) have been the primary target of CPS school actions—representing more than 80 percent of all affected schools. These students face a wide range of challenges outside of school, including high levels of violence and trauma, but are still expected to serve as test subjects for unproven school reform schemes.”

Despite setbacks West Siders continue to organize community meetings. They picket and hold press conferences. They study the data and crunch the numbers. They testify at School Board hearings. They go to the state capital in Springfield.They organize voter registration to dislodge politicians hostile to public education. They run for Local School Councils and seek to improve them. They form alliances with other education justice organizations. They work closely with the Chicago Teachers Union. They brainstorm about what to do next.

CPS may be silent, evasive or dishonest
when questioned, but West Siders are still talking

The following are some highlights of what West Siders have been talking about in recent months:

The decimation of Black administrators, teachers and support staff: The percentage of Black teachers in CPS has been cut from approximately 40% to 25% since 2001. Black principals made up 55% of CPS 10 years ago. That is down to 46%. Black males are a rarity in administration at 12% and even rarer in teaching at 4%. 

Brandon Johnson, a West Side resident and CTU organizer saw the results after the 2013 school actions:

“More than 250 black teachers were impacted by the board's decisions ...Octavia Sansing-Rhodes, a black teacher at Herzl, brought an inspired, culturally competent pedagogy to her classroom. Her dedication was recognized and she was named WGN teacher of the month. Her school was turned over to a private operator and she was fired...”

Brandon Johnson on left
Brandon Johnson (left)

In addition to being a racist educational policy, it is a body blow to an economywhich already has a black unemployment rate twice that of whites and a poverty rate nearly three times that of whites. 

Teach for America (TFA) and the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL): Organizations like TFA and AUSL replace veteran (often African American) teachers with inexperienced mostly young white teachers with little knowledge of the community. AUSL is especially active on the West Side. AUSL schools are "turnaround schools" where everyone is fired and then replaced with new staff. AUSL however does use union teachers whereas charter schools that employ many TFA's do not. According to investigative reporter Curtis Black, these turnarounds have produced "mediocre results."

According to  juvenile court Judge Marianne Jackson who resides on the West Side, “Inexperienced teachers do not know how to read situations so they get frightened or confused  and don’t know how to deal with them.” Simple misunderstandings can then escalate into a major disciplinary or juvenile criminal case. As a result, more young people are sent down the school to prison pipeline.

Judge Marianne Johnson
Judge Marianne Johnson

TFA and AUSL try to stay non-union which cuts them off from the Chicago Teachers Union and the Association of Charter School Teachers, important advocates for quality education. They also don’t have Local School Councils, making them less accountable to the communities they purport to serve.

LSC’s are a unique Chicago institution where parents and community members are elected to provide input on local school policies and budgeting. There will be a city-wide LSC summit in mid February to strengthen and revitalize these important institutions.

The acute shortage of pre-school education: Aminah Wyatt of Illinois Action for Children told us that only 1/2 of the children in the West Side North Lawndale community are in any kind pre-school program:

”Many of these children fall off the radar in terms of schools because they are in homes, not traditional child care. And then there are the children who are not accounted for all. We can’t find these children. So where are they? Some of them represent the homeless population.”

Zerlina Smith delivers toys to West Side Pre-K children
Zerlina Smith (foreground) delivers toys to West Side Pre-K children

Many parents find the CPS pre-K program useless because it is half day. Aminah Wyatt is especially concerned about those children who aren’t in any programs at all, because they will enter kindergarten already behind their peers.

The inequities in school funding: Illinois bases school funding on property taxes which gives an unfair advantage to affluent communities. Even within CPS the West Side and other low income areas have traditionally been underfunded and under resourced relative to schools in more affluent Chicago neighborhoods.

This year CPS created a budgeting process making individual school funding even harder. Until this year budgeting within CPS has followed a “Teacher Allocated Budget” in which small swings in student enrollment at a school had no immediate effect on a school's funding. Principals could hire experienced teachers without budget worries because teacher salary was not an issue.

This year CPS is following a new budget process that Sarah Karp of Catalyst Magazine described as every kid having “a price tag attached to them.”  Karp believes this “student-based budgeting” will work to the disadvantage of both special needs children and veteran teachers, both of whom suddenly became more expensive.

Sarah Karp of Catalyst Magazine
Sarah Karp of Catalyst Magazine

This forces principals into making difficult decisions in already underfunded schools. It is another way to further destabilize neighborhood schools and the communities they serve.

Charter proliferation Charter schools were originally designed to operate with minimal control from central bureaucracies in order test new educational methods.The results would then be shared for the benefit of all.

Today’s charters have largely abandoned that mission. They have been weaponized to break teachers’ unions and privatize public education. They generally perform no better than regular public schools and further divide parents in already distressed communities.

Some charters are mired in political scandals as contracts are doled to the well connected. Among them is the UNO charter chain, formerly led by the disgraced Juan Rangel who was very close Mayor Emanuel.  UNO is now under SEC and State of Illinois investigation for financial fraud. UNO operates on the West Side among its other locations.

The West Side Austin community saw 4 grade schools closed in 2013 for “underutilization” only to see a charter school approved which is sponsored by the politically connected Moody Bible Institute. 

Tammie Vinson, a special education teacher at nearby Oscar DePriest school, said that while CPS claimed the lack of money was one “the driving reasons for closing schools, but now they're supplying money to open charters, and it doesn't make sense.” 

Tammie Vinson
Tammie Vinson (in red sweater)

CPS parent Zerlina Smith pointed how budgets were slashed at the surviving neighborhood schools as money was diverted to the new charter.

The introduction of a Noble Street charter school into the West Side came under fire from Dwayne Truss because of its discipline policies where loose shirttails and untied shoes mean $5 fines.

According to Truss,”If you get so many demerits, you have to take what they call an attitude adjustment class that you have to pay for in the summer because if you don’t, you don’t move up to the next grade.” A FOIA query revealed that Noble Street collected almost $387,000 in fines from 2008-2012.

Dwayne Truss of Raise Your Hand
Dwayne Truss of Raise Your Hand

Katie Osgood, a  teacher at a Chicago psychiatric hospital testified at the Board of Education about how Noble Street traumatizes students:

“We’ve seen an alarming number of students being admitted to the hospital with depression, severe anxiety, and increasingly with actual suicide attempts all directly tied to these schools’ discipline, academic, and retention policies.”

As Dwayne Truss remarked,”This what happens at Noble Street. This is what they want to bring into our community”. Noble Street is closely associated with hedge fund operator and GOP candidate for governor Bruce Rauner, an ally of Mayor Emanuel.

Race to the Top and standardized test abuse: Although City Hall and CPS usually get the most criticism, Valerie Leonard made the point that the federal Race to the Topprogramdeserves its share too, “It encourages those massive school closings that we see from city to city. It also encourages a lot of this testing that’s going on. It also encourages tying teacher performance to student test performance.”

Teachers do not control the West Side’s poverty and resulting social problems that affect student learning.

For states to to compete for Race to the Top funding they must agree to fund charter schools the same as public schools, agree to a dramatic increase in standardized testing as well agree to the controversial Common Core standards. Valerie Leonard told us,” The federal government has basically dangled carrots around the country with no guarantee of funding for these so-called reforms.”

She was also very critical of CPS entering into the Gates Compact in exchange for funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation because it favored school closings, standardized testing and privatization with very little money actually coming to Chicago.  

Valerie Leonard
Valerie Leonard giving a presentation on school budgets

The endless parade of standardized tests do not help students become critical, creative and curious lifetime learners. In an era when even kindergarten children are subjected them, the Chicago Teachers Union published a report debunking the test mania:

"Standardized testing grew out of the American tradition of using quantitative attempts to measure intelligence as a pretext for racist and exclusionary policies. Todays tests still discriminate and together with inequities in housing, employment, education, and health care, contributes to the achievement gap.”

Cassandre Cresswell  a CPS parent and member of More than a Score,  a group opposed to testing abuse, urged West Side parents to join the national movement and opt out of the tests:“We can say no, we don’t want our schools to be evaluated by this kind of testing because it is not meaningful enough for what [children] should be learning.”

School actions and gentrification: Two things I hear often on the West Side are,”They don’t want us here,” and “They want the land,” meaning that school closings are part of a disinvestment process that drives out Black and Latino working class people to make room for more affluent people (mostly white). 

Dr. David Stovall, an education policy professor at UIC notes that the closings are concentrated in gentrifying areas, "This is a piece in the larger picture of making Chicago a 'global city' and displacing residents seen as undesirable." 

This kind of disinvestment and social dislocation has helped lead to the exodus of 200,000 African Americans from Chicago.

The low wage economy: One of the most important factors for student success is the income of the parent. Gloria Warner, President of Action Now, a community group active on the South and West Sides, made this point:

“There is a direct link between poverty and increases in violence and crime, as well as decreases in educational achievement. When workers make a living wage, it helps build up the whole community”

Ellyson Carter of West Side Action Now stressed the importance of more money flowing into the West Side economy,” We’re fighting for a minimum wage to be raised in the City of Chicago up to $15 an hour. We have a referendum on the ballot certain precincts to do this.” 

Elllyson Carter (right) with Gloria Warner
Elllyson Carter (right) with Gloria Warner

Both the  Chicago Teachers Union and Action Now are strong supporters of the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC) which has led several Fight for $15 strikes since being founded in 2012.

“Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories”---Amilcar Cabral

I’d be a liar if I told you that morale is high in Chicago’s education justice movement right now. After the historic CTU strike of 2012, it was The Empire Strikes Back. CPS doubled down on teacher persecution, continued its traditional neglect of student needs and closed 50 schools. A lot of people are feeling fearful and discouraged. CPS teacher Tara Stamps said it best on a cold January night in a meeting held in the Austin neighborhood near where I live:

“The pressure that teachers are under is being transferred to our students because our teachers are so beleaguered. They are beat up on from the time they walk into the building until the time they leave. I believe it’s intentional, the amount of paperwork, the amount of accountability---and I’ve come to hate the word accountability. Because the only people being held accountable are the teachers. Nobody else. And what breaks my heart is that all of these things happen and the only people who are going to pay the price are our children...

...I know what happened during the strike, that you felt passion and anger that provoked us to action. And we cannot, and I know it’s hard, because I feel it too, but you cannot rest and think that this malaise will take care of itself. Because all of the data has shown that all of this change, not change really, but desolation and destruction, has not stopped. And the only people who can stop this are parents, students, teachers and solidarity.”

As I attended meetings, I kept thinking about the WWII London Blitz when German bombers leveled whole sections of the city, but rescue workers kept searching for survivors in the rubble and wondering how to rebuild. Powerful economic forces are attacking West Side with disinvestment, foreclosures, low wage jobs, unemployment and school closings, creating the “desolation and destruction” so eloquently described by Tara Stamps. 

The Corporate Blitz on Chicago’s West Side has certainly taken its toll, but there is a resilience of spirit that has not been extinguished. Life goes on, changed perhaps, but life finds a way. And so does the resistance. 

West Sider Roberta Wilson, an 86 year old retired Chicago Public Schools (CPS) employee who marched with Dr King against school segregation in 1963 said this:

“I’ve been out on the battlefield for a long time.I worked on the North Side for 29 years and believe me, up above Fullerton Ave you don’t see any charter schools. They’re in the African American community. That’s why parents need to get up and get out of the house and fight for all the children. So what I’m saying is, we need to hit these streets and do what we have to do.”

Roberta Wilson
Roberta Wilson

The CTU strike of 2012 terrified the barons of LaSalle Street from the big banks and hedge fund operators down to their spokesperson Rahm Emanuel. The CTU had called out the city elite for its institutional racism, for its callous attitude toward quality education and for its impoverishment of the city’s working class. 

As the strike unfolded, it was clear that the Chicago’s working class had united across racial lines in support of the striking teachers. In 2013 Chicago’s working class once again united across racial lines in its overwhelming opposition to the school closings.

2012 Chicago Teachers Strike
2012 Chicago Teachers Strike

In my 38 years living in the most segregated urban area of the north, I had never seen that kind of multiracial working class unity. It was the cry of a people on behalf of the young. It is a cry that continues to be heard.

The pathological values of the very rich

“Research experts want to know what can be done about the values of poor segregated children; and this is a question that needs asking. But they do not ask what can be done about the values of the people who have segregated these communities. There is no academic study of the pathological detachment of the very rich...”―Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools

Education justice activists often say that the Chicago school closings “were never about the money.” Actually they were all about the money. It is true they were never about saving money. They were about making money.

Neighborhood disinvestment and destabilization means lucrative contracts for charter school operators, investment bankers, real estate speculators and building contractors. The public relations term for this is gentrification. The more accurate term is ethnic cleansing.

But this is bigger than Chicago's wealthy elite. Wall Street sees education as a goldmine for investors. Besides the national charter chains like KIPP, there is profit from the mind numbing standardized tests and the lifeless scripted curricula from companies like Pearson. There is the expensive hardware and software that accompanies online testing and online teaching.

The attacks on public education help feed the school to prison pipeline, a pipeline that is increasingly being privatized for profit. 

But this just short-term gain.  What about the systematic attack on children’s social skills, playfulness, imagination, curiosity and lifetime love of learning? Imagine the damage this does to their developing humanity. Then think about how this prepares them for a lifetime of precarious but very profitable low wage labor.

West Side schoolchildren
West Side schoolchildren

Of course the elite send their children to schools designed to encourage their social skills, playfulness, imagination, curiosity and lifetime love of learning. Clearly they have other plans for their offspring.

The miseducation being pushed on the West Side and communities like it is useless for ending poverty and racism, the two biggest problems these communities face and the two biggest enemies of their schools.

A feature of American capitalism since its beginnings, poverty and racism are both very profitable. To put it bluntly, eliminating poverty and racism would mean transforming the US economy from top to bottom. West Siders have traditionally resisted both poverty and racism, fighting for liberation from these evils.

The school motto of the now closed Mathew Henson School on the West Side was “Education is liberation! Peaceful! Positive! Productive!” Corporate domination over the minds of children is one way to counter both resistance and liberation. 

It is a battle that Chicago’s West Side cannot win on its own.

This is modern neo-liberal capitalism at work, where everything and everyone are viewed as prey for profiteers. It is truly a global system whose impact is felt locally everyday.  It is imperative that the education justice movement deepen its understanding of this reality. Whether you believe that capitalism can be made to work for all, or like me, you think socialism is the answer, that kind of knowledge is power.

The destructive social pathology of Chicago’s wealthy elite can be countered by solidarity among Chicago’s working class people, a solidarity that must extend across racial divisions, neighborhood boundaries, city limits, state lines and yes, even national borders. For as the downtown civic boosters like to say, “Chicago is a global city.”

Our job in the education justice movement to make it a global city that can educate everyone to their fullest human potential. Nothing less is acceptable.

Rally for an elected school board

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated that AUSL schools were non-union. That is incorrect. They employ union teachers after the "turnarounds".

Sources Consulted

Chicago Bombshell! TFA Plans to Staff 52 New Charters as 50 Public Schools Die by Diane Ravitch

Education Activists Discuss Next Steps Against Charter School Expansion In Chicago by Ellyn Fortino

New charter school approved for Austin by Christa Smith

Upsized classes, downsized education by Brian Jones

How Inequality Hollows Out the Soul By Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

AUSL turnarounds called ineffective, expensive by Curtis Black

Labor Beat: Stop the West Side Charters (video)

Documents from the West Side town hall meetings 

Unmasking the Chicago charter scam by Kevin Moore and Rachel Cohen

Disappearing acts: The decline of black teachers by Brandon Johnson

Data Analysis Reveals Nearly 11,000 Empty Seats; 47% of Charter Schools Under-enrolled from Raise Your hand

Structured out of a job by Sarah Karp

New CPS Charter Schools Could Cost $255M Over 10 Years, Study Says by Ted Cox

Are schools the next target of gentrification? Chicago has been closing public schools in the areas developers want. by Kari Lydersen

The Black and White of Education in Chicago from the CTU Research Dept.

Behind the racist school closings agenda by Lee Sustar

Trickle-down Gentrification by  Karen Narefsky

Of Nightmares and Watersheds

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“If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.” ― Rebecca Solnit

The nightmare that comes to me while I sleep always begins the same way. I am standing next to Colesville Road in Silver Spring, Maryland, near where Northwest Branch creek crosses this highway. 

But instead of the small filtration station that once served the modest-sized dam a couple of hundred yards upstream, there is massive hi-rise development everywhere: acres of uber-modern condos and swanky shops cover the ground where I once pried off samples of translucent mica from the soft sandstone in the forest above the creek.

In the nightmare, the stream valley on both sides of the highway, once crowded with ancient trees, has been denuded and the resulting silt has turned the once clear waters a sluggish brown. The boulders and small waterfalls downstream are still there, but bake in the sun instead of being protected by the cool shade of an Eastern forest.

When I to hike down the creekside trail, it never leads to the house I once called home. I become lost amidst unfamiliar boulders and side trails that lead nowhere. When I awake I am filled with a deep and terrible sadness. This is a recurring nightmare of mine. It comes upon me frequently.

During my teen years I explored that publicly owned stream valley for miles in both directions, often hiking through the water in an old pair of tennis shoes. I came to know the sucker fish who swam in the shallows, the tadpoles of the vernal pools and the box turtles who would seek relief from the summer heat in the calm areas of small feeder streams.

Fallen logs across the creek provided easy bridges to the old suburb of Woodmoor, high on the other side of the valley, where the branch library kept me furnished with a steady supply of science and science fiction books.

In the winter, the half-frozen waterfalls became an ever-changing sculpture garden of icy surrealism.

In and around the Rachel Carson Greenway
Northwest Branch north of the small dam

Teddy Roosevelt visited Northwest Branch in 1904 and wrote to his son: ” ... there is a beautiful gorge, deep and narrow, with great boulders and even cliffs. Excepting Great Falls, it is the most beautiful place around here.”

Northwest Branch crosses the geological fall line between the Piedmont and Atlantic coastal plain regions which explains the small waterfalls south of Colesville Road.

Rachel Carson’s former home where she wrote much of “Silent Spring” is near Northwest Branch. The trail there is now called the Rachel Carson Greenway. Famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed her near the creek for a 1962 Life Magazine article.

Although the stream quality has been adversely affected by storm water runoff from the crowded suburbs that surround it, it is afforded some protection by government agencies of Montgomery and Prince Georges County. The Neighbors of Northwest Branch organization leads nature walks there and monitors its condition.

Rachel Carson photo Rachel-Carson-008.jpg
Rachel Carson birdwatching along Northwest Branch

So why do I have recurring nightmares about Northwest Branch instead of recurring dreams of its beauty, a beauty that has largely survived since the end of the last Ice Age?

Why? Perhaps because Northwest Branch is a part of the Anacostia watershed.

It empties into the dangerously polluted Anacostia River which flows past Southeast DC, a largely African American working class community. Much of the pollution comes from suburbs upstream or from the rest of DC across the river. A short distance away, across the bridges that span the river, are the EPA headquarters and the Congress that passed the Clean Water Act.

Trash in Anacostia River
Trash in the Anacostia River

According to the National Resources Defense Council: “Toilets in the Capitol regularly flush directly into the Anacostia -- our federal government needs to show leadership and contribute its fair share to cleaning up the District's rivers.” 

Apparently Congress really does give a shit about our watersheds.  That contrast alone is almost too much to bear, even as citizens groups and official agencies work to slowly repair the Anacostia River.

But in the face of greed and misplaced priorities, official agencies and well intentioned citizens groups are an easily breached line of defense. Powerful financial interests do it all the time.

So despite its present status as public parkland, the eco-system of Northwest Branch remains vulnerable.

But perhaps these nightmares about a favorite creek also stem from other places as well. Three women I've met are in a Michigan jail for non-violently protesting an Enbridge company pipeline that would carry Canadian tar sands oil across the Midwest. Tar sands oil is one of the dirtiest petro-products ever. 

In 2010 leakage from an Enbridge pipeline caused the largest inland oil disaster in US history when it polluted Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.

In both West Virginia and North Carolina, energy companies recently leaked toxins into rivers with seeming impunity. In Northern Alberta where oil and gas development has ravaged the traditional lands of the Cree peoples, Melina Laboucan-Massimo said this:

“My community has dealt with three decades of massive oil and gas development. And this has been without the consent of the people or without the recognition of protection of the human rights which should be protected under section 35 of the Canadian constitution, which protects  aboriginal and treaty rights.”
It is the reckless burning of coal, oil and gas that is accelerating climate change, drastically altering the hydrology of the entire biosphere. 

Meanwhile, the snowpack of the High Sierras in California shrinks as climate change sweeps across the planet. What will become of those frigid fast flowing mountain streams whose waters I drank and whose rushing sounds lulled me to sleep as I camped near their banks.

And how many Californians depend upon that snow pack for their home water supply?

The UN tells us that,” More than 2.7 billion people will face severe shortages of fresh water by 2025 if the world keeps consuming water at today's rates...”

I can’t be the only person who is having nightmares about fresh water, the lifeblood for all terrestrial beings. My prehistoric Scottish ancestors once designated pools, springs and other water sources as sacred places of worship, as did other peoples around the planet. 

But as social critic Karl Marx wrote,”... all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

I believe in neither gods nor goddesses. But the next time I visit Northwest Branch, my own personal shrine to water, I will offer a silent prayer.

May we please make water sacred again?

Northwest Branch 2
A small waterfall along Northwest Branch

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A socialist since he was a child, Bob "BobboSphere" Simpson is a retired history teacher now living in Oak Park IL. 

Sources Consulted

Neighbors of Northwest Branch

Rachel Carson Greenway & Northwest Branch Stream Valley Park Trails

Northwest Branch  Subwatershed  Action Plan

Robert B. Morse Water Filtration Plant

Cleaning Up the Anacostia River by the National Resources Defense Council

Anacostia Riverkeeper

Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands

Report Warns Of Severe Water Shortages By 2025

Chicagoans join together to ice the ISAT standardized test

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“Standardized testing encourages rigid scripted teach-to-the-test curricula devoid of educational exploration. The human element that makes great teaching and engaged learning is ruthlessly crushed like so much scrap metal in a junkyard compactor. No student was ever motivated to become an eager life-long learner by taking a mind numbing battery of tests. Now they are even being inflicted on Kindergarten and Pre-K children. Have we lost our minds?”

Across the wide 24th Boulevard in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood you could hear the chants:  “Let us teach…Let us teach…Let us teach!”

It was the frigid late afternoon of February 28 and the sounds were coming from the steps of Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy. Parents, teachers, students and community allies had gathered to support Saucedo’s boycott of the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT).

Ice the ISAT rally at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy on the near SW Side of Chicago.
Students dismissed from school gather before the rally

Earlier that week Saucedo teachers, with the urging of school parents, had voted unanimously not to give the test. The endless procession of standardized tests that take up valuable instruction time had pushed the Saucedo school community past the limit of its patience. Teachers didn’t want to go to work and follow a regimen they knew was harmful to children. And parents didn’t want that either. A natural alliance came into being.

The late Maria Saucedo was a highly respected bi-lingual educator working in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood who was active in groups like Casa Atzlan and Mujeres Latinas. As an honors student at Northeastern Illinois University, she helped found the Chicano Student Union. She was killed in a fire in 1981.

The Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy community is carrying on her life’s work of social and education justice. 

Saucedo special education teacher Sarah Chambers opened the rally by announcing that Saucedo did not stand alone:

“ We’ve received e-mails, photos, calls from Montana, from California, from New York, from all over the country. We have people supporting us for taking a stand.”

Ice the ISAT rally at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy on the near SW Side of Chicago. The teachers, students and parents have joined forces to boycott the ISAT standardized test.
Windy Pearson holds the bullhorn for Sarah Chambers

The rally was part of the general revolt against testing abuse in Chicago and across the nation. Spirits at the Saucedo rally were buoyed when word spread that Drummond Montessori on the city’s North Side had joined the boycott. This was in addition to the 67 schools where parents were opting out of the test on an individual basis.

 photo drummond.jpg
Press conference announcing the Drummond boycott

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett had already threatened to revoke any teachers’ state certificates if they refused to administer the ISAT.  Sarah Chambers said, “People who  threaten are cowards…because they are afraid of the teachers, the students, of the parents and of the community joining together and rising up.”

Chambers went on to ask why anyone would want to revoke teaching certificates because what the boycotting teachers want is to teach, not spend days administering a meaningless test.

Teachers and parents opting out of the testing are being supported by the Chicago Teachers Union and the Illinois Federation of Teachers, with CTU President Karen Lewis saying in a YouTube video:

” The ISAT is an unjust, unnecessary test. Everybody knows that. We’re not even going to use it next year. There are no stakes attached.”

Zerlina Smith, a parent at Saucedo, linked testing abuse to larger issues saying:

“School should not be used as a number, or a dollar amount on our kids’ heads. They are trying to force our African American and Latino babies into taking these tests so they can determine which schools to close.”

She linked school closings to displacement of residents in already deprived communities and to the laying off of qualified educators. 

Ice the ISAT rally at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy on the near SW Side of Chicago. The teachers, students and parents have joined forces to boycott the ISAT standardized test.
Zerlina Smith speaks

Veteran education activist Windy Pearson also spoke about school closings,”…our communities are being devastated and that in the process there is now an understanding that testing is not the answer to the problems that are occurring.”

Poverty is the biggest enemy of education in Chicago. Chicago’s corporate elite which pushes standardized testing, also favors disinvestment in minority working class communities, exacerbating the very problems that deeply concern people like Windy Pearson.

As the opt-out movement took shape Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett spread FUD across the city 

In characteristic fashion, the titular leader of Chicago education spread what they call in the computer world: FUD. FUD stands for “Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.” The idea was for Byrd Bennett to threaten retaliation so that parents and teachers would retreat, too frightened or confused to take action. 

 photo Bennett.jpg
Barbara Byrd Bennett

At the Saucedo rally I had a conversation with a CPS retired teacher and we talked about the pervasive fear that exists and how important seemingly small individual or local actions can be for breaking though that fear.

Remember, this is Chicago, where retaliation can come in very unsubtle ways and in the not-too-distant past, could even mean violence. It is a city largely ruled by fiat from the Mayors Office with backing by powerful financial interests. People who present promising ideas about education are routinely ignored by the unelected school board, leaving protest and civil disobedience as the only ways to influence policy.

Byrd-Bennett began sending out a series of misleading letters and public statements starting on December 20, 2013. The December letter announced the demise of the ISAT but trumpeted the Northwest Education Association(NWEA) exam. Byrd Bennett warned darkly that opting out of the NWEA exam could mean,” …your child’s future could be negatively impacted,” implying that a student could be held back from grade level advancement.

The December letter had the opposite effect of what was intended. It angered many parents and opposition grew, as evidenced by community forums across the city. More parents were considering opting out. Then came another letter on January 29, 2014. Byrd Bennett stated that students who opted out of the NWEA exams would not be considered for selective enrollment high schools or grade promotion for grades 3, 6, and 8. 

She also said that even if the ISAT was being phased out, it was still required for measuring the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) required by the federal No Child Left Behind ACT. Yet as CTU VP Jesse Sharkey stated, most schools in Illinois do not meet AYP goals,  and that even Education Secretary Arne Duncan largely ignores No Child Left Behind.

The situation became even more uncertain as principals gave out contradictory sometimes inaccurate information to parents.

But opposition continued to grow, especially against the ISAT. Then came Byrd Bennett’s  infamous February 28 letter to principals with its threats of disciplinary action against teachers refusing to administer the test.

“The Chicago Board of Education will discipline any employee who encourages a student not to take the ISAT or who advocates against the ISAT on work time for insubordination and for any disruption of the educational process.”

Her stand was backed up by Rahm Emanuel who said,”She made the right call. The only person who can pull somebody out is not a teacher, but a parent.”

This was a weird thing to say considering the threats made to parents about the future of their children.

FUD indeed.

The real high stakes of  standardized testing

Today’s standardized tests are descended from the unscientific IQ tests of the early 20th century, which were used to cement racial, ethnic and social class discrimination. Despite the modern alphabet soup of ISAT, MAP, PARCC, NWEA, SAT and the rest they have not evolved much further, though they have become more become pervasive and more profitable.

They do not measure independent thinking, creative imagination, curiosity, social skills and the counter-intuitive reasoning necessary to understand what may appear obvious is often misleading. The tests are clueless when it comes to measuring the complexity of the human mind and its ability to change and develop. 

 photo Socrates.jpg

Standardized testing encourages rigid scripted teach-to-the-test curricula devoid of educational exploration. The human element that makes great teaching and engaged learning is ruthlessly crushed like so much scrap metal in a junkyard compactor. No student was ever motivated to become an eager life-long learner by taking a mind numbing battery of tests. Now they are being inflicted on Kindergarten and Pre-K children. Have we lost our minds?

But standardized tests do measure one thing with reasonable accuracy: the amount of poverty in a working class community. Ironically, the lower test scores in impoverished areas are then used as further justification for more testing, more scripted curricula and more school privatization. Meanwhile in  corporate offices far away, cash registers are constantly beeping.

Must I mention that poverty is heavily racialized in this country and that this form of insidious child abuse falls most heavily on children of color? And that public schools in high poverty areas are most likely to lack libraries and laboratories, music and art, advanced science and world languages, quality textbooks and modern computers? Yet these schools still endure an endless parade of expensive testing even as they are closed one by one and their funding is shifted over to privatization.

What about working class communities that are less economically wounded? They are seeing their public education budgets reduced as standardized testing gallops on and privatization looms on their horizon.

The wealthy elite who push these tests are using young minds as experimental test subjects. Remain silent. Follow the rules without question. Don’t look to your neighbor for help. Dutifully recall the isolated bits of data that were given to you as everyone else around you does exactly the same. And never ever let your mind wander in new directions that take you to the undiscovered or as yet uncreated.

Is this what we want for the next generation?

Sources consulted

Chicago Test Boycott – Second School Joins In by Michelle Gunderson

Teachers at Chicago’s Saucedo Scholastic Academy vote 100% to boycott ISAT test. Teachers union has their backs. 100%. by Fred Klonsky

Biography Of Maria Saucedo

Battle Brewing Between CPS, Teachers Over ISAT Boycott by Aricka Flowers

CTU supports second teacher boycott of low-stakes ISAT by CTU Communications

Update: Continued CTU support of the Saucedo ISAT boycott

Don’t Sit for the ISAT by Matt Farmer

Teachers at second school to refuse to give ISATs, CTU says by Becky Schlikerman 

High Stakes Testing: The new child labor

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“Exploited without regard to their tender years, countless youngsters were working under conditions constantly fraught with danger to life and limb…The blight of child labor was widely prevalent, in dust-laden textile mills and pitch-black coal mines, in sweltering glass factories and fetid sweat-shop lofts, in filthy canneries and blazing hot tobacco fields. No industry, no region was without its "tiny hostages to rapacious capitalism.” ---- from Child Labor in Textile Mills by M.B. Schnapper

“I walked past my daughter.  She looked up at me, her face red from crying, I could see that tears had been collecting at her collar ‘I just can’t do this,’ she sobbed.  The ill fitting headsets, the hard to hear instructions, the uncooperative mouse, the screen going to command modes, not being able to get clarification when she asked for it...Later on when I picked her up after her long seven-hour day, she whispered into my shoulder ‘I’m just not smart, mom. Not like everyone else. I’m just no good at kindergarten, just no good at all.’”----------Claire Wapole, a Chicago mom who volunteered as a MAP test proctor in a Chicago Public Schools kindergarten

Look how far we’ve have advanced in the use of child labor? Corporate USA doesn’t send US children to choke out their lives in the black dust of the coal mines or the brown dust of the textile mills. After long and intense opposition to that kind of child labor, Corporate USA was forced to allow working class children to attend school.

But in our Brave New World of neoliberal capitalism, Corporate USA, as represented by companies such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill,  have turned schools into testing factories. They generate mega-profits by having kids hunched over their writing desks or their computers for hours and even days at a time. Education is a big business, some estimates I have seen place it at as high as 1.3 trillion dollars.

 photo Leah-AnneThompson-kindergartenTestingFW.jpgPhoto by Leah-Anne Thompson

If the White House and Wall Street have their way, this big business will get even bigger. There’s gold in dem thar’ tests, along with the ancillary material, the training manuals, the test prep guides and the scripted curricula that goes along with the whole package.  Standardized tests have been weaponized and used as an excuse to close schools and privatize education while firing experienced and beloved teachers. Teachers? Who needs teachers? If the trend continues, a computer network technician who can read instructions in a clear voice will be all that is necessary. Think of the cost savings in salaries and benefits.

But the real mother-load will be the data collection that requires monstrous server farms, upgraded multi-state digital networks, endless software and hardware upgrades, technical support and...well you get the picture. And by the way, what do they plan to do with all of this highly personal data?

What do these tests measure BTW?

Just because something happens in a school doesn’t mean that it has anything to do with education. Today’s standardized tests grew out of the racially and class biased  IQ tests popular in the days when eugenics was considered “science.” As Alfie Cohn says about the modern standardized tests:

“The main thing they tell us is how big the students' houses are. Research has repeatedly found that the amount of poverty in the communities where schools are located, along with other variables having nothing to do with what happens in classrooms, accounts for the great majority of the difference in test scores from one area to the next.”----- Alfie Cohn 

To those who say that students need to prepare for jobs and careers in “real life”, how many people are evaluated on their jobs based upon sweating over often inane and unrelated multiple choice questions?

Protesting standardized testing abuse in the Chicago Public Schools
Chicagoans against testing abuse

High stakes testing proponents seem to forget that schooling is not only about preparing students for careers, careers  that may not even exist when they graduate. It is also about preparing students to be active citizens in a vibrant democracy.

While it’s true that the voting booth is a kind of standardized test, the few minutes we spend there every couple of years are only a small part of our responsibilities as citizens. There is no standardized test that can evaluate the complexity of sustaining and extending democracy.

What high stakes tests cannot measure

High stakes testing cannot measure inspiration, creativity, exploration, curiosity and collaboration. Instead it is banishing these from the schools in favor of “rigor” and “grit”, the latest faddish buzzwords from hi-stakes testing proponents. 

Pardon me while I draw upon my 25 years experience as a secondary school educator and talk a little about the “rigor” that I have observed, none of it the result of high stakes testing.

Rigor is the cast of the high school musical devoting many hours of practice after and before school to make their live performance as flawless as possible. Rigor is the students in a math class exploring advanced calculations because they have been inspired by the sheer beauty of them as well as by how math has been essential to the technology they carry in their pockets. Rigor is students in an English class learning that painstakingly combining exactly the right words together can lead to life-changing insights and perhaps even result in a respectable showing at the next city-wide poetry slam. 

You can’t bubble that kind of “rigor” into a standardized test. It’s amazing how even pre-k’s and kindergartners can focus on tasks that inspire them without the intervention of high stakes testing. That kind of rigorous intensity comes from the human interaction of students and teachers in a collaborative classroom environment. 

Protesting standardized testing abuse in the Chicago Public Schools
Chicagoans against testing abuse

As for “grit”, introduce that into delicate complex machinery and it will destroy it. Grit is what wears things down and in that sense the term is a pretty accurate way of describing what high stakes testing is doing to our schools. They are wearing them out from within.  Katie Osgood is a teacher in a Chicago psychiatric hospital. Here is her take on “grit”:

“What is the value in teaching children to be able to sit for hours, to have the “grit” to finish that tedious task or long test? Why not create curriculum that is so engaging and relevant that children discover a joy in learning? No instruction on “grit” is needed when students are empowered and engaged. “No excuses” pedagogy is rooted in obedience and submission, in breaking children’s spirit, while social justice pedagogy empowers and uplifts using that spirit as an asset.”-------Katie Osgood 


Wasting valuable class time for dubious results

I often hear from frustrated parents and teachers that the endless parade of standardized tests is a “waste of valuable class time”. It’s much worse than that. The old fashioned child labor damaged children's’ health and deprived them of an education. I fear that the new child labor of high stakes testing and its related classroom activities will be the 21st century equivalent.

How will the chronic stress affect the minds of young children as it is applied year after year? A Great Neck, New York principal named  Sharon Fougner reported visceral reactions to Common Core testing:

“We know that many children cried during or after testing, and others vomited or lost control of their bowels or bladders. Others simply gave up. One teacher reported that a student kept banging his head on the desk, and wrote, ‘This is too hard,’ and ‘I can’t do this,’ throughout his test booklet.’” ---from an open letter signed by over 1500 New York state principals.

Chronic stress can kill.

It’s no secret that American schools have problems with bullying and violence. This manifests itself in different ways, some of which are related to race and social class. Troubled students often turn to favorite teachers when they are in distress. Yet, the goal of the standardized test mania is to remove the caring empathetic  human connection and replace it with a rigid scripted curricula that will literally “teacher-proof” the classroom.

I spent 15 years of my teaching career at a South Side Chicago Catholic women’s high school. My students were a multiracial mix of working class young people, many of them from distressed neighborhoods where labor exploitation, disinvestment, racism and gender discrimination take their toll on a daily basis.

I had students coming to me with serious personal issues exacerbated by the socio-economic realities around them. By working closely with the school counselors, together we were able to offer them at least some of the support they so desperately needed.

Since most of my teaching career was before the high stakes testing madness took hold, I had a lot control over the history curriculum in my classes. I was able to bring in historical examples and current events that addressed what these young people faced. I could show them how social movements had addressed and continue to address the often harsh realities of working class life in the USA. I could ask them to imagine how they would address these issues and how research and creative thought can provide some answers while also raising new questions.

How do you bubble that into a standardized test? 

According to Kathleen M. Cashin and Bruce S. Cooper of Fordham University, financially hard-pressed schools who pay for expensive testing packages:

“...are forced to cut such necessary services to students as social workers, psychologists, counselors, as well as the arts and athletics. These demands and the sacrifices they require will prove harmful to students, in the short run and the long run.”

How will this affect the school to prison pipeline as students drop out or are pushed out? How will this impact the mental health of the next generation? How many lives will be lost to suicide, street violence or domestic abuse who might have been saved with a more rational and caring educational system?

Is corporate profit really worth the loss of such human potential and human life?

Fortunately there is the law of unintended consequences 

One of the consequences of the testing mania is a growing nationwide resistance movement to the new child labor of high stakes testing. Corporate USA is giving parents, teachers and students quite an unintended education in just how far it will go to squeeze profit from even the youngest children. 

Parents are requesting that their children opt out of the tests. Teachers are risking their careers by refusing to give them. Students in Massachusetts organized their own “Be a Hero. Get a Zero” movement for test refusal.

Here in Chicago, in the midst of one of the worst winters in the city’s history, teacher Sarah Chambers stood in front of her grade school early one morning looking out from inside of her heavy parka. She was calmly explaining to the media why teachers at her school were refusing to give the ISAT test and why many parents were not allowing their children to take it. Too many tests. Too little time for learning and human interaction.

When asked what teachers planned to do with the children not taking the test, Chambers smiled and said, “We’re going to teach them.”

Teach the children. What a concept.

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.”--------- Mario Savio at the 1964 Berkeley student strike


It’s way past time to shut down the high stakes  testing machine that runs on the labor of children and the growing anguish of adults....and turn our attention to actual education.

 photo Test-Skills-Jobs.jpg

Sources consulted

N.Y. school principals write letter of concern about Common Core tests by Valerie Strauss

Paul Tough Is Way Off-Base. And Stop Saying ‘Grit’ by Katie Osgood

Testing? Testing? by Claire Wapole

Lean Production; Inside the real war on public education by Will Johnson

Childhood Lost: Child Labor During the Industrial Revolution from Teaching with Primary Sources at Eastern Illinois University

How Wall Street Power Brokers Are Designing the Future of Public Education as a Money-Making Machine by Anna Simonton

You Can’t Bounce Off the Walls If There Are No Walls: Outdoor Schools Make Kids Happier—and Smarter by David Sobel

The case against standardized testing: raising the scores, ruining the schools by Alfie Kohn

Sacrificing Psychologists, Counselors, & Social Workers—and Athletics & the Arts—to Test Preparation by Kathleen M. Cashin Bruce S. Cooper

Testing in kindergarten: whatever happened to story time? by Ben Joravsky

They turned our schools into testing factories Socialist Worker editorial

Tests + Stress = Problems For Students by Daniel Edelstein


School turnarounds : Turning against racial justice

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The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) leadership is doing exactly the opposite of what both community activists and researchers have shown to be the most effective ways of improving public schools. School "turnarounds" are a racist privatization scheme damaging to quality education.

Tears welled up in the eyes of Angela Gordon, Local School Council President of Dvorak school as she composed herself to speak her allowed 2 minutes in front of the Chicago Board of Education on April 23, 2014.

Her school, along with McNair and Gresham schools, was about to have its entire staff fired, from the lunch ladies to the principal and then reorganized by a private management company called the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL)

In Chicago this is called a “turnaround”. 

Gordon tossed aside her prepared remarks and pleaded for the Board to postpone the decision. Her voice filled with emotion, she told the Board they are ”all about the numbers” explaining that she was there for the students as human beings, not as statistics. 

Surrounded by Dvorak parents and children she concluded by saying.”Do not turn us around through AUSL! Give us the resources so WE we can give the students what they need!”

Representatives of the other two schools also spoke in behalf of their students.

Faces of the resistance at the April 23 2014 Chicago School Board meeting
Supporters of McNair await their
their turn to speak at the April 23 Board meeting

 

A couple of hours later the Board went ahead and issued orders to fire everyone at all three schools and replace them.  But that had been decided long before the meeting even began. The entire morning was as one observer said,”Just a game of charades.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel calls the shots and communities have little input

The three schools that were chosen by Rahm's handpicked school chief Barbara Byrd Bennett and his handpicked school board were Dvorak Technology Academy and Ronald E McNair Elementary School on the West Side and Walter Q Gresham Elementary School on the South Side.

Turnarounds differ from charters because AUSL school workers can join the Chicago Teachers Union and AUSL schools can have a Local School Council (though the AUSL LSC’s are stripped of important powers). Local School Councils are a unique Chicago experiment in local democracy where teachers, parents and community members are elected to help develop school policies. 

Individuals can apply to be rehired, but AUSL prefers to bring in its own people (usually younger and whiter) and proclaim that the school is “turned around” and on the road to success.

The criteria for turnarounds are based on test scores and racial geography. AUSL picks schools with low test scores, usually in working class African American neighborhoods. While it’s true AUSL has had limited success at raising test scores in some schools,  most of their turnaround efforts do no better than neighborhood schools and test scores have even fallen in some cases. 

AUSL’s  test score criteria for determining school “failure” is itself a failed measurement. The complexity associated with genuine learning cannot be bubbled in and quantified by the dubious tool of the multiple choice test. Low test scores do reveal the extent of poverty in a community, which research shows is mostly what they measure. But one does not need a high stakes test to know that. They also suggest the chronic under-resourcing of neighborhood schools which must struggle for such basics as textbooks and toilet tissue.

AUSL’s generally mediocre performance on test scores is despite the influx of additional money CPS puts into their “turnaround” schools. Neighborhood schools that have been denied basic educational resources like libraries are suddenly deluged with funding once they are targeted for turnaround by AUSL or to house a charter school. 

Ollie Clemons a grandmother and the guardian of two boys at Gresham Elementary explained how that worked at her school:

“It was decided last year to have a charter school come in. In the meantime over the summer they put in an elevator. They put in a new library, but yet when the charter school decided not to come, the library did not get a librarian. The librarian was totally eliminated. Our art teacher did not come back. We only have a half time gymnasium teacher yet they want us to have healthy activities for the kids...”

But ironically, when a school does receive better educational resources, that is often linked with privatization.

The turnaround proposal generated intense opposition from the neighborhoods surrounding these schools

Representatives of the largely African American Lawndale, Austin and Auburn-Gresham neighborhoods packed hearings and community meetings. They picketed the Board of Education and held prayer vigils and press conferences. They turned out in force  at the April 23rd Board meeting and testified before the final decision was announced. They proposed alternate plans for school improvement.

In Chicago where the majority of students are African American and Latino, there is no elected school board as in in the rest of Illinois. Chicago Teachers Union organizer and CPS parent  Brandon Johnson compares this to the racist voter suppression being directed at African Americans and other people of color  around the nation. A school board handpicked by the mayor and corporate elite makes it eaier to privatize education.

Parents, students and community allies rally in front of Chicago Board of Ed President David Vitale's house
Gresham principal Dr. Diedrus Brown (center)

 

The human connection is a key factor in quality education. Why does AUSL want to weaken that connection?

A Gresham parent told me with pride,” Gresham is a school that goes back generations.” 

A quality education requires a complex web of human relationships among all of the people who directly affect student lives including teachers, administrators, non-teaching school staff, parents and other people in the surrounding community. 

Valerie Leonard of the Lawndale Alliance talked about these longterm human relationships when she testified on behalf of Dvorak.  Dvorak’s highly regarded principal Cheryl White had only been there two years and almost half of the staff was new. Leonard quoted from a Carnegie study:

“A study by the Carnegie Foundation examined the relationships between teacher tenure and experience and student performance and found that the sheer number of novices in public school teaching has serious financial, structural, and educational consequences for public education— straining budgets, disrupting school cultures and, most significantly, depressing student achievement."

Lisa Russell, a parent and Local School Council member from  Dvorak explained how a neighborhood school with these deep connections can be a refuge for children who have been rejected elsewhere:

“ Let me tell you about the neighborhood school, particularly Dvorak. We take anybody’s child from anywhere.. Don’t turn us around. Give us the resources. Give us the small class sizes... Our neighborhood school is more than what you know. It's a community, as they say. We have all kinds of children at the neighborhood school. When everybody else doesn’t want them, we get them. And guess what. We teach them. We work with them.”

Lisa Russell speaks out against school privatization in Chicago
Lisa Russell speaks at a press conference in front of CPS headquarters

 

West Side activist Zerlina Smith made a similar point about McNair after explaining that 21% of the students at McNair are special needs with IEP’s (Individualized Education Programs), "Why would you turn around a school with that many IEPs knowing that there’s not another school on the West Side that can handle that?” At the time of the proposed turnaround McNair had no librarian, no music or art teacher and no reading specialist.

Faces of the resistance at the April 23 2014 Chicago School Board meetingZerlina Smith at the April 23rd school board meeting

 

There are teachers who choose schools like these because they want to teach the students whom no one else wants. The abused. The misused. The abandoned. The ones with very special needs. The ones drowning in a sea of poverty and racism. The ones that Rahm Emanuel was describing in a discussion with CTU president Karen Lewis:

“In that conversation, he [Rahm] did say to me that 25 percent of the students in this city are never going to be anything, never going to amount to anything and he was never going to throw money at them."

Teachers who take on these kinds of challenges are being punished for doing so.

In African American communities beset by racialized poverty and segregation, school-based relationships form connections of human solidarity that are the basis not only of quality education and neighborhood stabilization, but of resistance to racial oppression.  In schools that are struggling and where these relationships are weak, they can be strengthened through the hard work of organizing. 

Protesting attacks on public education in ChicagoValerie Leonard and Brandon Johnson in front of the Board of Education

 

The corporate elite’s war against the Chicago Teachers Union is only partly about money issues. Under its present leadership the CTU has allied with embattled neighborhoods fighting for quality education. The CTU has shared important educational research with the city’s working class which has helped built stronger human connections among teachers as well as with the community at large. 

Brandon Johnson put it this way:

“This not simply about keeping union employees. Teaching and learning go way beyond the ability to have collective bargaining rights. It’s about the deep-rooted relationships that are critical for a child and their family to develop the trust that allows access to these family’s spaces.”

Both parents and teachers agreed that McNair, Gresham and Dvorak needed improvement

At the hearings and protests that I have attended, people constantly challenged the Chicago Board of Education to work with them on school  improvement, to provide resources, to support teacher and parent involvement, to join that complex web of relationships as a partner instead of a relentless adversary. 

But instead of working with communities, AUSL ignores their input. Here is how AUSL operates:

From the AUSL proposal to the Illinois State Board of Education 2009:
“AUSL replaces the principal with an individual selected by and accountable to AUSL as well as the district, and also brings in a cohort of specially trained new teachers from AUSL’s Teacher residency program. AUSL evaluates all incumbent teachers and staff before re-hiring any who are interested in remaining. We expect that more than half of the school’s incumbent teachers and staff would be replaced. “

  1. AUSL weakens Local School Councils (LSC’s) by taking over principal selection and budgeting. This strips LSC's of power and makes them only advisory organizations. In addition AUSL ignores  the countless hours that parents and community volunteers have put in to obtain special grants and programs that CPS did not provide.
  2. AUSL turnarounds contribute to the sharp decline in experienced African American teachers as they replace them with younger mostly white teachers. Younger teachers of any race need experienced teachers to mentor them. Experienced teachers benefit by working with younger ones who can bring fresh ideas into the education mix. Breaking this critical relationship degrades quality education.
  3. The loss of jobs in African American communities through AUSL turnarounds contributes to the disinvestment and destabilization of Black Chicago. Along with charter school operators, AUSL also divides communities against themselves as different types of schools compete for educational resources.
  4. AUSL has a high teacher turnover rate making it harder for them to work together and develop close collaborative relations.
  5. The AUSL has a “zero tolerance” discipline policy which results in more students being pushed out or expelled, feeding the school to prison pipeline. According to Brandon Johnson, AUSL has the highest suspension rate of any network in Chicago. This is especially troubling as AUSL works mostly with African American students.
  6. AUSL does not have adequate programs in place to deal with the many special needs students in Chicago.
  7. AUSL relies heavily on high-stakes testing which cannot measure critical thinking, creativity, curiosity, inventiveness and the skills necessary to resist racial, gender and class oppression.
At the April 9 Chicago Public Schools hearing on privatizationMcNair staff members at a CPS hearing about the future of their school

 

Anthony Capetta who went through AUSL training said in an interview that AUSL makes the extraordinary claim that a few years of “good teaching” (as they define it) can overcome any problems that children bring from the outside: i.e the effects of institutionalized racism and poverty.

Capetta explains:

“They very much believe in a paternalistic mentality toward schooling. The parents don’t know how to teach their children. The neighborhood is bad. There is a cultural deficit. We as teachers and we as a school have to make up for that. We are going to take the place of an authority figure and we are going to do the job of raising these kids right.”

AUSL has close ties with wealthy corporations who profit off of racism and poverty. That alone tells us a lot.

There are alternatives to turnarounds, but these are rarely reported in the media

Parents and teachers at all three schools recognize the need for improvement, but asked for help that did not involve privatization. Dwayne Truss, a West Side activist, made this point when he testified on behalf of McNair:

“McNair as well as any school will admit that there is always a need for improvement. There are other alternative school improvement models and school improvement providers then AUSL...McNair is more than happy to partner with any provider to provide professional development for both teachers and parents in order to augment the efforts McNair already has in place. “

The Chicago school research group Designs for Change published a study in February 2012 which showed a much more effective way of improving school performance than turnarounds.

Designs for Change calls it School-Based Democracy. This model has achieved significant improvement at a number of Chicago schools, but like the Chicago Teachers Union plan The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve, it has received little recognition from the Chicago Board of Education, the Mayor’s Office or the Chicago major media. 

 The report compares test scores in schools that use School-Based Democracy vrs. those that used the turnaround model. School-Based Democracy showed the most significant gains even though those schools did not receive the kind of extra financial support available to AUSL.

Remember, these are gains in test scores which are the main criteria used in determining whether a school will be turned around. Designs for Change concluded the following:

"This study indicated that the high-poverty schools achieving the highest reading scores were governed by active Local School Councils who chose their principals, and had experienced unionized teachers...These effective elementary schools have dedicated Local School Councils, strong but inclusive principal leadership, effective teachers who are engaged in school-wide improvement, active parents, active community members, and students deeply engaged in learning and school improvement."

CPS has weakened and even eliminated many Local School Councils. It has relentlessly attacked the Chicago Teachers Union and eliminated many experienced teachers. Its climate of FUD (Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt) has caused most school principals to remain silent as public education is being dismantled before their eyes.

Corporate Chicago is always hoping for an obedient racially divided working class from which to extract a fast buck. 

AUSL is using a problematic model from the corporate world. At the hearing to decide the fate of McNair, Chicago mayoral candidate and public policy expert Amara Enyia spoke about the origins of turnarounds:

“I think this model is flawed. It is adopted from business practices. And as a  business practice it does not work. In fact it has had limited to no results. So why are we adopting this method in education? And specifically, in public education. It’s problematic for a number of reasons.”

At the April 9 Chicago Public Schools hearing on privatization Amara Enyia (right) with CPS security officer (left) at the Board of Education 


The president of the Chicago Board of Education is David Vitale, former Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Board of Trade and a former board president of AUSL. Tim Cawley, Chief Administrative Officer of CPS, was a Motorola executive before joining AUSL. Mayor Rahm Emanuel with his close ties to Wall Street is an enthusiastic supporter of AUSL. Hedge fund operator Bruce Rauner, a heavy investor in Chicago charter schools and the Republican candidate for governor, is also an AUSL enthusiast.  And the list goes on...

The people who run the Chicago schools today come from the corporate world. In the introduction to her book School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago 1880-2000  Dorothy Shipps  looked at the long history of how business interests have dominated Chicago education--and done a poor job: 

“This book asks a necessary but important question: if corporate power was instrumental in creating urban public schools and has a strong hand in their reform for more than a century, why have those schools failed urban children so badly?”

Their corporate vision for working class schooling today is massive privatization with a very narrow focus on memorization and recall. It values the ability to stay focused on boring repetitive tasks emphasizing obedience to authority. The AUSL model with its emphasis on high-stakes testing and zero tolerance discipline is a perfect example of that.

At a recent Board of Education meeting I heard a parent brag that you can walk into a classroom in her child’s AUSL school and “hear a pin drop”. Is that what we want from children? Silence?

Chicago’s corporate education model is also profoundly racist with its history of segregation and unequal allocation of resources, as well as its persistent racial discrimination against teachers and other education workers of color.

The corporate education model of rote learning mixed with politically connected real estate speculation and lucrative vendor contracts has nothing to do with actual education. 

UIC professor of education Pauline Lipman’s book The New Political Economy of Urban Education demonstrated how the destabilizing influences of  school closings, turnarounds and privatization are an integral part of the city elite’s policy of gentrification. This contributes to the ongoing exodus of the city’s African American and Latino working class. AUSL is deeply entwined with this project of replacing much of the city working class population with affluent (mostly white) people weary of long suburban commutes.

West Side Chicago defends Dvorak Technology Academy
West Side activist Windy Pearson speaks at a community hearing as Pauline Lipman listens

 

The income of the parent is the best single predictor of student success, yet the city elite has done nothing to raise wages on behalf of low income neighborhoods or provide the investment to create good paying jobs that keep people in the city rather than driving them out.>

Corporate Chicago apparently believes Chicago’s status as a global city depends upon economically driven ethnic cleansing.

The business world is littered with the corpses of companies that were subjected to hostile corporate turnarounds and takeovers which drained their resources, destroyed their morale and drove them to an early grave.

Is that what we want for our system of public education?

Low test scores measure the failure of this nation's leadership to reduce poverty. Where's their “grit and rigor” in pursuit of that goal?

“ I have a school full of wonderful teachers that care about the students...We teach the whole child. My children are not about test scores. There is more to a child than test scores. They are whole children and they deserve love. And I love my children.” --Principal Diedrus Brown of Gresham school

Love. That’s a word I’ve heard often since I joined Chicago’s education justice movement in the months leading up to the 2012 teachers strike. It’s a powerful emotion in a school setting. I know that because I was a classroom teacher for 25 yearsf. When a school is working it’s because the power of love has been nurtured and encouraged to grow.

The city power elite also understands the power of love. That’s why they want to break the human relationships that create it. Love is a threat to the city elite because it motivates people to protect their neighborhood schools and their communities.

For the city’s power elite, the biggest problem with school-based democracy and similar programs is their success in improving neighborhood schools, while empowering the communities that surround them. That kind of success stands as a powerful testament against the corporate driven turnarounds and increased privatization.

Instead of supporting the city’s teachers, many of whom work under very difficult conditions, the Chicago power elite treats them with the same contempt it has for the working class students that make up the majority of CPS. It attacks their union, a union which takes quality education for ALL children VERY seriously, apparently a cardinal sin in the eyes of those whose love extends only to power and money.

West Side Chicago defends Dvorak Technology AcademyCTU activist Sarah Chambers speaks out for the children at a public hearing

 

The Chicago street violence that has made headlines across the country is directly related to the poverty and neighborhood destabilization favored by the city’s power elite working through organizations like AUSL.

Both Wall Street and Washington are behind this privatization movement. It is a bipartisan project with both Democrats and Republicans supporting the educational carnage that results. Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been closely allied with Republican Bruce Rauner, the current front runner in the Illinois governors race. Democratic president Barack Obama has essentially continued the same destructive polices that came out of the Republican Bush administrations.

However it would be a mistake to see the turnarounds and the school privatization movement as simply being about short-term profit from gentrification, lower teacher salaries and bloated contracts to education vendors like Pearson. There is a distinctly ideological component that in the long run is the most dangerous.

In a nation  facing a some of the worst wealth inequality in its history and a global environmental crisis that threatens the existence of humanity itself, who would benefit from a fearful, obedient and racially divided working class that has been shorn of creativity, inventiveness and independent thinking?

Fortunately the human spirit is too strong for total subjugation. 

Chicago’s  multiracial working class will the continue to fight for quality education. They will lose some battles along the way, but as people learn through struggle and study, I believe that the privatized schools will eventually be returned to the public domain. Chicago can then develop a school system that will educate ALL children--- so they can grow up to create the kind of  human society they truly deserve.

Parents, students and community allies rally in front of Chicago Board of Ed President David Vitale's house
Why we fight


Bob "BobboSphere" Simpson is a retired high school history teacher


Sources consulted

Testimony against 'Turnaround' of Dvorak by Valerie Leonard

Area residents oppose AUSL turnaround of elementary school by Curtis Black

Gresham challenges 'turnaround' verdict by Jean Schwab

Chicago's Violence Tied to Policies of Rahm's Past by Curtis Black

Comments to Hearing Officer on McNair Turnaround by Dwayne Truss

CPS proposes three new school turnarounds by Sarah Karp

Emanuel Continues War on Black Schools by Stephanie Gadlin

New report: LSCs and democracy outperform turnarounds  By Parents United for Responsible Education

The Free Market Isn't Very Good at Running Schools by Anthony Cody and Xian Barrett

Chicago Public Schools' Turnaround Plan Called Into Question By Parents, Education Activists by Ellyn Fortino

Test Scores, Poverty and Ethnicity: The New American Dilemma by Donald C. Orlich and Glenn Gifford

Interviews conducted with Brandon Johnson and Anthony Capetta by Bob Simpson

Special thanks to CPS teacher Tammie Vinson for sharing her perspective on privatization.

Fight for $15 in Chicago: Revolt in a Global City

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“I am here to remind America that it is a crime to live in this great nation and to receive starvation wages. At McDonalds $8.25 an hour, what I make is about $400 every two weeks. With that salary I have to choose between rent and food. Rent and light...but this isn’t just about me This about my grandkids and my great grandkids. If McDonalds has its way, my great grandkids will make $8.25 in the year 2050”---- McDonalds worker Doug Hunter

It was a chilly drizzly, 5:30 am in Chicago as a handful of WOCC (Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago) activists loaded batteries into bullhorns, sorted out picket signs and made sure the now familiar Fight for $15 red plastic rain ponchos were ready. WOCC is the organization for the Fight for $15 movement in Chicago. They were preparing for the planned 6 am rally at the Rock and Roll McDonalds, the city’s flagship store.

Fight for $15 in Chicago: May 16 2014
It was May 15, 2014, the day of a global strike and protest against the McDonalds Corporation for its selectively applied exploitative labor policies. In countries with strong unions and a high level of working class solidarity, a job at McDonalds means reasonably decent wages and benefits. But not everywhere. And definitely not here in the USA.

 WOCC members are acutely aware of this which is why they say “Fight for $15 AND a union.” Victories won can be taken back again without strong worker organization and constant vigilance.

Soon, a sizable number of people were  gathering within the small plaza in front of the Rock and Roll McDonalds. Located in the trendy Near North tourist area close to the Hard Rock Cafe, it is an unusually large and architecturally unique McDonalds.


Fight for $15 in Chicago: May 15 2014

Although named after a music born of youthful rebellion, it is run as a tight fisted dictatorship. One Rock and Roll McDonald’s worker said they treat the employees there like “animals.”

At first McDonalds security feigned friendliness and told people they could stay in the small plaza as long as they did not carry signs. Those could only be carried on the public sidewalk in front of the store.

But when a smiling mariachi band tried to play for the growing crowd carrying nothing but their instruments, McDonald’s security pushed them and everyone else on to the now crowded public sidewalk. Fortunately the overhang over the plaza extended to that narrow public space, giving the strikers, their allies and the media partial protection from a now wind-blown cold heavy rain. Spirits remained high as workers sang and chanted.

 Fight for $15 in Chicago: May 15 2014

Forcing the media to cover themselves and their equipment against the elements was probably not the best way for McDonalds Corporation to get sympathetic coverage. Neither was the disingenuous official statement from their Oak Brook Illinois HQ:

“...The events taking place are not strikes. Outside groups have traveled to McDonald’s and other outlets to stage rallies.”

Calling their own striking workers part of an “outside group” was both disrespectful and untruthful. But the bad weather and the now unsmiling McDonalds security did not deter  McDonald’s workers like Adriana Alvarez from speaking out at the early morning press conference:

"We’re here to show to show McDonald’s and everyone else that we are not going to put up with it anymore. This is global. Not just in the United States. Not just in Chicago. Everywhere. 100+ cities and 30 countries. We’re ready. I’m here because I have a 2 year old son. I want to give the world to my son but I can’t on today’s minimum wage so I need a living wage of $15 an hour.”

Chicago: A tale of two global cities

“I am proud to see A.T. Kearney has recognized the City of Chicago has a top global city of today and tomorrow....With our access to international transportation, central location between the coasts and pool of skilled workforce talent, businesses across the world realize all of the extensive opportunities Chicago has to offer as the city continues to shape the direction of the world in the coming years.” ---Mayor Rahm Emanuel

Chicago is often called a global city and as Mayor Rahm Emanuel is fond of saying, a “world class” one at that. Rahm’s vision of Chicago as a global city is a greatly enhanced version of a downtown that already exists---- only with more glittering office towers and luxury condos. Where even more expensive cars cruise streets bordered by ornamental shrubs and colorful flowers. Where still more smartly dressed affluent mostly white people peruse the fancy shops lining the Magnificent Mile and its side streets. Where armies of business leaders and well-heeled tourists from across the planet will come to marvel at this Emerald City on the Lake.

You can read about this vision in A Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs a report commissioned by Mayor Emanuel himself. Buried deep within its 58 pages is this astonishingly frank  statement:

”While the Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs will contribute to increased opportunity for individuals and more investment for communities, it is not a plan for poverty elimination and community development.”

No kidding, Mr Mayor. Eliminating poverty is not on your agenda. Neither is fair-minded community development. But what else could we expect from a “leader” whose actual constituency  consists of high rolling hedge fund gamblers, gentrifying real estate speculators, shady mortgage lenders and predatory multinational corporations like McDonalds who ply their money-making trades with a coldblooded  intensity that even Ebenezer Scrooge couldn’t match. Poverty wages are just too damned profitable. The skyrocketing wealth inequality which the McDonalds Corporation and the rest of the Chicago elite favors is dependent upon the  continued existence of poverty. 

Fight for $15 in Chicago: May 15 2014

The MacDonalds workers who went on strike May 15 have a different vision for the global city that Chicago could become, one that is widely shared by other low wage workers. While aimed specifically at McDonalds, the strike also send a message to other large corporations as well as government. It's time for poverty wages to be raised to a living wage

The demand for a living wage is literally a fight for life. Poverty can kill, sometimes swiftly with a hail of bullets in the shadows of lonely street; sometimes slowly as stress and constant worry wears down an immune system, inviting multiple health problems that overwhelm the body and the city’s inadequate public health system.

 Are you listening Ronald McDonald?

Chicago’s chronic and terrifying street violence is largely confined to the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods where unemployment, low wages and racism combine into a perfect storm of social distress. Raise wages. Cut the violence.

Are you listening Ronald McDonald?

Poverty can wound the mind as well, which is why the Chicago Teachers Union teamed with WOCC to help produce a report called “Fight for the Future: How low wages are failing children in Chicago’s schools”. From the report:

“Students living in or experiencing childhood poverty are much more likely to face significant unaddressed obstacles to classroom learning than their middle- and upper-income counterparts, and this impacts educational outcomes. In fact, data shows that family income is now the most significant predictor of academic success among students in the U.S.”

Are you listening, Ronald McDonald?

A living wage and the ability to organize a union without fear, as well fair minded investment in distressed communities would go along ways toward eliminating the poverty that is the root cause of so many human tragedies in Chicago.

Fight for $15 in Chicago: May 15 2014

Referring to a recent partial victory for the $15 an hour minimum wage in Seattle, Jamie, a McDonalds worker from Rockford said:”

We're coming together with our coworkers, and we're fighting for the right to join a union and $15 an hour...If they can get it in Seattle, we can get it in Chicago."

The workers of Fight for $15 want not only better wages and benefits, but work schedules which are arrived at through honest negotiation, schedules that would enable them to have more time with their families; more time for relaxation; more time for personal goals and interests; more time to improve their neighborhoods; more time to live a rich and fulfilling live.

They want a global  city of safe neighborhoods, good schools, clean well maintained parks, decent housing, affordable health care, access to nutritious food and all of the social amenities that come with a living wage enforced by a union contract.

They know such things are possible because they see people in more affluent communities having them at their fingertips.

Their vision of a global city comes with a global working class consciousness, an understanding of the power that working class people have if they unite across racial, regional and national boundaries.

You could see the fierce pride in the eyes of McDonalds worker Jessica Davis as she said:

”Just months ago we were just a few workers in a couple of cities. They thought we were crazy. Now we’re global. We’re 100+ cities and 30 countries. We are showing McDonalds that we are a force and they can’t ignore us any more”

This is not the globalization that Rahm and his wealthy friends have in mind.

Fight for $15: This is what solidarity looks like!

All day long individuals and groups came to show their support. With rain still falling in the morning, Action Now! a community organization with branches on the West and South Sides came clad in their characteristic blue t-shirts. They brought an enormous blue fist, their bullhorns and their chants as they joined Fight for $15 and marched around the block where Rock and Roll McDonalds is located.

Fight for $15 in Chicago: May 15 2014

There were people from the United Auto Workers, Chicago Teachers Union, United Food and Commercial Workers, International Association of Machinists, Service Employees International Union, Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, Jane Addams Senior Caucus, Brighton Park Neighbors and Albany Park Neighbors.

Representing one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the city, the Albany Park contingent proudly marched up Clark Street with the flags of nations that were participating in the global strike action. The flags also represented the many nationalities who live in that North Side neighborhood.

Fight for $15 in Chicago: May 15 2014

There were the usual friendly waves from passerby, the raised fists and the horn honking. Tourists snapped pictures from their tour buses and from the sidewalk. I decided to take a break around midday from note taking and photography and held up a Fight for $15 sign on the corner. A pair of tourists asked to borrow my sign so one could hold it up while the other snapped a picture for their Facebook friends.

By the time the protest ended at 6 PM, several hundred people had participated. It was a long day, but spirits were even higher when the rally closed and the group briefly occupied the Rock and Roll McDonalds plaza in a final act of defiance.

No one underestimates the difficulties that lie ahead within the corrupted political economy of Chicago, where the vast fortunes controlled by global corporations  compete with the cry of the people demanding a better life.

Chicago needs more working class people in union meetings, in the streets, and on the picket lines. We also need more  volunteers in insurgent electoral campaigns. Independent-minded  elected leaders such as Kshama Sawant in Seattle, Washington and Marc Elrich in Montgomery County, Maryland have been instrumental in the fight toward gaining a living wage.

We need to exercise both economic and political power.

Jorge Mujica, an independent socialist candidate for city council who was on the picket line with the McDonalds strikers throughout the day, sums it up pretty well:

“We live in a working class city. It is our labor, our skills, our ingenuity, and our pride that built this city and that keep it running every day. Yet most of us are overworked and underpaid. We face a real crisis--not one of resources or possibilities, but of priorities. Until we create our own political voice, working people will remain locked out of political power.”

Whose global city? Our global city!

Fight for $15 in Chicago: May 15 2014

 Bob "Bobbosphere " Simpson is retired teacher and a member of Action Now!

Sources Consulted

Rahm Emanuel's Chicago, a tale of two cities by Kevin Coval

Fast-food workers put their issues on the table by Elizabeth Schulte

Chicago's world-class city complex by Jake Malooley

A Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs by the World Business Chicago (Chaired by Mayor Rahm Emanuel

Chicago Named Top Global City in A.T. Kearney Index by the World Business Chicago (Chaired by Mayor Rahm Emanuel

Brown v. Board Of Education at 60: Where is the compliance?

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The night the 1954 Brown decision to desegregate schools was announced, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund threw a party. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had worked on the case was reported to have said this, ‘You fools go ahead and have your fun, but we ain't begun to work yet."

In 1952 my kindergarten class at Pleasant View Elementary School was located in a wooded area of suburban Wheaton MD, a working class community just outside of Washington DC. It was a child’s garden of earthly delights.  

Each day brought new wonders: new songs, new stories, new indoor projects, big kids showing off green snakes from the forest and visits to the school hatchery where I watched baby chicks emerge from eggs. I loved climbing to the summit of the jungle gym where I thought it might be warmer because it was closer to the sun. I was wrong, but the view was worth it. 

Kindergarten at Pleasant View was the best educational experience of my 12 years in the Montgomery County school system. What I didn’t know at the age of 5 was that not far away, there were schools that didn’t look like Pleasant View at all. 

A local civil rights leader named Romeo Horad spoke to the Montgomery County government about these segregated African American schools saying conditions were “deplorable”:

He told the Commissioners ‘not one Negro school in the county compares favorably with any white school’. He charged [that] the county government ‘disregarded’ conditions at Negro schools which he said include no running water, outdoor privy toilets, schools located far from Negro population centers, some near railroad tracks. All Negro schools, he said were overcrowded.”---- from a 1948 Washington Post article
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You see I went to kindergarten in 1952 in a segregated school district. That was 2 years before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed racial segregation in education. But unlike many places south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Montgomery County did not openly fight school desegregation and by 1961 the schools were declared to be officially integrated. 

When I entered Springbrook High School in nearby White Oak MD, there were African American students enrolled in this officially “integrated”  school. But all through my years at Springbrook,  where I took a number of advanced classes, I never shared a class with a Black student except for PE. It wasn’t until my senior year that I even had a Black teacher. She taught English and ironically, objected to me reading James Baldwin. Go figure.

Springbrook High School was an example of how segregation can exist within “integration”.

Still, by 1965 when I graduated, it appeared that the evils of school segregation might be slowly evaporating despite strong resistance in some parts of the USA.

I now live in Oak Park IL, a desegregated suburb that borders Chicago. African American parents report racial disparities at Oak Park-River Forest High School (OPRF)  that remind me of those at Springbrook High School decades ago. African American parents charge that it is difficult to get their children placed in courses that are “challenging”. The so-called “racial achievement” gap at OPRF is discussed endlessly with little actual change to show for it.

That’s racial progress?

I recently read about Gale School on the North Side of Chicago an area where some of the best equipped and best funded schools are found. The North Side also has a large white population compared to elsewhere in the city. 

Gale is majority African American and Latino. Unlike the pre-Brown decision Negro schools of Montgomery County MD, Gale does have indoor toilets. Unfortunately the interior of the school has peeling lead paint that only after years of protest is finally being removed. Gale is not a dilapidated structure like the pre-Brown decision Negro schools of my early childhood, but it has a malfunctioning fire alarm system.

A school where kids can pee and poop indoors but might suffer from lead poisoning? A school that looks modern from the outside but where students might die or be seriously injured in a fire? 

That’s racial progress?

What the hell is going on?

Brown vs. Board of Education: Where’s the compliance?

The night the 1954 Brown decision was announced, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund threw a party. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had worked on the case was reported to have said, “You fools go ahead and have your fun, but we ain't begun to work yet."

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But I don’t think even even the prescient Thurgood Marshall would have predicted the results of this  August 27, 2013 study by Richie Rothstein:

“Racial isolation of African American children in separate schools located in separate neighborhoods has become a permanent feature of our landscape. Today, African American students are more isolated than they were 40 years ago, while most education policymakers and reformers have abandoned integration as a cause.”--- For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since

Across the USA, school segregation is very real. It is not decreed by law, but it is such a feature of civil society that many Americans see it as as normal and nothing to be concerned about. This is not to suggest Brown was a complete failure. It was certainly a major impetus for the civil rights movement and there was some school desegregation as a result. But as a nation, we’re not even close to following its mandate. .

The Brown decision overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that declared racially separate but equal facilities to be constitutional. Plessy was a bad joke. No one expected that equal facilities would be provided during the time Jim Crow was being constructed.   

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But todays modern segregation means that we as a nation not even in compliance with Plessy when it comes to education. Parental income is the best single predictor of student achievement and communities of color are generally less affluent thanks to our racial caste system. Even middle class people of color are often in more precarious financial circumstances than their white counterparts. 

Poverty is heavily racialized in the USA along with the social problems it creates. Even former President Lyndon Johnson observed that,” Negro poverty is not white poverty.” Poverty paired with racial isolation also translates into less political clout, which means deliberate under-resourcing of schools in impoverished communities of color. 

And guess which communities are bearing the brunt of school closings, school privatization through charters, narrowing of the curriculum, standardized testing abuse and the rest of the corporate inspired attacks that are dumbing down US education?

Protesting standardized testing abuse in the Chicago Public SchoolsA Chicago protest against standardized  testing abuse

As we used to say on the playground back in Wheaton, you get 3 guesses and the first two don’t count.

Chicago is an example. Chicago’s record number of school closings and school “turnarounds” have been heavily focused on African American and Latino neighborhoods. In Chicago these schools are closed for "underutilization" while privatized charters and "turnarounds" are being opened. West Side Chicago policy analyst Valerie Leonard has documented how this instability negatively affects student performance as veteran teachers are replaced by younger more inexperienced teachers with a high turnover rate.

This is a city that has seen the number of African American educators decline from 41% of the teaching force to just 25% since 2000. This is a city where of the 160 schools that lack libraries, 140 of them are south of North Avenue, where African American and Latinos are most heavily concentrated. Separate? Mostly. Equal? Yeah, right. 

Heck, enforcing the long discredited Plessy decision would be an improvement in Chicago. At least African American and Latino students would get school libraries and other necessary resources. Similar naked examples of under-resourcing can be easily found in other parts of the USA.

What went wrong?

The Brown decision was fundamentally flawed from the beginning.  Institutionalized racism and ideological white supremacy have a history dating back to the late 1600’s when African American slavery became the dominant form of planation labor. Before then African American and Euro-American plantation workers resisted oppression side by side, even to the point of armed uprising.

Racialized slavery was created to divide the working population along color lines and ensure ruling class control. Racism evolved into a robust racial caste system which even after the abolition of slavery, proved to be like the Borg in Star Trek, very adaptable to changing conditions.

Overturning an enduring racial caste system takes more than a judicial brief, however well written and historic.

Enforcement of Brown depended upon a reluctant executive branch and a multitude of often recalcitrant lower courts to fill in the desegregation details as best (or as worst) as they could. This encouraged  “massive resistance” to desegregation from the states of the former Confederacy who could then turn a blind eye to racist white violence. 

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The situation was different but not much better outside of Dixie. Federal labor, housing, transportation, and social welfare policy contributed to racial inequality. This fed the kind of segregation and racial discrimination that did not require “White Only” signs. Efforts to overcome this  “de facto segregation” met with some limited success, but also with massive white flight to the suburbs and at times, nasty mob violence.

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The most progress toward school desegregation came during the heyday of the civil rights and black power movements. It should be pointed out that the Warren Court which issued Brown was a product of the New Deal political culture that evolved in a period of mass resistance to social injustice.

Progress toward desegregation ground to halt in the 1970‘s.This came with the ebbing of the social movements against racism and the beginning of the corporate offensive against the working class, best exemplified by the dark days of the Reagan Years. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Corporate USA and the 14th Amendment

Central to Brown was the concept of “equality before the law”, a legal fiction that in this nation dates back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Equality before the law in a class society born out of slavery and racism was at best a distant aspiration at the time. It remains so today. 

Brown relied heavily on the 14th Amendment saying that the plaintiffs in Brown were “...deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.” That was true, but one is tempted to ask, “So what?” What about enforcement?

The 14th Amendment  was born out of the decades-long often violently repressed abolitionist struggle to end slavery, finally culminating in a devastating Civil War. It was supposed to guarantee equal protection of the law regardless of race. One might think that after such supreme sacrifice, enforcement would be unquestioned. Wrong. Enforcement of racial equality  was badly wounded by the counter-revolution against Reconstruction and remained so until the post WWII civil rights movement created a brief span of time when the federal government took enforcement somewhat seriously.

  photo 14th_amendment_MM.jpgThe first copy of the 14th Amendment

To make matters worse, US corporations soon  began to use the 14th Amendment, intended as a tool of liberation, into a tool of oppression as they claimed “rights” that had been intended for real people, not legal entities. They attacked progressive legislation that protected actual human people with particular savagery. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black said this in 1938 about the use of the 14th Amendment:

“...“less than one-half of 1 percent invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than 50 percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations.”

The recent Citizens United decision is only the latest chapter in the usurpation of state power to protect profits instead of people. Corporate power over public policy has been growing steadily over the past 40 years. During this time Corporate America could have used their domination over government policy to push for racial justice in an aggressive way.

They did not. So we know which side they are on. Honorable exceptions noted.

Instead there have been attacks on affirmative action, the growth of mass incarceration, and massive disinvestment in working class communities, especially ones of color. A complete list of such attacks would take an entire other article. This has been accompanied by a barrage of propaganda that we now live in a colorblind post-racial society so that any social problems plaguing people of color are their own fault.

Celebrating the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of EducationZerlina Smith speaks out for racial and economic justice to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Brown decison

Corporations which benefited from the 14th Amendment to consolidate political power now attack public education, especially African American public education.

The irony of using “equal protection of the laws” against the descendants of the very people it is supposed to protect is another bitter irony in the USA’s long torturous racial history. Especially since African Americans were instrumental in building the first large scale public education system in the USA after emancipation from slavery. 

That’s gratitude for you.

Equality versus equity

The USA needs racial equity to make racial equality before the law a reality. Equity is looking at actual outcomes, not prattling on about “level playing fields” or “equal protection of the laws” when neither exists in the world of US capitalism.

 After over 200 years, US capitalism has failed to create a market economy or an educational system with equitable outcomes for all racial groups. Instead the human talents and creativity of millions are tossed away despite the consequences to those individuals and the cost to society as a whole. 

Racism has always been at the very heart of US capitalism because racism is very profitable. One obvious reason is that paying working people of color less or even nothing at all(as in slavery times) means more profit. Another example is the direct theft of African American wealth through violence, financial chicanery and government sponsored programs such as redlining entire neighborhoods to prevent African Americans from obtaining decent mortgages. 

This amounts to a staggeringly massive theft of wealth, much greater than the comparable theft of wealth from white working people.

But there is another reason that is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media or in conventional college economics textbooks.  Racial division within the working class weakens the working class ability to organize  for economic and political power. That means more wealth going to the top.This translates into even more power for the corporate elite.

An illustration of this racial inequity within the working population is a recent study from the Brandeis Institute on Assets and Social Policy. The study revealed a median wealth of $265,000 for white working age families as compared to the median African American working age families wealth of $28,000.  That is a huge division, made worse by the 2008 financial crash.

The wealth gap means white people are simply less likely to question the system. In addition higher unemployment among people of color means fewer white people out of a job. That also means fewer white people likely to question the system. These institutional racial inequities also help keep alive the ideology of white supremacy and the personal racial prejudices of people who live in white social isolation and know little else besides racial mythology. 

In a widely read article from the Atlantic magazine Ta-Nehisi Coates recently raised the issue of reparations to African Americans to help close that very wealth gap:

“Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.”

But how does one bridge those inequities when it is those very inequities that fuel the chasm?

Multiracial alliances that link social justice and quality education by addressing racial inequities do exist today. But they are relatively weak, partly because social struggle itself is at a relatively low ebb. The greatest gains toward racially equitable outcomes in education have come during times of intense social struggle that involve multi-racial alliances. It has been in these times of struggle that more white people question this nation’s racial divide with some of them even joining with people of color in the battle for racial justice.

Racial inequities must be addressed directly if we are going to create an educational system that works for all children. And frankly, the kind of education that most white children receive could also use serious improvement. 

Socialists such as myself believe that a strong well organized working class is the best hope of success in any major societal transformation. We need to be fully aware that striking at racism, which lies at the heart of American corporate capitalism is a radical demand. To put it bluntly, we’re messing with their money and these are powerful people who don't like that at all. But without the power of a strong multi-racial working class movement, how can we possibly counter the current corporate offensive against public education? 

In short the education justice movement cannot succeed unless it deals directly with economic inequality and racism.

Across the USA there are people in the education justice movement who see the big picture and are struggling for racial equity in education and socio-economic justice for all working people. But the hard facts are that we are have been losing most of these battles. That should surprise no one. We are up against some of the most powerful corporations and financial institutions on this planet.... and a racial caste system that dates back centuries.

But evidence across the country suggests that public opposition to the corporate offensive against public education is growing. This corporate attack is aided by  the Department of Education (DOE) and the White House. The USA’s two largest teacher unions have been very critical of DOE chief Arne Duncan with the National Education Association even calling for his ouster. Duncan honed his destructive skills on Chicago’s African American neighborhood schools when he was the head of the Chicago school system.

And here in Chicago another sign the times may be a changin’. Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis is leading Rahm Emanuel in the latest  poll for the 2015 mayoral election. Lewis has put poverty and racism front and center in the education justice movement here. The future is unwritten, but pardon me for showing a flash of optimism.

 photo C201211-Karen-Lewis.jpgChicago Teachers union president Karen Lewis during the historic 2012 Chicago teachers strike

Sources consulted

“Montgomery Negros Ask Better Schools”: Washington Post January 14, 1948

For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since: Education And The Unfinished March by Richard Rothstein

Racism, School Closures, and Public School Sabotage: Voices from America’s Affected Communities of Color by the Journey For Justice 

"Testimony against 'Turnaround' of Dvorak" by Valerie Leonard

Racial Roadblocks: Pursuing Successful Long-term Racial Diversity in Oak Park by Denise B. Rose

Brown at 60 Great Progress, a Long Retreat and an Uncertain Future By Gary Orfield and others

Black children might have been better off without Brown v. Board, Bell says” by Lisa Trei

Parents speak out about the 'two OPRFs': APPLE forum focuses on students left behind by Terry Dean

"Disappearing acts: The decline of black teachers" by Brandon Johnson

"Gale School's Peeling Lead Paint, Faulty Fire Alarms Unsafe for Kids: LSC" by Benjamin Woodard

The $236,500 Hole in the American Dream” by Dean Starkman

The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide by Thomas Shapiro and others.

The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Chicagoans prepare to take back their city

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"Imagine what a community would look like that you and your children deserve and what are you willing to do to bring that to fruition."----
-Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) activist Tara Stamps

Chicago Teachers Union(CTU) activist and West Side resident Tara Stamps repeated variations of that phrase   in a packed community July 17th meeting held at LaFollette Park in the 37th Ward  within the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s far West Side. Each time she said it, she spoke slowly and distinctly to catch people’s attention.

Community meeting in the Austin community of West Side ChicagoWest Siders and allies gather in the LaFollette Park
fieldhouse on Chicago's West Side

With the expected announcement that CTU President Karen Lewis will run for Mayor against Rahm Emanuel, along with plans by the CTU and groups like the newly formed United Working Families to conduct massive voter registration and coordinate efforts by progressive aldermanic campaigns, meetings like this one at LaFollette Park take on a more urgent significance. There have been a number of similar meetings across the city in recent weeks. Austin is Chicago’s largest neighborhood by physical area.

 Like much of the largely African American West Side, Austin has been hit hard by divestment, unemployment, low wage employment, foreclosures, street violence, and school closings, as well as school privatization through ”turnarounds” and charters.

The year 2014 marks the tenth anniversary of the decision by the Board of Education under Arne Duncan to close Austin High School as a general high school for the community, instead putting three small schools (two of them charters) inside the cavernous building. Duncan's attack on Austin (both the high school and the community at large) was one of the opening shots in the massive privatization and charter school plan that has unfolded in the decade since.

Community meeting in the Austin community of West Side ChicagoTara Stamps

Such massive community destabilization can to lead to despair and demoralization, as several community members and leaders noted at the meeting. Tara Stamps was asking people to connect with their imaginations and dare to dream of the community that they deserve because of their status as human beings. Dreams can become reality if people organize and fight back against oppression.

Stamps connected the dots by showing how school closings and privatization are linked to community gentrification, foreclosures, unemployment and violence. She emphasized that in the 37th ward alone, the neighborhood schools recently lost $3 million in funding thanks to the cynically-named “student-based budgeting” that the Chicago Public School leadership instituted to weaken neighborhood schools. Meanwhile spending for a charter school in the community was increased by 50%.

Charters drain money from neighborhood public schools resulting in overcrowding and starvation of resources. The 37th ward is represented by Ald. Emma Mitts. Emma Mitts has unfairly criticized  the real public schools in her West Side ward and supported the massive expansion of charter schools, both in her ward and elsewhere.

Mitts speaks about "choice" a lot,but deliberately ignores the sabotage of the city's remaining public schools through the 2013 school closings and the reduction in budgets for most schools. There have been no school closings in the 37th Ward, but Mitts is an enthusiastic supporter of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and an outspoken charter proponent.

This is despite the fact that Mitts served for several years on the Prosser High School Local School Council and was informed regularly of the challenges facing the schools in her ward. Many 37th Ward students lack art, PE, libraries and other critical programs because of the way the mayor has attacked the city's real public schools, but reporters and others regularly see Mitts standing up at media events with Rahm Emanuel, often telling the audiences that God sent the mayor to Chicago.

After setting some of the stage for the discussion, Stamps then asked community members to voice their concerns.

Community meeting in the Austin community of West Side Chicago

Below is a summary of their contributions:
  1. Since charters are businesses what will happen if they go out of business? This is not an unreasonable fear in Austin.  Residents noted  that  many businesses have abandoned the area. long time community leader Dwayne Truss of Raise Your Hand (a education justice number crunching group) was one of the influential  participants in the July 17 meeting. pointed out that the boards of charters rarely have community members on their boards but claim to love Black children.

  2. The community needs more recreational and job training facilities, especially for the young people. Several people talked about how CPS closed the electric shop program in a South Side school, effectively cutting off an avenue for African American youth  to obtain good jobs. Those kinds of programs should be supported and expanded, not shut down.
  3. Residents asked what has happened to youth organizations like the YMCA, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Better Boys. Some have ceased operations while others have been cut back. Meanwhile African American youth face greater social challenges than ever before.

  4. Residents also were upset by many of the politicians and faith-based leaders who fail to represent the interests of the community and instead follow the script from the Mayor’s office and big business.

Community meeting in the Austin community of West Side ChicagoDwayne Truss

The organizers finished up by urging participants to come to an organizing meeting on Wednesday July 23 to plan for voter registration and further community action.

July 23: Getting organized for a long struggle

“People with a thirst for change must come back to the idea that people can overcome the power of money.”
----Tara Stamps

The meeting on July 23 was focused on how people can organize in the 37th Ward and ally with others in what CTU organizer James Flynn called, “A critical moment in Chicago political history.”
 
He was referring to the proliferation of insurgent campaigns for City Council as well as the expected Karen Lewis for Mayor campaign. There are 3 independent City Council campaigns planned for Austin alone. CTU member Tara Stamps explained why the CTU was involved in these community based movements for change. The CTU contract is up in 2015, the same year as the Chicago elections. The CTU needs to know what issues communities want the union to fight for, because community support is essential when the union goes to  negotiate and fight for quality education.

There are many CTU members in the 37th ward and they spend their money at local businesses.  Charter schools and turnarounds prefer to hire their own people. Most of them live outside of the community and spend their money elsewhere. So when there are closings and privatization, laid off CTU members who find it hard to obtain new positions  can no longer circulate as much money into the community. Community meeting in the Austin community of West Side Chicago
 
The last thing the Austin neighborhood needs is more unemployment and more low wage work, a further example example of divestment that is strangling African American neighborhoods. Community residents brought up additional issues of concern:
  1. One was the problem of violence. One woman told of how she is afraid to take her children outside because she is frightened  of the gangbangers. She spoke in anguish about how she leaves the neighborhood to take her kids on outings. The violence problem was linked to the larger issues like disruption of the schools, inadequate social services and the elimination of truant officers.
  2. People talked about the lack of engagement by many neighborhood residents in community affairs. This was attributed to a lack of education and their feeling that nothing much can be changed. 37th Ward City Council Ald Emma Mitts was criticized with not being responsive to the community except on small minor issues.
Matt Luskin answered by talking about the importance of concerned community members  being organized and visible. He cited the example of a large 2010 community protest in the 37th ward against a charter school that would bleed the neighborhood schools of resources.
 
Tara Stamps pointed out that while Mitts is well practiced when talking about fixing potholes and and how she can’t do much about the gangbangers on the corner, she gets flustered when people talk about money. After some discussion the group agreed to send representatives to an  Emma Mitts ward meeting to ask what she planned to do to get the $3 million dollar education cuts rescinded. 

 
No one had any illusions that getting the $3 million back would be easy. The idea was to build momentum and gain more group members by being on the right side of vital issues. When someone said this is really about downtown billionaires  dictating the affairs of the 37th Ward, the room erupted into agreement.

People understood that this is bigger than one ward and that people must  deal with the big picture as they organize on the local level.
The meeting concluded with an agreement to register voters and leaflet people about the impact  of $3 million loss in local school funding. There was a pledge to coninue to build out the organization for the future.

When people attended the Emma Mitts ward meeting the following evening, Mitts became verbally abusive to people who brought up the issue of the 3 million dollar education cuts, further demonstrating her unfitness for public service.
 
You ain't seen nuthin' yet......

 
It appears to me that the CTU is applying the template that the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) used to gain elected leadership of the union, lead a successful strike and then gain re-election to union office. Basically it involves face to face organizing and intense political education in as many Chicago schools as they can reach.

CORE has a radical vision of education justice that would totally revamp Chicago's racially segregated school system where resources are allocated by race and income rather than by the needs of students. 
Now imagine a campaign of face to face organizing in as many wards as possible supporting independent City Council candidates with a vision for a city where public resources are allocated by need rather than by race and income.

Karen Lewis would be at the top of the ticket as the mayoral candidate, drawing on her popularity in African American and Latino neighborhoods. This could help bring out more voters to support the independent City Council candidates.


I'm hopeful that the kind of vicious racial hatred that accompanied the Harold Washington campaigns of the 1980‘s  will not be a major issue. There are strong indications that the mostly white voters on the Northwest Side are very dissatisfied with Rahm and that Lewis could do better there than the traditional pundits expect. For example the CTU strike led by Lewis in 2012 was overwhelming supported in the Black and Latino areas while whites spilt evenly, according to polls taken during the strike. But support for the pickelines was solid throughout the city, without regard to racial demographics.
 
There is animus toward Karen Lewis based racial and gender prejudice, but I think trying harness that that would be a losing strategy for Rahm  and his minions. I've been to a lot of different community meetings over the past couple of years and there is yearning for basic change .
This yearning has created the basis for a broad and deep multi-racial progressive alliance that is now in the process of  being born. 

How this alliance will deal candidates who run as independents as well as those who run as progressive anti-machine Democrats remains to be seen. That can be a contentious issue in Chicago.
Lewis, along with the school and community activists who eagerly await her formal announcement, face an enormous challenge in a city when some of the deepest pockets in the USA are behind Rahm.

But they know that organized people can overcome organized money when the circumstances are right. And more importantly, if they can maintain their organization after the election like CORE has done within the CTU, they can force accountability from those they elect.
 
I suspect that when Karen Lewis announces her candidacy we will see something far more profound than a political campaign. We will see the birth of a powerful social movement.
Now imagine the city that you and and the next generation of young people deserve. 

What do YOU plan to do to bring it into fruition? Community meeting in the Austin community of West Side Chicago A  somewhat different version of this article appeared in Substance News Online. Special thanks to George Schmidt for editorial help.
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