'I will not stand by while the children of Chicago are played as pawns in an internal dispute within a union...' Mayor orders CPS, City of Chicago lawyers to file for an injunction against the continuation of the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012
The news was barely breaking that the CTU House of Delegates had voted not to end the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012 when the Mayor's Press Office issued a statement attacking what Rahm Emanuel is calling a "divided" union and ordering his lawyers to go to court for an injunction ordering the striking teachers back to work. The mayor's statement to the press was issued at 7:10 p.m. on September 16, 2012. Most of the delegates were still in their cars heading away from the meeting at the time the mayor fired this shot.
Press release issued by the Office of the Mayor of Chicago at 7:10 p.m. on September 16, 2012. The Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates had barely finished voting on a motion to continue the strike at least through Tuesday, September 18, when the above was sent by email to all the press.In a press release that was issued on the evening of September 16, 2012, the Mayor's Press Office stated:
Statement from Mayor Rahm Emanuel on the Chicago Teacher’s Union Choice to Continue to Strike
I will not stand by while the children of Chicago are played as pawns in an internal dispute within a union. This was a strike of choice and is now a delay of choice that is wrong for our children.
Every day our kids are kept out of school is one more day we fail in our mission: to ensure that every child in every community has an education that matches their potential.
I have instructed the City's Corporation Counsel to work with the General Counsel of Chicago Public Schools to file an injunction in circuit court to immediately end this strike and get our children back in the classroom. This continued action by union leadership is illegal on two grounds – it is over issues that are deemed by state law to be non-strikable, and it endangers the health and safety of our children.
I have also asked the President of the Board of Education, David Vitale, and the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Jean-Claude Brizard, to explore every action possible to get our kids back into a classroom or educational facility.
While the union works through its remaining issues, there is no reason why the children of Chicago should not be back in the classroom as they had been for weeks while negotiators worked through these same issues.
Of the hundreds of homemade signs that were produced by teachers, students and parents during the first week of the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012, a large number were devoted to Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's mayor. Emanuel began teacher bashing even before his May 2012 inauguration, when he deliberately — and in a grotesque racist and sexist way — insulted the members of the union's Political Action Committee at an interview about endorsements. From June 2011 (when his school board lied and broke the union contract for the raise of the fifth year) through the end of the strike, Emanuel's hysterical charges and megalomania fueled challenges from more and more teachers. Above, a teacher reminds the mayor that many teachers have to bring their own supplies, including toilet paper for the children, in the inner city public schools of the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of Earth. Substance photo by Kati Gilson. Emmanuel's latest challenge was just a continuation of his drive, since his inauguration in May 2011, to insult every real public school teacher and to bully the Chicago Teachers Union into submission. While some speculated that he would shown some restraint after the teachers voted by more than 90 percent to authorize the strike, then struck with a fury and organizational finesse that was unprecedented, Rahm instead doubled down on his megalomania.
Substance will be publishing, on line and in print, a chronology of the mayor's antics through the second week of the teachers' strike.
But as of the morning of September 17, 2012, it was clear that Chicago's ballerina mayor was not going to accept anything short of devotional obesience from the best educated group of public workers in the nation's third-largest city.
Comments:
By: Trish Ramirez
Count Two of the Injunction
Mr. Mayor, how can you have the nerve to attempt to take CTU to court on rights that they are currently fighting for? Are you that delusional or a complete scoundrel? I suspect that you are a complete scoundrel that has been driven so delusional with power and control that you have lost all sense. Shame on you Mr. Mayor. The public should bring you to court along with Vitale for presenting one lie after another to the public via the biased media. I am disgusted with you and the free?? press. How can you possibly be fighting for critical educational and social services that you don't currently provide and then hide behind these issues like a coward when you want to win? Also, critical services for special education students whom you totally ignore every day that a strike is not going on? Come on! Are you kidding? Schools don't have textbooks to start the new year. The critical services that have been asked for for years and not have been provided are suddenly so critical? Pathetic. Parents are not given a voice when they want to be involved with the meetings you have with the Bd. where you pretend to give parents a platform to voice concerns about their children and the state of their schools. You and your pals are nothing but a big bunch of phonies and bullies. We should have a recall on your election and anything you have been a part of. You are a fraud out for your own special interests and the interests of your friends. Shame on you, Mr. Mayor. You should be more concerned with setting an example for your own children and leave the children and families of Chicago the hell alone.
By: Jeff johnston
Tantrum from Rahm...
Ha ha! Rahm didnt get his way, it's called Little Man Syndrome
By: Kimberly Bowsky
Rahm... Out for the count
The unknowledgeable mayor, with what seems to be a Napoleonic Complex, came out swinging, and has gone down steadily in a barrage of misses about teachers, unionism, and education. So his last technical is using the corporate media for a final push: scare the public about tax hikes, school closures, bankruptcy, failure in education, endangering students — all done by the teachers, according to his team. Teachers did none of these things, but the mayor was willing to sacrifice the students to trounce an opponent he underestimated. He didn't even understand the time-out teachers took during the fight in order to read the contract. This is NOT the education mayor.
By: Bob Busch
Rahm the albatross
Equally as incredible as the success of our uprising are the adventures of Rahm in the Cook County Courts. For a judge to tell him, "Wait till Wednesday" is a political slap in the face never experienced by any Chicago mayor in recent history. Can you imagine any Judge telling Mayor Richard J. Daley — or Jr. — that? It is a political insult beyond belief.
Seems Rahm has become a political albatross .
By: Anthony Smith
Injunction Junction What's Your Function?
Injunction Junction What's Your Function?
(for those of us old enough to fondly remember School House Rock my apologies).
Really Rahm?
Big Baby!
Rahm Hates Democracy!
Now you have to wait, and we all know how much you like to wait, and now you have to deal with the process we call Democracy, and well, we all know how you feel about Democracy!
Democracy = 1
Rahm's Dictatorship = ho, ho. ho, hee, hee, hee, thanks for galvanizing the teachers union, and the firefighters, and the police, and the cta, and the streets and sanitation crews, and the postal workers, and regular working class people, and the poor, and moms, and dads, and the children you say you care about.
Oh Yeah, Mayor, start giving the TIF money to the children, like you should have been doing all along, sir.
By: Anthony Smith
Speaking for that 2%
I am stunned. I am hearing 98% of the delegates, who I assume speak for their teachers etc. at their school, voted to suspend the strike.
Just as CNN and MSNBC were starting to ask where President Obama was regarding this issue and why he has not weighed in on it! A few more days and the heat would be on and perhaps the leader of the Democratic Party would have to take a side, Unions and the working class or Charters and Corporate money!
And we dropped the ball on Friday by not stating repeatedly that we might not be back Monday and that parents should be prepared for that!
So, we work an additional 10 days without pay, and additional time without pay, our "fired teachers" get an interview with no guarantee for rehire, and at least 120 schools, 100,000 empty seats according to Vitale from the Board, to be closed and 90 charters to be built and so on and so on.
My peeps at my school overwhelmingly wanted to end the strike, thinking that we could still work on the contract, not realizing the golden opportunity we had to make some real positive and lasting change for union workers and for our kids at our schools.
So now Mayor Rahm spins a win his way, with tears and a shakey voice, so well done that I nearly cried myself, although for different reasons.
Sad day for me and for my peeps. The young ones in particular have no idea what is coming our way. And it isn't good.
By: Anthony Smith
Rahm does NOT like DEMOCRACY!
So Rahm doesn't like Democracy!
It is not his style.
Rahm appoints the school board.
Rahm gives out TIF money to his
friends and cronies.
Rahm controls most of the media in Chicago.
Rahm uses intimidation and threats to get his way.
Well this is what Democracy looks like. IT takes time. If you drag your feet, as the Chicago Board of Ed. did since November, and then you put as many stumbling blocks in the road to render our teachers powerless, and then you find that you did not succeed, well you are likely to pout and rant and kick and scream as a toddler would do during a temper tantrum.
We are adults. We like to take some time to thoughtfully reflect and discuss what is in writing before us. If you had done your part in the 70 or so meetings, Mr. Mayor, that CTU had with your Board of Ed. then we would not be at this point. You sir, pushed us to this point.
And now that you have told the media and the parents that the children will be back in school Monday, even though you had no right to do that and new we would need more time to work things out, now I hold you accountable for that!
You are a liar and a bully. Remember when you took away our 4% guaranteed in our last years contract?
You said you did not have the money to give us.
You lied.
So what are we supposed to do, take you at
your word?
Sorry sir, your word is no good with us.
We have learned the hard way not to trust you, ever.
Put it in writing. Give us time to read it.
But no, you decided you did not get your way quick enough. So you go to court. Big Baby!
Boo Hoo for you. Deal with it.
You have made hard and tough choices and you have been told that compromise might be a better way to deal with people but you still refuse to do so. It is your way or the highway.
We will see how that works for you in your next election, sir.
In solidarity.
Standing Strong and Proud.
Anthony