Editorial: Union people must defeat Marilyn Stewart's budget and her attack on Ted Dallas
Why the sideshow in Chicago?
As one recent blogger wrote on District 299.com: “...Listen, Ted created Marilyn. He is the UPC. He is the one who negotiated this contract last spring. He is only complaining now because Marilyn doesn’t need him anymore. She took away his cut. You are all acting foolish doing his bidding...”
On May 28, Marilyn Stewart’s supporters put what we’re calling the “Koffman - Walsh Complaint” in front of the executive board of the Chicago Teachers Union. The Executive Board quickly endorsed the 112 pages on the Complaint by scheduling a “trial” for June 12.
The problem now is that Marilyn Stewart’s people (through the research of the staff of CTU and the writing of Gail Koffman and Patti Walsh, see Page One of this Substance) are trying, in almost “Shock Doctrine” fashion (i.e., rush it through before anyone has the chance to respond), to strip Ted Dallas of both his elected office and his membership in CTU between now and June 13. They are doing this one month before AFT gets here, so Dallas is not a danger at the convention. For more than 50 years, the paragraphs of the CTU Constitution and By-Laws presently being invoked against Ted Dallas were only used against those who had crossed picket lines during union strikes. Now they are being used to strip a 30-year union veteran of an office he was elected to less than one year ago and strip him of his union membership as well.
This is not about popularity contests, as Substance readers know. Over the years, except for the basics of enforcing a union contract for all the members of the union, there have been few things about which we’ve agreed in Chicago with Ted Dallas. But this month it’s about the fundamentals of unionism, now, in the past, and into the future.
If anyone in the Chicago Teachers Union thinks that CTU will be stronger or better if Dallas is stripped of an elective office and kicked out of the union on the basis of those Purge Trial charges (all 112 pages of them) and silly trivializations, we’d be glad to hear from her. We’ll try to cover this over the summer in the pages of our main Website (www.substancenews.net). Union people have got to fight the charges, because they are not about a “who” but about a what. And the “What?” includes some of the most basic principles upon which unionism is based.
As we point out in two articles, including our main article beginning on Page One of this Substance, Mr. Dallas is being attacked because he refused to sell out the members of the union and allow the Chicago Board of Education to violate the rights of those members after Marilyn Stewart negotiated one of the most sellout contracts in history last summer. With the help of Mr. Dallas and the (by then creaky) machine of the United Progressive Caucus (UPC), Stewart then got the contract approved.
Once the contract was approved, the Daley administration was given a green light to privatize at an even faster rate than it had been since “Renaissance 2010” began in Chicago in July 2004, one month before Marilyn Stewart took office at President of the Chicago Teachers Union.
To watch the inside churnings at the headquarters of the Chicago Teachers Union since last August is a revelation we rarely get. Based on the Koffman - Walsh Complaint and other sources, we have reconstructed a history of betrayal of union principles that is rarely seen as it unfold. Marilyn Stewart’s contract and subsequent behavior are the real attacks on unionism in Chicago’s public schools. Ted Dallas’s attempts to defend the members from attacks by the Board of Education while he was simultaneously being attacked by the regime he helped create is an amazing story, and one we’re proud to be telling exclusively in the pages of Substance since February when our sources became precise enough to begin our reporting.
We continue that story in great detail this month, much as we did not expect it would be on the top of our agenda at this time. When we began planning the June Substance, the last issue of our 34th year of publication, we had budget and national resistance to consider. Turmoil within the national unions. We didn’t expect even greater turmoil on our doorstep, but here it is.
There is nothing we at Substance admire about the United Progressive Caucus in the Chicago Teachers Union. When we were sued for a million dollars, the UPC was on the other side. When our editor was stripped of his teaching job, denounced editorially in the pages of both daily Chicago newspapers, and fired (then blacklisted) by Daley’s people (Paul Vallas and all) nine years ago, the UPC cheered. Michael Williams (then CTU financial secretary) actually did a little dance of joy and other hoopla at the district supervisors meeting. Four years after that, when CTU voted to support our editor by a motion to the House of Delegates (which called George Schmidt a “hero” of test resistance and gave the union the green light to file an amicus curiae brief at the U.S. Supreme Court), the UPC voted, virtually alone in the union, against the motion. Ted Dallas and Linda Porter (the two officers now under attack) were among the dozen or so people in the House of Delegates to vote “No” on that resolution, which was approved overwhelmingly and is now published on the Substance Website (old site, at www.substancenews.com).
The CTU amicus curiae brief in that case (the Supreme Court, as in most cases, denied cert) is still a brilliant statement of a union, educational, and constitutional position.
When Marilyn Stewart fired our editor from his job as director of security and safety at CTU in August 2004, Ted Dallas was one of the people (with Larry Poltrock) who tried to get Schmidt out of the union by “refunding” the balance of his CTU dues. That was a long story; Schmidt had to wait until he took his pension to reinstate as a CTU member because of their silliness. Other members of our staff had regular run-ins with the UPC, “Old,” “New” and “Newer” Members of the Substance staff are not members of the Ted Dallas fan club.
This month, however, any union member who doesn’t fight against the Purge Trial Marilyn Stewart has scheduled against Ted Dallas is a fool. Solidarity is the biggest challenge when you have reasons not to “like” the people you are showing solidarity with. But unions were never built on the basis of some New Age narrative about feelings and vibes. On Wednesday, June 4, Marilyn Stewart’s stupid budget has to be defeated by an overwhelming “No” vote.
Between June 4 and June 12 (when the Purge Trial begins on the Koffman - Walsh Complaint and the “charges” against Dallas), everyone should be mobilizing.
This mobilization should include calling and talking with every one of the 39 people on the executive board who voted against Ted Dallas, demanding to know why they are taking the unprecedented step of trying to remove an elected officer and expel a member from union membership in the middle of the month when 500 of their brothers and sisters (Orr, Harper, Copernicus, Fulton, Howe and Morton) are being fired because Marilyn Stewart negotiated a contract that sold out everyone to Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago.
We can sort out likes and dislikes later. Anyone who is too blinded by personalities to miss the main points of this fight will have to wait until next year for the discussion, because the fight is now, the sides have been chosen, and the only question is who will win or lose in the next couple of weeks.
