Number one, the Union's bylaws forbid it from mixing dues and political money. So much for following their bylaws. Those are meant to be a joke. Excited to hear a number of teachers have filed a lawsuit for unlawful diversion of funds.
So the Union's candidate will give their union members big raises and lots of benefits including more vacations and kill Charter schools. Is any of that stuff good for the City, parents or kids? Plus, defunding the police is also a winner for Chicago.
Chicago Teachers Fight a Union Political Ploy
They want their union to stop using dues to fund Brandon Johnson.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
April 2, 2023 6:35 pm ET
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is all-in for mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson, and it wants every member to finance the bet. Yet plenty of teachers didn’t sign up for this cause, and they’re fighting union leaders for their right to stay out of it.
Several CTU members filed a complaint Thursday with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board, accusing their bosses of spending dues money on political campaigns. CTU’s bylaws forbid mixing dues and political money, and new members can opt into a separate payment if they want to contribute to the political fund.
The complaint is led by Froy Jimenez, a high-school civics teacher who says electoral politics distracts from CTU’s core mission. “We became public school educators to do one thing,” he says: “improve the lives of Chicago’s students.” Mr. Jimenez and other teachers behind the complaint belong to Members First, a caucus within CTU that opposes political activity.
But the mission of CTU’s leaders is to elect politicians they can control, and they don’t bother to cover their tracks when they use members’ dues to do it. They voted in February to divert up to $2 million of dues to their political fund, according to a Chicago news station. The union’s March 10 filing shows a $1.5 million campaign donation simply labeled “dues.”
The union’s favored candidate, Mr. Johnson, was a political director in the union before he became a Cook County commissioner in 2018, and he helped lead a citywide teachers strike in 2012. CTU’s labor agreement expires next year, and Mr. Johnson says he’ll seek $800 million in new taxes to finance more spending.
He also opposes school choice. In a debate last month he dismissed charter schools and publicly funded scholarships as “experimentation on black and brown and poor children.” Teachers unions have supplied 62% of Mr. Johnson’s campaign funds, and they want to squash alternatives that threaten their grip on school governance.
Paul Vallas, Mr. Johnson’s opponent in Tuesday’s runoff, opened Chicago’s first charter schools as public-schools chief from 1995 to 2001. He says he’d let charters expand.
Polls show a dead heat in the runoff, and a decision on CTU’s use of member dues will come too late to affect the race. Yet the ruling and the election will determine whether the union retains an effective veto over school reform. As the Supreme Court has ruled, union members have a constitutional right not to fund political speech or causes they oppose.