Chicago Teachers Union narrows contract demands in negotiations with CPS

After eight months of increasingly tense contract negotiations, the Chicago Teachers Union has now narrowed its number of demands in an effort to land a deal in the next month, the union and Chicago Public Schools officials said.

At the same time, a CTU proposal about teacher assistants has led to a labor dispute with one of its biggest allies, SEIU Local 73, which is accusing the teachers union of trying to raid its members. SEIU has threatened legal action.

Despite the progress between CPS and CTU, that demand is one of many thorny topics still on the table. The CTU put forth a list of about 160 demands this week that its leaders say lay out a road map to getting a deal — that’s down from more than 700 proposals the school district estimated would cost $10 billion over four years and catapult the cash-strapped school system further into debt.

The CTU aims to get a deal done by mid-January, before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated. That’s also around the time the new 21-member partially elected school board will be seated. The two sides are negotiating daily.

Neither CPS nor the CTU could provide a new cost estimate for the scaled-down list of demands.

CPS officials said they just received the list Monday and “do not yet see a significant reduction in the cost of the demands.” S&P Global Ratings, a credit agency, issued a warning on Tuesday that if CPS does not cut expenses or find more revenue, there could be implications for its credit rating over the next few years.

The $10 billion estimate that district officials shared with the public late last month included $5.5 billion in CTU demands for 13,400 new staff to be hired, including 7,000 teacher assistants.

The union has called that claim misleading.

"The CEO has been saying we've got $10 billion worth of proposals on the table, speaking about our initial contract proposals from nearly eight months ago," CTU Deputy General Counsel Thad Goodchild said. "Bargaining has moved a lot in the intervening months and we think there's a path to a deal here."

The union is now asking for 6% salary increases in each of the first two years of the contract and 5% each in Years 3 and 4, down from its original proposal of 9% in each year. CPS has offered 4% in Year 1 and up to 5% in each of the next three.

As for the staffing demands, Goodchild said the CTU wants a phased-in approach to hiring, not an immediate massive wave.

The CTU has backed off of several staffing proposals, he said, and is asking for far fewer than 7,000 teacher assistants. He accused CPS of inflating that figure.

Teacher assistants, an often overlooked group of school support staffers, have proven to be a key point of contention. The union ratcheted up its public rhetoric against CPS earlier this year when many teacher assistant positions were cut from school budgets.

Now, a CTU proposal that CPS consider hiring teacher assistants to support students with special needs has caused the dust-up with SEIU 73, the CTU’s largest sister union that spent six figures to help vault Mayor Brandon Johnson to office.

Traditionally, those responsibilities fall under special education classroom assistants represented by SEIU 73, who work individually with special education students and provide personal care, such as feeding and toileting. The CTU has insisted the two job duties are similar and that some teacher assistants already work with special education students. Teacher assistants and SECAs are among the lowest paid staff in the district, most making less than $50,000 annually.

That stance has outraged SEIU Executive Vice President Stacia Scott, who said the CTU proposal would break from current practice. Scott sent a cease-and-desist letter to CPS to try to prevent the district from bargaining with CTU over the issue.

“SECAs are far more than toileting and feeding in our schools, and so reducing their work down … does them a disservice for the respect that they should be owed,” she said. “It also creates the threat… that it would erode our bargaining unit over time.”

SEIU 73 sees its SECAs as a growing point of pride, having just successfully negotiated new protections and increased training.

CPS employment information shows the district had 842 teacher assistant positions at the end of September, a number that’s dwindling; meanwhile, there were 7,213 special education classroom assistants, a figure that’s increasing.

That makes this issue a big deal for both unions.

The relationship between unions at the same employer is an important one. CTU and SEIU 73 went on strike together for new contracts in 2019. Although SEIU landed a deal before CTU, its members remained on picket lines in solidarity with teachers.

But those relationships can be fragile too. The financial health of unions depends on its dues-paying members.

The CTU has said it simply wants to fill vacancies that help kids.

“How we would define it is, it's a raid,” Scott said. “That's the union term for it. And if you dress it up pretty, at the end of the day, it's still a raid.”