Summary: Illinois Public Employee Strike

Duty-to-bargain laws substantially increase unionization beyond other public policy measures favorable to public sector unions.

Many public sector employees, particularly teachers, felt as their profession was under attack. Consequently, thousands upon thousands of public sector employees protested the bill outside of the state capitol. The content of the bill, and the furtive manner in which many feel the legislation was introduced, created deep fissures in communities that had once embraced diversity in people, ideas, and culture. The Midwestern values of neighborliness, friendliness, honesty, and acceptance were suppressed by a toxic battle of political partisanship that blanketed the state, from college campuses to townie bars. Walker described Act 10 as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy he wished to employ in the state. In fact, the “division” aspect of that strategy was so effective that best friends refused to speak to each other. Mark Ellis, a former Republican state Senator, has even noted that “former friends and neighbors still won’t talk to him in the supermarket” as a result of Act 10. The social and political divisions prompted by the events of 2011 still remain today. Importantly, the feuding parties have deeply entrenched supporters, enabling partisan attacks that would’ve otherwise been prevented by a centrist political

strike in two days unless their .wage demands are met. Alex Kunzler, President of Leckenby;

In the meantime at San Francisco State College, students in the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a coalition of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American student groups, began demanding reforms that addressed the concerns of students of color and the surrounding community. After more than a year of negotiating with the school and organizing students, they called a strike on November 6, 1968, that became the longest student strikein United States history. When it was finally settled in March 1969, many of the students' demands were met, including the establishment of a School of Ethnic Studies.

Pullman Strike: The Pullman Strike was a nationwide railroad strike in the United States on May 11, 1894. The American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman Company, and the government of the United States, President Grover Cleveland. The issue began in Pullman, Chicago, on May 11 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike.org about “4,000 factory employees of the Pullman Company began a strike in response to lowered wages.” According to https://www.britannica.com “In response to financial reverses related to the economic depression that began in 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company, a manufacturer of railroad cars, cut the already low wages of its workers by about 25 percent but did not introduce corresponding reductions in rents and other charges at Pullman.” Most factory workers who built Pullman train cars lived in Pullman Chicago, Illinois. George Pullman wanted to design it as a model community. He had a different people working for him. He hired African-Americans for certain jobs at the company. Pullman also hired young, single women to be his secretary for him, which at the time was very unlikely for women and African-American men to work at all. He also used ads and other things to help bring workers to his company. The company laid off workers and lowered wages, and did not change rents, and the workers called for a strike. There were many reasons for the strike, for example not enough democracy in the Pullman, bad water and gas

The controversy behind this is that the people of Wisconsin believe that if the Governor takes away collective bargaining, he will take away the rights of the people, especially public sector workers, such as teachers and nurses. Governor Walker though is correct in taking this drastic measure because the state currently has a $137 million deficit. They need some way to bridge this deficit, so why not take out collective bargaining? Not all people agree with this way of thinking. Representative Jan Schakowsky from Illinois wrote a statement on February 17, saying that “under the guise of addressing state

In 1968, a major change occurred in not only New York’s educational system, but also in the U.S. In the book The Strike That Changed New York, Jerald E. Podair aims to delve into the experiment known as Ocean Hill- Brownsville, that ultimately led to one of the largest teacher strikes in America’s history.

Georgia has been a right-to-work state since 1947 when legislation assured workers they would not be forced to join a union by employers or other union members; guaranteed the right of workers to decide for themselves whether or not to join a union; workers cannot be forced to join a strike; and interference with an employer’s lawful business through violence or mass picketing is not allowed. Georgia is also an employer at-will state that allows employers to terminate an employee for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all (Select Georgia, n.d., p.2).

Workers were paid as little as dollar or a dollar and twenty-five cents for working for twelve to sixteen hours a day. The low wages were so bad that many were starving. In document 3, Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois wrote to George M. Pullman saying that “there are nearly six thousand people suffering for want of food- they were your employees” (document 3). However, workers who joined labor unions had their wages increased dramatically. In document 8, the President of American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, said that those who joined labor unions had their “wages increased 70 percent in the past seven years” (document 8). Labor unions in the 1900s helped workers increase their low wages to not beg for food for

The Winnipeg General Strike The year of 1919 has been one of the most influential years of strikes

“Upwards of 250,000 workers in Chicago were on strike, threatening to strike, or locked out by late July 1919.In other words, one out of every three or four men and women in wage-earning fields in which there was the slightest union activity was a participant in a labor

First of all, many national debates get involved this strike. In the surface, the CTU declared that this strike is a labor dispute over job security, in which way laid-off teachers would be hired back according to their seniority-pay, merit-pay and in some ways surprise me, they wanted to connect teacher evaluation to student achievement as test scores just like China. In some aspects, this strike was just part of the battle across the entire country between teachers unions and education reformers.

The tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the events that ensued afterwards are not the first to exemplify workers’ loss of freedom due to the corruptibility of government by powerful corporate interests. In 1905, the Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York declared unconstitutional a state law establishing a limitation to the number of hours employees could work (626). The court held that liberty of contract is implicit in the Fourteenth Amendment and such a law “interfered with the right of contract between employer and employee” (626). In response, workers felt they were being granted liberties they did not want, and the liberties that were of “real value” were being withheld (626). The “overwhelming labor question” thus sparked labor walkouts and

adamantly opposed any recognition of the union. Thus, the union members decided to strike over wages, safety

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) Strike in 2012 affected every single Chicago Public School and their Students in 2012. The strike affected about 600 public schools which is over 350, 000 students. The CTU began negotiating their contract with CPS in November of 2011, but their demands were not met. Since the negotiating did not solve the issue, the Chicago Teachers Union chose to organize a strike for the first time in Chicago in 25 years.