Is a generous pay offer enough to ward off a teachers strike? Union says it’s fighting for more than money

City and school officials say Chicago teachers should take the raises they’re being offered and call it a day. The teachers union says the pay bumps aren’t enough, and they want iron-clad assurances the district will fix problems that have plagued schools for years.

The public spat between the two sides has grown this week as Chicago Teachers Union members vote on whether they should strike over their contract demands. The result of the strike vote could come as early as Thursday night.

But the pay and benefits package offered by the city, while not necessarily the primary focus of many members of the CTU, could be the key consideration for many following the negotiations both inside and outside the union: Does the offer from the district warrant a strike?

CPS officials have proposed a 16% raise over five years that they say would essentially turn into a 24% raise for the average teacher. That’s because the district is taking into account “step and lane” raises — automatic bumps for years of experience and level of education — that are already in the contract.

So a teacher who makes $78,961 this year, the district says, would earn more than $97,000 in five years — amounting to a nearly 24% raise — when their extra bumps for experience are added. A second-year teacher who makes $53,893, they say, will earn $72,888 by the end of the contract.

The median salary for more than 19,600 full-time CPS teachers was $82,826 in late August, according to an analysis of CPS data. Teachers also receive a median of $28,600 in benefits.

The CTU, however, has said the raises aren’t enough for them to accept a deal without assurances there will be lower class sizes, adequate teacher preparation time and beefed up staffing of nurses, librarians and social workers.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot has said she’ll accede to those demands outside of the contract, but the union has insisted the mayor put everything in writing.

“There’s a lot more to this than money,” CTU President Jesse Sharkey said Wednesday. “We’re not going to settle money until we can say, ‘Look, this represents a fair deal and the teachers going into the schools have an entire package of things which satisfies us.’

CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates added: “To boil it down to 16% is offensive and it is tone deaf to the movement that we have been leading in this city with parents, with allies, for over a decade.”

Though the CTU can’t legally strike specifically over many of the issues it’s concerned about — including class sizes of 32 students or higher at many schools that don’t have full-time social workers or nurses, for example — the union can make the argument that the overall working conditions make the proposed wages unacceptable, said Bob Bruno, a labor professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“In bargaining, these things are intertwined,” said Bruno, who has studied CPS-CTU negotiations for years and wrote a book about the 2012 strike. “You’re willing to accept a certain amount of pay for the work you do depending on the working conditions.

“So you can generally make the case that, ‘We’re striking over pay, and we’re doing that because of the limitations of our working conditions.’”

Bruno, though, said this year’s negotiations have been a “mind-bender” because the two sides appear to generally agree on many of the issues, just not how to implement them.

“They agree in principle to the kind of changes,” Bruno said, including the need for more equity among schools and for more nurses, librarians and social workers. “But they disagree conceptually as to the mechanism to do it.

“It really does seem to have brought them to this breaking point,” Bruno added. “You can understand the arguments that they’re making, and they could be coming to these positions quite legitimately. That makes this hard.”

CPS CEO Janice Jackson told the city’s school board at its monthly meeting Wednesday that the district’s “generous” offer would land the average teacher a salary ”just shy of $100,000 a year by the end of the contract.”

She said the city and union have “mutual interest” in the series of other proposals the CTU has made, but that the district will commit to those issues outside of the contract.

Lightfoot’s message to teachers preparing to cast a strike vote? “We value you,” she told reporters at City Hall earlier this week. She said CTU teachers “will be among the highest paid teachers in the country. It’ll be the most lucrative CTU package in its history.”

She said increasing other staff and addressing the needs of special education students have been “baked” into the budget.

Davis Gates, though, said budget promises — which have not been fulfilled in the past — is not enough to prevent teachers from walking.

“We’re going to keep asking, we’re going to keep fighting, we’re going to keep expecting, and we’re going to keep demanding until we see it,” Davis Gates said. “Period.”