Karen Lewis Lit the Spark

[Omaha Steve]

https://labornotes.org/2021/02/karen-lewis-lit-spark

February 10, 2021 / Labor Notes Staff



Speaking at the 2014 Labor Notes Conference in Chicago, Karen Lewis drove home the importance of building a militant, bottom-up labor movement. The speech is characteristically funny, engaging, and powerful. Watch it here. Photo: Jim West/jimwestphoto.com

Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teachers Union president who led the landmark 2012 strike, died February 7. Her generosity, charisma, and indomitable strength of purpose were gifts to labor organizers across the country who watched, learned, listened, and stepped up themselves.

She inspired a whole host of educators who had been looking for a way forward in the midst of orchestrated attacks on public schools and educators. Around the country teachers were facing weaponized high-stakes testing, defunding, charter schools, and privatization.

Lewis and the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) in CTU gave us a vision for the types of schools we were fighting for and a path to win those schools: rank-and-file, strike-ready, democratic unions. The 2018 red-state strike wave was lit by the sparks of Lewis’s leadership in Chicago.

“When CTU went on strike in the fall of 2012,” recalled Labor Notes staffer Barbara Madeloni, “I was teaching a class to future teachers at UMass Amherst. We were talking about unions and why they mattered. When I posted a photo of CTU members sitting in the street, arms locked, ready to be arrested to win their strike demands, students sat up and leaned in. The energy in the room popped.

FULL story at link above.