Education
With Labor Contract Secured, CTU Members Now Set to Vote on Union Leadership
Weeks after ratifying a new labor agreement, rank-and-file members of the Chicago Teachers Unions this week will be voting once again, this time to decide on their leadership for the next three years.
The union on Friday is holding officer elections in which current leaders — the Caucus of Rank-and-file Educators (CORE) — will face off against challengers from the Respect Educate Advocate Lead, or REAL, caucus.
CORE, which took over union leadership in 2010 under powerhouse president Karen Lewis, is now headed by Stacy Davis Gates, who is wrapping up her first term as union president following her election victory in 2022.
That year, CORE secured 56% of votes, ahead of the Members First slate at 27% and the REAL slate at 17%. Members First does not have candidates running in the current election.
Under Davis Gates, the union successfully backed former CTU organizer Brandon Johnson’s mayoral campaign in 2023 and recently secured what officials hailed as a “transformative” four-year labor contract, doing so without going on strike or taking a strike vote for the first time in 15 years.
The union went on strike for seven days in 2012, then narrowly avoided a second work stoppage under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel with a late-night agreement in 2016. After negotiations broke down with former Mayor Lori Lightfoot in 2019, the CTU again went on strike for 11 days.
Davis Gates said CORE over the years has provided “transformational leadership” that has catapulted the CTU into a “power player in the struggle for equity and justice.”
“We’ve done that with Karen Lewis, we’ve done that with (Lewis’ successor) Jessie Sharkey and now we’re doing that under the Davis Gates administration,” she told WTTW News. “Everything that we’ve said we were gonna do, we have made tremendous progress and advancements in doing.”
The union in recent years has expanded its efforts beyond the classroom to advocate for social justice causes.
But her opponents have criticized the union’s transparency, political engagements and relationships with other labor allies.
“I think members started feeling information is being kept from us,” Erika Meza, a 25-year teaching veteran and REAL’s candidate for president, told WTTW News. “How are decisions being made? Are decisions being made for the betterment of our schools and our students and our professions or are these decisions being made for political gain, political aspirations, political goals? And more and more people just started feeling disenfranchised.”
While Meza said the new labor contract is a “step in the right direction,” she disagreed with the notion that it is transformative for rank-and-file members.
She criticized language in the agreement she said would make certain facets difficult to enforce, and her caucus has claimed more should have been done to secure additional prep time for elementary teachers.
“We have a CTU member as mayor right now,” Meza said. “How did we not manage to not win that back? Our elementary school teachers are drowning.”
The REAL caucus has also criticized CORE leadership as being out of touch with its members, while pledging to improve classroom working conditions, expand an existing grievance department to respond to member concerns and enact term limits on union leaders.
Meza portrayed the current CTU as a “fractured” union that needs to better support its members and labor partners. That includes the Service Employees International Union, a longtime CTU ally that more recently has butted heads with the teachers union.
That rift arose during the CTU’s latest round of contract bargaining when it made a proposal that would’ve allowed Chicago Public Schools to use CTU-represented teacher assistants to do the work of some SEIU-backed classroom assistants.
SEIU Local 73 President Dian Palmer went as far as accusing CTU leadership of “bullying and dishonesty.”
“We need support from our labor allies, we need support from SEIU,” Meza said. “We don’t have their support at all right now … We need to rebuild that relationship with SEIU and we don’t believe current leadership can do that.”
Davis Gates pushed back on that notion, saying she “loves” the SEIU and sees that union as family. She recently appeared at a May Day event with SEIU’s national president April Verrett and said they have a close relationship where “I can call her, she can call me and we’ll figure it out.”
“Families get to have a multidimensional relationship — a relationship that’s sometimes close, a relationship that can be strained and a relationship that can be rebuilt,” Davis Gates said.
If CORE is reelected, Davis Gates said she’ll work to implement the new labor agreement, expand the union’s overall reach and continue to “dream big.”
She also said the CTU must show “quite frankly, the world how to withstand what’s happening with Donald Trump right now,” comparing massive federal cuts enacted by billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to actions taken by former Chicago and Illinois leaders Rahm Emanuel, Arne Duncan and Bruce Rauner.
CTU leaders have touted first-time provisions included in the new labor deal they say will protect academic freedoms and make clear educators are free to supplement their curriculum in line with state standards on discussing things like culturally responsive teaching, Black history and the contributions of the LGBTQ+ community.
Davis Gates said they also have to use their collective bargaining agreement to “fight for the common good,” pointing to language in that deal that adds resources to ensure the removal of lead, asbestos and mold from schools and expands services for unhoused families.
“We’re gonna continue to be good neighbors,” she said. “We’re gonna continue to be good partners, we’re gonna continue in this quest for a Chicago that isn’t segregated and we’re gonna continue in our quest for a Chicago that provides equity to those who have been displaced over generations.”
Note: This article was published May 14, 2025, and updated with video May 15, 2025.
