The Legacy of a Chicago Teacher’s Union Leader

Karen Lewis addresses a rally of thousands of public school teachers in downtown Chicago, June 22, 2018 [AP/Sitthixay Ditthavong]

By Sarah Leonard

The Chicago teacher who kicked off a 2012 revolution in the labor movement has died. But the movement that will be the legacy of Karen Lewis, a former chemistry teacher, is growing.

In 2012, Chicago teachers donned red shirts and went on strike. Parents and students marched alongside them. This successful action was to be the first of many more strikes and walkouts to come, and played a key role in reasserting labor’s power in Chicago. In 2019, when Chicago teachers went on strike again, they demanded not just good wages but food and housing security for their students.

Karen Lewis stood at the forefront of these actions, inspiring many of her colleagues to become activists for their schools.

With her fiery challenges to more conservative labor leaders, the Democratic establishment, and a commitment to organizing not just teachers but parents and students, Lewis transformed Chicago politics. She led a faction within the union, and then the union itself, into an era of greater militancy. Lewis’s greatest nemesis was Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel (in office 2011-2019) whose austerity budgets and school closures threatened to devastate the Chicago public school system. This was a moment when Democrats had begun to abandon teacher’s unions in favor of “education reform” groups, some sponsored by hedge funds, that pushed for school privatization. With few political allies, the union turned to its community and gathered support to hit back.

Lewis’s legacy extends beyond Chicago and includes the “Red for Ed” teacher walkouts and protests that have swept through Indiana, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Back in 2013, she told the Belabored podcast that in the past, school closing hearings would draw maybe a dozen people. Now, “we’re now getting thousands of people to come to those hearings. And what they are saying with one voice is, ‘Keep your hands off my school.’”

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