A new lawsuit seeks to make Chicago's powerful teachers union and its current and former presidents pay at least $250 million for causing learning loss, income loss and general headaches for Chicago Public Schools students and their families, when the union executed a labor action in early 2022 to protest the Chicago Public Schools' return to full-time, in-school learning.
The lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court, accuses the Chicago Teachers Union, former CTU President Jesse Sharkey, current CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, and the American Federation of Teachers, of allegedly conspiring to call an illegal strike in December 2021 and January 2022, because the CTU asserted CPS did not do enough to protect them from the spread of Covid during that time.
The lawsuit asserts the allegedly illegal actions caused a widespread public nuisance and violated the contract rights of CPS students and families, who should be considered third-party beneficiaries of the collective bargaining agreement between the CTU and CPS.
Stacy David Gates
| Illinois Federation of Teachers
The plaintiffs are represented in the action by attorneys Patrick Hughes and Daniel Suhr, of the firm of Hughes & Suhr LLC, of Chicago.
"The families affected by these illegal strikes have suffered real, tangible losses," said Suhr, in a statement provided to The Cook County Record. "Monetary damages are not just compensation. They are a recognition of the pain and disruption inflicted upon them.
"It's about restoring what was unjustly taken from these communities."
The lawsuit centers on CTU's actions amid CPS' planned return to in-person learning, as the school system became one of the last in the country to restore normalcy to public education for hundreds of thousands of students in the country's third largest city, after enduring over a year of disruption during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The slow return to in-person learning was heavily credited not only to state and local public health restrictions imposed on all levels of society by Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, among others, but also to heavy resistance by the CTU, with the support of allies in the national teachers union. The CTU, for instance, notably posted on social media that calls to return to in-person learning were "rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny."
However, those delays in returning to in-person schooling likely affected low income racial minority students the most, according to the complaint, leading to substantial learning loss.
The complaint cites academic analysis demonstrating that such learning loss further leads to substantial income loss later in life.
That damage was allegedly exacerbated by a labor action lasting five days, from Jan. 5-11, 2022, in which the CTU refused to return to the classroom to teach students until it secured certain concessions from CPS.
CTU notably did not describe the action as a "strike," instead repeatedly referring to the refusal to report to classrooms, as ordered by CPS, as a "remote learning action."
The lawsuit, however, said the action by any name amounted to an illegal strike. They noted both former Mayor Lightfoot and CPS referred to the action as "an illegal work stoppage."
"Regardless of whether the teachers' work refusal was referred to as a remote-work job action, a sick-out, or a work stoppage, the conduct constituted a strike within the meaning of the Illinois Educational Label Relations Act," the plaintiffs wrote in the lawsuit.
"... Mayor Lightfoot, CPS, and the Parents were right then and the Plaintiffs are right now: The January Strike was an illegal strike."
The labor action further was carried out with approval from only 73% of CTU members, short of the 75% required by state law to authorize a strike, the complaint notes. Further, CTU never sent a notice of its intent to strike, nor did it allow 10 days to pass between the vote to authorize the labor action and the beginning of the labor action.
The plaintiffs assert this violates the CBA between CTU and CPS, and thus, violates the contractual rights of CPS students and families, whose interests the CTU claims to also represent in its CBA.
The lawsuit asserts the allegedly illegal strike harmed families, unexpectedly upending their lives for days, costing them income and forcing them to pay for child care, while allegedly inflicting further emotional and psychological harm and learning loss on students already reeling from many months of remote learning, school shutdowns and other societal restrictions.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of named plaintiffs Amy Kessem and her two children, and Robert Roth, and his child. The children attended CPS in January 2022.
The lawsuit seeks to expand the action to include more than 290,000 CPS students and their families.
The lawsuit further seeks to establish a class of defendants, to include all of CTU's members who voted to authorize and abided by the work stoppage in late 2021 and early 2022.
Hughes and Suhr formerly worked together as part of the team at the Liberty Justice Center, a public interest non-profit legal organization in Chicago, perhaps most famous for securing the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the case of Mark Janus v American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees. That decision struck down the state-protected regime by which public sector worker unions were allowed to force non-union workers to pay fees to the unions. The high court declared such compulsory fees violated non-union workers' free speech and association rights.
Hughes and Suhr are no longer associated with the Liberty Justice Center, and the Liberty Justice Center is not a party to or providing legal representation in the new lawsuit filed by Hughes and Suhr against the CTU.