BTW: Obama Clan... Occupiers support strike of nation’s highest-paid teachers! BUT OF COURSE!!
The average teacher who retired in 2011 after 30 or more years of employment—what passes for a full career in the public sector—had a final salary of $105,888 and will receive an annual guaranteed pension of $78,576,” Biggs wrote. “The salary puts the average Chicago teacher in the top 5% or so of workers nationwide, while even fewer private sector workers will receive a pension that generous.”
But Rachel Unterman, a member of Occupy Chicago, said that public teachers in Chicago have neither fair compensation nor adequate working conditions.
“They are being asked to work a longer day and they have not been offered appropriate compensation for that,” she said in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. “What they are striking for now is better working conditions and better learning environments for the students.”
When told that Chicago Public Schools teachers were highly compensated when compared to not just other teachers, but all employees nationwide, she responded that this was just evidence that public teachers everywhere were insufficiently compensated.
While children across the country have returned to school for another year, approximately 400,000 students in Chicago have been forced out of the classroom for four days -- and counting -- as a result of a union-boss-ordered teacher strike in the country's third largest school district.
The strike has forced parents and guardians to scramble to find adequate supervision for their children by taking unscheduled time out of work or making last-minute arrangements with relatives, churches, or daycare centers -- if they're lucky.And if the union power brokers' strong-armed tactics succeed, it's not just today's children who will suffer.
Union bosses reportedly ordered the strike not primarily over salaries, but to protest modest reforms to make bad teachers more accountable to parents and principals.
Imagine what the union bosses would do if their iron-clad grip on schools were truly in jeopardy.
Of course, school-age children in Chicago have long suffered as a result of the Chicago Teachers Union hierarchy's iron grip on city and state politics.
Even 25 years after U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett named the Chicago public school system the worst in the country, reading scores for elementary and middle school students haven't budged.
The strike comes at a time when local budget problems have driven some cities and towns to bankruptcy.
That's why reform-minded legislators and governors across the country are looking to reign in union bosses' monopoly bargaining powers that corrupt our politics.
And make no mistake, this strike is enabled by the teacher union hierarchy's forced unionism powers.
By extracting forced fees from teachers and funneling that cash into city and state politics, teacher union bosses will threaten to withhold their massive electioneering warchest from politicians who would stand up to them.
It's no wonder the Chicago Democrat political machine has long worked hand-in-hand with union bosses.
If Chicago and Illinois elected officials ever want to pass meaningful education reform or restore fiscal sanity to their budgets, they ought to take a long, hard look at the corrupting effects of monopoly bargaining.
Reform will only be possible by breaking the teacher union hierarchy's special privileges that empower them to corrupt our politics and crush local and state budgets.
First, teachers -- and other civil servants -- should have Right to Work protections.
A Right to Work law would protect teachers who don't want to abandon their students and don't support the teacher union hierarchy's radical political agenda.
Second, the government-sector monopoly bargaining powers that drive this madness ought to be curtailed.
Just like in Wisconsin -- where teacher union militants staged a "sick-out" to protest these very reforms.
We're seeing again in Illinois what happens when the union tyrants are in charge. It's time to fight back.
