CHICAGO—Pushed by a right-wing downstate Illinois “think tank” with a reputation for self-dealing for its boss, the radical right Republican majority on the U.S. House panel dealing with workers’ issues is targeting the Chicago Teachers Union, AFT Local 1, for investigation.
The pretext is implausible: late filing of some federal forms due to messy financial records under a prior union president, which the coronavirus pandemic only worsened. And the think tank, the Illinois Policy Institute, is suing the CTU for even more records, too.
The assault’s real aim is to intimidate one of the more outspoken anti-Trump unions in the U.S. CTU is fighting back. So are its allies, including the United Electrical Workers and the state’s heavily Democratic House delegation.
The lawsuit and the investigations are about “our power and the fact that we use it for our students,” union President Stacy Davis Gates, a social studies teacher, said in a mass e-mail to all 30,000 CTU members on Jan. 16. She also may discuss the right-wing attack in her State of the Union address to members on Jan. 27.
In the e-mail, Gates writes:
“The billionaire forces behind groups like IPI and this current Congress have made it clear they want to terminate the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, collective bargaining rights, and public schooling altogether.
“We’re being investigated not because there is a there there. We’re being investigated because we make improving the education, communities, and lives of our Black, Latine, and largely low-income student body our first order of business.
“We stand in the way of the anti-worker, white supremacist agenda of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, and their tentacles in Illinois.”
In a series of letters, the Education and Workforce Committee demanded not just the copies of the required reports, called LM-2s, that CTU and virtually every union must file. It also demanded detailed backup material, such as vouchers and meeting minutes.
The LM-2 reports, unlike corporate reports, force unions to disclose every penny of spending on everything from payroll to paper clips. Unlike corporate data, whole union reports are public records.
That let Paul Weiss, a lawyer for the “Liberty Justice Institute,” the legal arm of the complaining think tank, the Illinois Policy Institute, look at the union’s books, too.
The probe of the CTU is important because it’s yet another intimidation tactic against unions, who have been leaders in the fight against the Trump administration and its policies targeting workers, people of color, immigrants, and students.
The battle against teachers and education workers particularly pleases the capitalist backers of Trump and the GOP who hope to destroy unions, especially public workers’ unions and teachers’ unions, and to line their own pockets by privatizing public schools.
Gates has been particularly outspoken about Trump, his backers, his goals, and his racism.
“We are reopening libraries while the right-wing bans books,” Gates states. “We are winning supports and protections for queer, trans, and immigrant students while the right aims to make them less safe. We are protecting Black history and promoting Black student success while the president says the civil rights movement was very unfair to white people.” 90% of Chicago students are people of color.
The committee majority’s demand was “based on citations exclusively from the Illinois Policy Institute,” the union’s e-mail said. And unlike the Institute, the union discloses its sources of income. A prior Pro Publica investigation uncovered the institute’s secret financial sources: right-wing leaders and major Republican donors.
“CTU is a democratic institution. Members elect our officers to run the union and elect our executive board and delegates to govern it. Delegates receive monthly financial reports, and our executive board provides the highest level of oversight and accountability. That’s what democracy looks like at CTU and what it should look like in our country,” the CTU e-mail declared.
In their letter supporting the CTU, a group of Illinois lawmakers told Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., the Education and Workforce Committee chair, that they’re puzzled by the panel’s request for years of LM-2s plus the background material, since the forms are publicly available, to the committee, the right-wing institute, the union’s 30,000 members, and everyone else.
Walberg and his right-wingers used the reason that the panel is considering updating and rewriting the 1957 GOP-passed Landrum-Griffin Act, officially the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA). That law, passed in the wake of scandals involving the Teamsters, mandates public disclosure of every detail of union spending.
“Given the availability of financial reports, consistent with their obligations under the LMRDA, we find it curious the committee suggests CTU is ‘keeping complete financial information from its own members’ or ‘flout[ing]’ LMRDA requirements,” the Illinois lawmakers wrote.
“Given the spurious nature of the claims and that the sole citations are sourced from the Illinois Policy Institute, a locally controversial organization previously registered as a lobbying entity until 2013, we are concerned the inquiry itself is overtly partisan in nature.”
The United Electrical Workers, an independent, non-AFL-CIO union, also came to the CTU’s defense. Both UE and the Illinois lawmakers said the committee had better things to do with its time and resources than conduct a war against unions in general and CTU in particular.
“This is the result of a coordinated attack, not just on CTU, but on public education, workers’ rights, and democracy. CTU, like UE, is a democratic, rank-and-file union…. Instead of harassing CTU, the committee—which has also made frivolous requests of UE—should be investigating the dismantling of the Department of Education, the $12 billion in cuts to education in the FY2026 budget, and the administration’s firing of nearly half of Department of Education employees last year,” that union said.
“While the Trump administration seeks to defund schools, dismantle the Department of Education, eliminate protections for students with special needs, and roll back the clock on equal access to education, the Chicago Teachers Union fights to preserve and increase the resources, programs, and protections our constituents rely on and deserve,” the Illinois lawmakers wrote.
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