Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s negotiating team has offered to end the outsourcing of nursing and other support staff jobs at Chicago Public Schools in an effort to seal a deal with the Chicago Teachers Union and avert a strike, according to two senior CPS officials.
Though the offer is still on the table, the CTU is unlikely to accept the city’s proposal as currently written because it “includes huge loopholes that essentially render their proposal meaningless,” CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates told the Sun-Times.
The offer is contingent on a series of concessions from the CTU, one of which would be withdrawing all proposals for additional social workers, nurses, librarians and other wraparound services, sources close to the negotiations said. The union has been unwilling to drop those issues, on which a CTU spokeswoman said the two sides remain “worlds apart.”
The other concession would see the CTU agree to the district’s preferred contract length of five years. A five-year deal would carry Lightfoot more than a year into a potential second term and have her avoid another contract standoff with the CTU in her first term.
The CPS proposal — first made at the bargaining table in late July — would put an end, starting with this school year, to contracts that outsource jobs such as counselors, school psychologists, school social workers, case managers, speech pathologists, occupational therapists and physical therapists. Though privatization isn’t widely used for those positions, those jobs would become entirely filled by full-time union employees.
CPS would have more time to end contracted nursing work in particular, but would commit the district to phasing out privatization of nurses by the end of the 2023-24 school year, CPS officials said.
Nursing positions are the ones most commonly outsourced, and the CTU, parents and students have taken issue in the past with the privatization of nursing jobs. CPS has claimed the reason those positions have needed to be outsourced is because of a difficulty in finding qualified candidates for full-time jobs.
Though that could still be a problem, a CPS source said the district feels more confident now in its ability to recruit and retain nurses to fulfill its promise to end privatized nursing in the next four years.
The district’s proposal also includes an offer to end outsourcing of teacher assistant or librarian positions “unless necessary,” in which case the city will give the union 30 days notice. Very few, if any, of those positions are currently privatized.
The “loopholes,” as Davis Gates put it, don’t guarantee CPS will follow through and are a sticking point for the CTU, Davis Gates said. The union would only consider the offer if the city guarantees that CPS will fulfill its promises, a CTU spokeswoman said.
“We welcome a real proposal that actually limits CPS’ failed experiment in privatization of nursing staff and other critical clinical workers,” Davis Gates said.
Though the city’s most recent proposal includes a 16% pay raise over five years, the CTU has been for weeks threatening a strike if its demands on wraparound services aren’t met. The union has asked for a nurses and librarians in every school, more social workers and smaller class sizes.
CTU sets strike date
During a house of delegates meeting Wednesday, the CTU set a date of Sept. 26 to vote on whether to strike. If approved, that means the earliest teachers could walk out is Oct. 7.
The two sides are expected back at the bargaining table Thursday.
