Marguerite Roza
Published December 2, 2019 on Teacher Pensions Blog
The Chicago Teachers Union leaders were adamant that they weren’t on strike over salaries, but rather were fighting for educational justice in the form of more staffing. Now that the dust has settled, the numbers support that claim. Teachers didn’t gain anything in terms of salary that wasn’t already offered before the strike started. Instead, they lost six days of pay for the missed school days. (They struck for 11 days, but will make up five of them.)
For the average teacher, the unpaid strike time amounts to $2,100 in lost wages. There goes most of this year’s raise.
But it’s the senior teachers nearing retirement that got hit with a double whammy: for a teacher at the top of the pay scale retiring in the next four years, the strike meant walking away from salary and pension payments totaling nearly $13,000.
