In recent weeks, we've been following the unionization drive by teachers from three charter schools located in Chicago and managed by Civitas, an arm of the Chicago International Charter School (CICS) chain.  First, the teachers took their union petitions to the Illinois Education Labor Relations Board (IELRB), which certified the effort.  But CICS refused to begin bargaining with the teachers, arguing that they are private sector employees and therefore under the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) -- a position backed up by the Chicago Public Schools.  Last week, the NLRB agreed with this assessment, meaning the teachers must now hold a federal union election.

At the weekend labor forum we highlighted yesterday, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Marilyn Stewart said that the teachers were "pushing for" a June 18 election day at the Wrightwood, Ellison, and Northtown Academy campuses. Listen here:

Internal mp3

Despite the fact that 75 percent of teachers have already signed a petition in favor of joining the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (Chicago ACTS), Stewart said on Saturday that Civitas has attempted to "drag out" the election process.  As we've written about in the context of the Employee Free Choice Act, federal labor law currently grants employees the power to control the election schedule and give themselves plenty of time to run anti-union campaigns in the preceding weeks and months.  "We want you to call these people and tell them they should honor this election," Stewart told the crowd.  

Those efforts appear to have paid off, as the IFT confirmed to us that the election will indeed be held on June 18.

As you can hear in the clip above, Stewart also suggested that one teacher had already been fired in conjunction with the union drive. (We're still trying to confirm this through the IFT.)

As for the debate over whether charter schools are public or private entities, Illinois lawmakers unanimously amended the state's school code last month to explicitly define charter school teachers as public sector employees subject to the IELRB's jurisdiction. If these institutions want to be private schools, Stewart says, "then they should give back the public money."

STEWART: You can have as many private schools as you want but you can't have public money to fund private schools. People have discovered that there's money in education. And they're coming after this money from the government, this stimulus money. So people are coming in with this corporate business model and we've seen what the corporations have done to our banks and our industries. They're taking over education and it's not about the education of our children.

At a Progressive Democrats of America forum last night on the subject of public school closings, some outspoken teachers from the Caucus of Ranks and File Educators (CORE) were not convinced that CTU is doing enough to stand up to the outsourcing of schools, which they see as an attempt to kill the city's largest teachers union. More on that discussion to come.