Speaking to the teachers union as much as the media, Chicago Public Schools officials held a press conference Thursday to announce a labor agreement with the district’s lunch workers.
“This is the message we are pushing: When two parties come together and sit together great things can actually happen,” said schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard. “We’re focusing on finding resolution. We’re not focusing on strikes.”
Talks between CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union are mired down, with both sides far apart on issues including salary. At the union’s request, a panel was created and is reviewing the offers of both sides, the first of several steps that need to be taken before a strike can be called.
The district’s 3,200 lunch workers will get a 2 percent raise in each of the first two years of a five-year contract. If teachers aides win a better deal with CPS, lunch workers will be entitled to those raises, said Henry Tamarin, president of Unite Here Local 1.
“This was the maximum they were willing to give us,” Tamarin said. “This was the best settlement we could have reached.”
The agreement also prevents CPS from converting more full cooking kitchens into warming kitchens for the next five years. That will allow cooks to keep their jobs. Union officials also have argued the conversions needed to stop to ensure schoolchildren get fresh food wherever possible and not the pre-packaged frozen food served in schools without kitchens.
Unite Here Local 1 officials said that a $1 billion initiative to modernize CPS schools has done away with cooking facilities at about one third of all elementary schools.
The agreement, announced at the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, also calls for a committee to find the best ways to promote healthy and fresh food in CPS schools.
CTU vice president Jesse Sharkey said last summer that CPS unions had agreed to fight the district’s decision to do away with across-the-board raises for all workers. But the teachers union has so many separate issues – from class size to how teachers are evaluated – it made sense for each union to negotiate on its own, Sharkey said.
More Top Picks Best Cooling Gel Eye Masks For Puffy Eyes