Illinois could soon be ground zero for government-mandated arbitrators dictating provisions in private school union contracts.
That could include provisions governing locker rooms, keeping secrets from parents and other social issues that have little to do with traditional bargaining.
The Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA) would make that possible. The bill is supposed to speed up the negotiating process with newly unionized private employers. But if the employer and union don’t bargain and agree fast enough, an arbitration panel could write the contract and make them binding on the parties — even if the workers themselves don’t want those provisions in the contract.
That’s bad news for private schools, which could be forced into provisions antithetical to their purposes. If the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) organizes a private school, and contract talks stall, a federal arbitrator would write the first contract. Nothing stops that arbitrator from drawing on the union’s own stated priorities or union contracts elsewhere, including provisions related to an array of social issues.
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Illinois offers a preview of how that could look. The AFT’s Chicago affiliate, the Chicago Teachers Union, already uses collective bargaining to pursue an agenda that extends well beyond traditional questions of wages, hours and benefits.
The union’s current contract with Chicago Public Schools includes multiple provisions affecting parental rights and student gender identity that are unrelated to traditional subjects of bargaining.
For example, the contract mandates that “all students and staff are permitted to use the bathroom or locker room that corresponds to their gender identity.” There are no caveats or limits.
The contract also allows the district to hide students’ preferred gender identity from parents. It states the district must “respect students’ privacy, especially if parents or family members do not know how students identify or express their identity.” Teachers “will not be required to reveal a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity” to guardians or parents “without the student’s permission.”
The CTU isn’t secretive about demanding these subjects, either. After its 2012 strike ended, “union leaders planned town halls in other cities across the country, in New York and Cleveland, San Francisco and Tampa, to spread the new gospel” of putting “things on the table that hadn’t been on the table before,” as reported in a Vox article CTU displays on its website.
Whatever one thinks of these provisions, the problem raised by the FLCA is more fundamental. Who should decide whether they belong in a private school’s labor contract — the union and employer through negotiations, or arbitrators that are accountable to no one?
And private schools are not merely hypothetical targets. CTU already has organized charter schools, which are treated as private-sector entities under federal labor law.
In 2018, then-CTU President Jesse Sharkey explicitly admitted his motivation to “undermine further charter expansion,” including through the unionizing and merging of charter schools into the CTU. Later that year, the CTU employed its go-to tactic by leading a charter network’s teachers out on strike, marking the first charter school strike in the nation and forcing the cancellation of classes for the 7,000 students in the network’s 15 schools.
By 2024, that network’s administrators announced plans to close seven of its 15 schools, citing declining enrollment and significant operating costs. The CTU’s ultimate goal came to fruition: Organize charters, drive up costs to force closure and then absorb them back into the public school system as traditional public schools.
A union that organizes employees with the intent of ultimately closing their schools also is capable of organizing a private school with the intent of introducing drastic contract provisions, especially when those provisions already have been demanded in its other contracts.
The FLCA would give teachers unions an additional tool in their arsenal against anything that isn’t a traditional public school. The question no longer would be simply what provisions a union can persuade a school to accept, but what provisions an outside arbitration panel could compel it to accept. If school officials at a newly organized private school don’t agree to the social or “climate justice” provisions demanded by the union, the union would have carte blanche to demand mediation that ultimately could lead to third-party arbitrators creating a binding contract that could include those very provisions.
The FLCA cleared the U.S. House of Representatives in June and is now pending in the Senate. Lawmakers may see the bill as a way to deliver faster labor contracts. But for private and charter schools, it could instead mean faster exploitation by teachers unions seeking to impose their broader agenda at the bargaining table.
Mailee Smith is vice president of policy and litigation for the Illinois Policy Institute.
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