“If we don’t get it,” a Cather Elementary teacher screamed into a megaphone in front of the school Thursday.

Dozens of others foisted picket signs into the air as they marched in a circle and shouted back in response: “Shut it down!”

That’s the scene in Chicago, where 26,000 teachers with the Chicago Teachers Union and nearly 8,000 support workers with the Service Employees International Union went on strike to pressure taxpayers into a big raise. The CTU and SEIU are backed by local socialist and communist allies on the picket lines to hold the education of 362,000 Chicago students hostage in hopes of job guarantees and significant salary increases the city can’t afford.

The CTU presented Chicago Public Schools 83 pages of demands in January and began negotiations with the city’s new socialist Mayor Lori Lightfoot this spring. For months CTU and CPS officials haggled over the usual: class size caps, lowering class size limits, commitments to add hundreds of nurses and social workers, and raises over the next several years. The sides were largely in agreement and close to a new contract when CTU decided on the strike and Lightfoot canceled classes for Thursday, NPR reports.

“At every turn, we bent over backwards to meet the unions’ needs,” Lightfoot said. “We offered a historic package on CTU’s core issues of compensation, staffing and class size.”

Chicago Board of Education President Miguel del Valle told reporters at a press conference that CPS negotiators essentially agreed to the union’s demands.

“They were concerned about the staffing issues, they were concerned about class size,” he said. “The mayor responded … what’s left?”

CTU President Jesse Sharkey offered few clues when he talked in generalities to teachers he convinced to walk out on students Thursday to stand in the cold outside at 5 a.m. with cardboard signs.

“We’re asking for a just contract. We understand a teachers strike is a difficulty for the parents and the public and the city of Chicago. It’s not something that we do lightly,” he claimed.

“We do it because for years we have been asking for better conditions in our schools. … This is a school where none of the kindergarten classes have fewer than 30 students in them. This is a school where we don’t have the social workers, or the counselors, or the resources,” Sharkey said.

“All of our schools here deal with real trauma and we need supports,” he said. “Our contract needs to be a just settlement to address those issues. … It’s in the mayor’s power to get a just contract, this doesn’t have to be a long strike.”

CTU “needs real solutions,” Sharkey said, “not half measures.”

The CTU’s “real solutions,” according to CBS Chicago, is more taxpayer money and members for the union. Each new CPS employee automatically becomes a CTU member and pays more than $1,100 each year in dues.

“RIGHT NOW: CPS teachers on strike outside Cather Elementary School.

“You’ll see this outside all Chicago Public Schools. Teachers want smaller class sizes & better staffing,” CBS Chicago’s Mugo Odigwe posted to Twitter with video from the front lines. “Also want a 15% pay raise over 3yrs. City is offering them a 16% pay raise over 5yrs.”

Throughout the city, educators blasted gangster rap and other music as they waived picket signs at passing motorists, many parents who were forced to find other accommodations for the kids during the strike.

“It’s lit on the strike line,” one teacher said, as others shivered with scarves and cupped hot coffee along the roadway.

 

It was also “lit” downtown, where members of the Chicago branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation preached to their fellow teachers from a park bench about how the strike bolsters their vision of ending capitalism.

“We need to change the school budgeting system,” a CTU teacher socialist told his comrades. “And we need to fight for housing for all of our students, and we need to fight for the social issues that impact the classroom environment of our students because it’s all connected.

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“Because the struggle doesn’t end at the end of the day. The struggle doesn’t end at three o’clock. Those students, their struggle goes on 24/7 and we teachers need to be there for them in the struggle,” the teacher shouted.

“En la lucha! (In the fight!)”

Elsewhere in the city, mobs of educators sipped high-dollar coffee, bundled in expensive down jackets and designer scarves, as they pumped their fists in the air with angry chants in front of their school buildings.

“Whose schools?” they shouted. “Our schools!”

In some places, the union agitators were clearly prepared for the long haul.

Video from the Lindbolm Math and Science Academy show at least one overweight woman decided to do her part from a folding camp chair, though her energy was perhaps better spent rattling a tambourine and waiving her sign: “Mayor Lightfoot Our Strike Your Watch,” it read.

“Mayor Lightfoot, get on the right foot, put it in writing now,” teachers at LMSA chanted. “Mayor Lightfoot, get on the right foot, get on the right foot, get on the right foot. Mayor Lightfoot, get on the right foot, put it in writing now.”

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Students, meanwhile, are learning a lot.

“Teachers support us to help us get a better education, so if we can help them to get a higher paycheck and support their families, then why not, you know?” one student of “Ms. Corres’ said in a video the teacher posted to Twitter.

“They also need money for their children, things at home, to pay bills so they won’t be poor,” another said.