Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s efforts seemingly seamless so far - Chicago Sun-Times

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s efforts seemingly seamless so far

MARK BROWN markbrown@suntimes.com June 15, 2011 8:44PM

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Updated: June 16, 2011 2:10AM

As Mayor Rahm Emanuel has moved seamlessly through his first month in office, checking one item after another off his list of campaign promises, the most striking aspect is how painless it all has appeared.

Right out of the box, he announced he’d identified $75 million in cuts in this year’s budget to start bringing down the cost of city government — and yet there wasn’t a single item listed where you could say for certain who would be crying, “Ouch!”

He “re-organized” the City Council without changing the key players.

Then he announced he would be putting 500 more police “on the streets” by reassigning them from specialized units and that in this manner it not only wouldn’t require taxpayers digging deeper into their pockets but that neither would it detract from other legitimate crime-fighting efforts.

Day after day, Emanuel has announced promises from one company and then the next to bring more jobs to Chicago, and the company CEOs tell us they weren’t swayed with offers of costly city subsidies but by their confidence in the new mayor.

Even on the divisive issue of school reform, Emanuel was able to get teachers union support for the Legislature to clear the way for his all-important expansion of the school day and year, despite the fact the package will also make it more difficult for Chicago teachers to strike and easier for them to be fired.

All that smooth sailing changed Wednesday when the mayor’s newly seated Chicago School Board voted, in effect, to take away the 4-percent raise that teachers had been promised for next year, saying it can’t afford the $100 million cost.

“Ouch!”

That was the collective cry of the district’s 23,695 teachers, expressed through their union leadership, as the pain-free reign of Rahm Emanuel came to a sudden end with a sharp jab to the nose.

This was inevitable, of course. The challenges the new mayor faces are too severe to be smoothed over without somebody feeling it somewhere.

A good case can be made — and the new regime at CPS was busy making it Wednesday — that the teachers should be well-positioned to absorb this sort of blow.

After all, nearly three-fourths of them will get raises of between 3 and 5 percent anyway this year under provisions in their contract that award teachers annual “step” increases through their first 13 years on the job (and smaller increases after 14, 20 and 25 years), which doesn’t include separate automatic raises for earning advanced degrees.

This comes at the end of a period in which CPS says all teachers have received annual contractual pay raises of 4 percent each year since 2003. That’s in addition to the pay bumps for longevity or continuing education.

Faced with what it says is a $712 million budget shortfall for next year, it would only seem to make sense for CPS to require teachers to shoulder part of the burden for getting the financial picture under control.

But the teachers aren’t going to go away quietly.

While their $69,000 average salary may make them the highest paid in the nation among big city school districts, as CPS officials asserted Wednesday, Chicago teachers are far down in the pack among Illinois school systems, trailing many suburban districts.

What most jumps out at me about Chicago teacher salaries is that they must have been awfully low paid before that long run of pay raises under Mayor Daley, who made labor peace his top education priority during the last half of his regime at the expense of actual reform. Emanuel has given every indication he is willing to go to war with the teachers, even if he would prefer to cut a deal.

That brings us to trying to discern Emanuel’s end game here.

CPS officials insist that pulling back the scheduled pay raises has absolutely nothing to do with Emanuel’s desire to implement his longer school day and year before students return to class in the fall.

But if Emanuel truly expects the Chicago Teachers Union’s cooperation this summer in working out the details of the increased classroom time, then you have to believe the mayor will eventually need to find a way to come up with at least part of that 4 percent raise.

While the teachers are the first to feel the pain that this new administration must inflict, they can’t be the last.

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