Reparations And Unionization In The Great City Of Chicago

OK, I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard Chicago is an interesting place. For sure it has an colorful history (hey, Haymarket, I see you) and a cool pop culture profile (“Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?”). It’s also making headlines right now in two cutting edge, money-related ways at once.

First, the city of Chicago is offering reparations to victims of police torture.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel says the abuse and torture of scores of mostly black, male suspects in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s by former police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his detectives is a “stain that cannot be removed from our city’s history.”

“But,” Emanuel says, “it can be used as a lesson of what not to do.”

Today’s unanimous vote in favor of the reparations fund is “an essential step in righting a wrong,” he adds.

Burge and his “midnight crew” of detectives on the city’s South Side used electric shock, beatings, suffocation and even Russian roulette to coerce confessions out of suspects. The city has already paid more than $100 million in judgments and legal settlements to some victims. The reparations fund will compensate up to 80 others and will provide them counseling, education and job training.

The fact that they’re calling this “reparations” seems pretty impressive to me. “Reparations” is enough of a loaded word that it makes some people gum up their ears and immediately stop listening. It also happens to be the correct word for the situation. If we cannot, as a society (on either side of the Atlantic Ocean), acknowledge that much of our affluence comes from the fact that we kidnapped, exploited, tortured, and either worked to death or killed other people, and that the descendants of those people might deserve some recompense, well, then at least we can focus on the descendants of those people who have also, more recently, been severely mistreated.

As Hamilton tells Jefferson in Cabinet Battle #1, one of my favorite songs from that show the Internet won’t stop talking about:

A civics lesson from a slaver. Hey neighbor
Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor
“We plant seeds in the South. We create.”
Yeah, keep ranting
We know who’s really doing the planting.

Secondly, the University of Chicago’s non-tenured faculty members are trying to unionize. There’s a lot of history here too. Some college profs began unionizing as long as 100 years ago. Others are still working on it today:

Nationally, there’s been a big surge in the number of faculty seeking to unionize, said William Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, City University of New York.

All told, about a quarter of faculty members nationwide belong to a union, the center estimated in a 2012 report.

In recent years, as part of a national campaign, SEIU has successfully organized adjuncts — lecturers who work on short-term contracts, usually for lesser pay and benefits — at prestigious private universities around the country, including Georgetown, American, Tufts, Northeastern and Washington University in St. Louis, Herbert said.

Considering how poorly adjuncts are treated pretty much everywhere, I’d say that’s worth three cheers.

Bloody Sunday picture via CNN

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