Teachers Beyond the Law: How Teachers Changed Their World
The beginning chapter of Teachers beyond the Law:Chapter 1
The Long Beginning
I waited in the Cook County, Illinois, courtroom with Norman Swenson, President of the Cook County College Teachers Union, Local 1600, and other leaders of the union for the proceedings to begin. Swenson was in serious danger because he had violated a judge’s injunction during a strike four years earlier, an action for which he had received a thirty day jail sentence, punishment he was still appealing.
What would the judge do? He had already issued one injunction against the current strike and ordered negotiations between the Union and the Chicago City College Board, negotiations that went nowhere.
During the eight years since I had left my classroom to organize teachers’ unions, I had been in many courtrooms with teachers who struck only to be ordered back to work, or, in some cases, ordered to appear in court to show why they should not be punished for refusing to obey court orders. Usually, we had found ways to work around such orders,