LONDON – The Chicago Teachers Union has gone global. The CTU’s demand of a 30 percent raise and subsequent 10-day strike made them rock stars in the radical unionist crowd.

Unions around the world continue to draw inspiration from the CTU and its president Karen Lewis.

Britain’s National Union of Teachers has been rattling its own saber with that nation’s leaders. Christine Blower, president of the humorously acronymed NUT, wrote in the communist paper, Morning Star:

In many ways the NUT has come late to the debates and practice of organising.

As a consequence we have learned a great deal from colleagues elsewhere in the movement and from the substantial body of research into organising in Britain.

We are also fortunate enough to have been able to learn international lessons from other teaching unions fighting similar battles to the NUT.

Not least among these are the lessons taught us by the Chicago Teachers Union which has successfully pushed back some of the worst aspects of (the global education reform movement) in a city that was in many ways the testing ground of neoliberal education policy.

Central to their success was a clear vision of an organising model based on membership participation, the renewal of democratic lay structures and the engagement of the community.

A slogan often attributed to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci that will be familiar to Morning Star readers is that of “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

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Isn’t that sweet?

Blower, too, has taken her unionized teachers out on strike over pension reform and compensation issues. Sound familiar?

In 2011, Blower came under fire for taking a 10 percent pay increase – four times the increase her members received. Her compensation that year was reportedly the equivalent of $234,836.

Lewis, meanwhile, pulled down nearly $300,000 in compensation in 2012 while the average teacher salary (without benefits) was $76,000.

In other words, NTU leaders have also adopted the notorious hypocrisy their Big Labor comrades in the CTU have perfected to a science.