(The Chicago Tribune)—… Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of four CTU members, which alleges the union has not complied with its contractual duties to produce its annual audit detailing union finances. The last published CTU audit covered the first half of 2019, according to the plaintiffs.
“Under CTU’s Constitution and Bylaws, Article VI, Section 1(d), the union is required to ‘furnish an audited report of the Union which shall be printed in the Union’s publication,’” wrote Dean McGee, senior counsel for educational freedom in an October email to CTU President Stacy Davis Gates and CTU Fiscal Secretary Maria Moreno, the lawsuit states.
Members were told that they could come to the CTU office to view an audit if they wished, McGee told the Tribune.
“In other words, their leadership is telling them that these busy educators need to take time out of their day, time away from educating students during a weekday to go to the office to view an audit that they are contractually entitled to receive directly from leadership,” McGee said.
A week after receiving the letter, CTU’s lawyers requested the identity of the plaintiffs and then Gates called them out at an all-member meet and greet of pension candidates, said school social worker and CTU member Philip Weiss, who is a plaintiff. According to Weiss, Gates framed their request for transparency as being part of a “right-wing” effort.
“I’m running for office to be the pension trustee. I was the investment chair,” Weiss said. “I was the investment chair, and she’s trying to undermine it… She used this lawsuit as a way to say, here is the rotten apple in our union.”
The CTU blasted the lawsuit as “frivolous” and its filer as a “Trump-aligned right-wing firm” in a statement Wednesday afternoon.
“Filing a lawsuit for a remedy that could have been resolved with an email is scab behavior and the definition of frivolous,” Davis Gates said in the statement. “This suit isn’t about the information they already had access to. It is one more inaccurate step in those pushing Trump’s agenda in Illinois.”
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