Chicago Teachers Union Local 1, the primary collective bargaining body for Chicago’s teachers, has been an integral part of “Black Lives Matter” protests in Chicago, but on Thursday, CTU took their interest in social change national, tweeting out support for a threatening “guillotine protest” that took place in front of Jeff Bezos’ house, demanding a $30 minimum wage or threatening Bezos with violence.
“More than 100 demonstrators gathered outside Jeff Bezos’ Washington, DC, mansion on Thursday and constructed a guillotine outside his front door to protest Amazon workers’ wages,” Business Insider reported Thursday. “The protest came the day after Bezos’ net worth surpassed $200 billion, making him the richest person in history, according to Forbes. His wealth has grown by about $85 billion since January, boosted by Amazon’s soaring revenue amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The protesters, who told reporters they were agitating for a $30 minimum wage — “Give a good reason why we don’t deserve a $30 minimum wage when this man makes $4,000 a second,” they said — did note that the guillotine they constructed was “not functional,” but the message was clear, regardless.
Washington Examiner reporter Nic Rowan captured the guillotine in action.
Protesters build a guillotine outside of Jeff Bezos’s house. Yesterday the Amazon billionaire was reported to become the first man worth $200 billion. pic.twitter.com/tY1wb0F1uj
— Nic Rowan (@NicXTempore) August 27, 2020
Guillotines have become a staple of recent protests — a clear threat of oncoming, bloody revolution (though protesters do seem to ignore that French Revolution’s founders were the apparatus’s final victims) — and have appeared at a number of demonstrations nationwide, including one that took place outside the White House Thursday night, during President Donald Trump’s RNC speech.
The Chicago Teachers Union tweeted out its approval of the protest: “We are completely frightened by, completely impressed by and completely in support of wherever this is headed. #solidarity”
Twitter/@CTULocal1
The CTU is, of course, no stranger to radical policies. As The Daily Wire reported back in July, the Chicago Teachers Union was one of a handful of national teachers unions that signed on to a radical “safe schools” plan that outlined demands that had to be met before public school teachers would return to the classroom amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“The group [of unions], under the banner of the Journeys for Justice Alliance, claims that no return to classrooms will be truly ‘healthy’ until those same schools are also ‘equitable,'” the Daily Wire reported, noting that CTU, among others, demanded not just PPE and regular sanitization of classroom facilities, but “police-free schools,” handouts funded by a tax on “Wall Street,” a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, and a complete “moratorium on charter and voucher programs and standardized testing” — an end to private education.
More recently, CTU has been agitating for fully online learning for the 2020-2021 school year and hazard pay, even for teachers who are returning to work in otherwise empty school buildings, according to Chicago’s CBS affiliate.