Seven more of the Chicago Teachers Union’s members are joining an effort to get the union to release its financial audits — prompting serious concerns about why the union bosses are resisting their own bylaws.

The additional members are joining an effort that started in October when the Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Teachers Union on behalf of four of the union’s dues-paying members who are demanding to know where their money is going — after several years of being kept in the dark.

The union’s own legally binding bylaws state that “each year, the Financial Secretary shall furnish an audited report.” Yet the CTU hasn’t produced any such audit in the past four years, the Liberty Justice Center says.

“The Chicago Teachers’ Union is failing its 25,000 members — and millions of Chicago taxpayers — by withholding years of legally required audits,” the Liberty Justice Center’s educational freedom attorney, Dean McGee, said in a statement. “If CTU has nothing to hide, why not just produce the audits?”

The union has since been using “intimidation tactics” and “false accusations” against the members who sued, the law firm says, including trying to tie them to a “‘right wing’ conspiracy.”

With more additional members joining the effort anyway, Mr. McGee tells the Sun, “Our takeaway is that it shows that the intimidation tactics have failed, and it shows that more members are standing up for their rights.”

The lead plaintiff in the case, Philip Weiss, had asked multiple times to see the audits in May, months before taking legal action, according to emails viewed by the Sun. Additionally, before pursuing litigation, Mr. McGee says the firm sent a demand letter to the CTU to “give them an opportunity to address this voluntarily, without the need for litigation.” 

Instead of taking the chance to produce the audits, the CTU’s leadership went on to attack the clients by name during a “Meet the Candidates” delegates meeting where Mr. Weiss was running for a position on the Pension Board, Mr. McGee says. The leadership called the client’s attempts to see the audits “part of Project 2025” and “a right-wing effort.”

“The message was, this is the enemy within,” Mr. McGee says. “It interfered with our client’s election to the Pension Board. And it was sort of a direct and false attack on all four of our clients whose names were read.”

Mr. McGee says that his firm has told CTU that it will dismiss the lawsuit as long as they publish proper audits — or, if the audits don’t exist, that they would be willing to negotiate a “reasonable timeframe” for the union to furnish them.

“That’s all it would take to get this lawsuit dismissed,” Mr. McGee says, “and the fact that they haven’t done that yet is very concerning.”

The CTU has signed documents with the federal Labor Department indicating that it has been audited by an outside auditor each year, he adds.

“So something doesn’t line up,” he says. “They have outside financial audits, and they’ve answered yes to the Department of Labor questionnaire. It should be very easy to hit a button and email those around to the members and make our lawsuit go away.”

The Chicago Teachers Union has not formally responded to the lawsuit in court yet and did not respond to a request from the Sun for comment. The lawsuit is the latest instance of the union coming under national scrutiny in recent months, after a list of contentious contract demands was leaked earlier this year. Those demands, as the Sun reported at the time, included enormous wage increases, using public funds for teachers’ home purchases, and making schools into temporary homeless shelters.