Los Angeles teachers plan to strike April 14

LOS ANGELES—Teachers and other education workers in L.A., numbering 37,000, are set to strike April 14. The union, the United Teachers of Los Angeles, is fighting for a new two-year contract, and they say if they don’t get they will walk.

A rally of 30,000 supporting them on March 18 attracted members of other unions, including Service Employees Local 99 and the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, a sector of Teamsters Local 2010.

“We all started as teachers,” AALA Sector President Maria Nichols told the crowd. “We are here to serve the students in another capacity…We will be heard.”

The strike is important because the Los Angeles schools teach one of the largest student populations in the U.S., between 420,000 and 530,000 students, depending on the year.

That figure trails only New York City (one million) and the entire island of Puerto Rico, which is one big school district. Chicago, Miami, and Las Vegas are the next three in size. Some 73% of L.A.’s K-12 students are Latinos and Latinas, 10% are non-Hispanic whites, and 7% are Black.

Top issues are better pay for teachers and staff and more support staffers to help the kids. The union demands a 12.6% base raise over two years and more spending for support staffers. In a common worker complaint in the high-cost city, the union says its members can’t afford to live in L.A. It also wants a 3% general raise this July and smaller classes in the last two years of high school.

The union says the Los Angeles United School District has the money. The LAUSD “committed $10 billion in multi-year contracts” to outside vendors over the last few years,” UTLA reported just before the rally. And the district sits on “unrestricted total reserves” equal to 35% of its total budget, the largest share in the state, one union graphic shows.

Yet it’s “offering scraps” to its teachers and staff, the union bargainers report. The scraps in the school district’s latest proposals are a 3.5% yearly salary hike and a bonus split in half over the pact’s two years, the union says.

“Once again, LAUSD comes up short—far short of the 17% average salary increase educators are fighting for,” UTLA President Cecily Myart Cruz said in the union’s latest bargaining update.

“LAUSD’s latest salary proposal is not enough to fix broken salary schedules. It’s not enough to attract educators to LAUSD,and it’s nowhere near enough to address the financial struggles educators are facing.”

Further, California has the capacity to help the L.A. schools, adds a new Teachers/ AFT-commissioned national study. The analysis by the University of Miami says California is now slightly better than the national average in percentage of its tax capacity devoted to K-12 public schools.

And in California, that share has been rising recently. Since 2016, most other states have seen their public school spending shares, compared to capacity, drop.

There’s been little movement at the bargaining table, UTLA’s 150-member team says in its latest report to its members. “We are ready to strike if they don’t change course,” the bargainers add.

“After fact-finding presentations,” from neutral analysts on March 16, the bargainers were “prepared to stay all day to work out a mediated settlement and avoid a strike, but mediation ended today (March 18) at 12:30 p.m. with no agreement.

“With billions in reserves, LAUSD could have settled a fair contract today that prioritizes the needs of educators and students—and they chose not to.

“The district brought in a paid consultant whose presentation to the fact-finding panel was offensive on many levels and implied our healthcare coverage takes resources away from students. LAUSD just can’t seem to stop spending money on outside contracts!

“LAUSD made no acknowledgement in their presentation of what educators and students struggle with every day: Under-resourced schools, communities under attack by ICE, educators who can’t afford to live in the communities where they teach.”

The bargainers brought updated proposals, including a smaller pay raise, to the table, but the two sides are still far apart.

Besides the pay hikes and the high school class size limits, some other elements of the union’s proposal include:

• A limit on class sizes in special ed classrooms, with a $75 daily fine for each day the school breaches the limit. That same $75 daily fine would be imposed in high schools where classes are too large. For both groups of affected teachers, the fine money would go into their pockets.
• Some 125 more professional school assistants, 125 more professional social workers and 125 more school psychologists system-wide.
• Four weeks of fully paid parental and family leave.
• A ban on layoffs, subcontracting and the use of artificial intelligence to replace teachers. And UTLA wants the district to hire more fine arts and phys ed teachers who can, among other benefits, give other teachers in-school time to create lesson plans.

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