Hot Union Spring at LAUSD

In spirit if not in fact, the narrowly averted strike on the Los Angeles Unified School District this week had its echoes in an L.A. scene from three summers ago.

That year, 2023, was marked by a number of disparate major labor negotiations in and around the city: hotel workers looking for wages that would allow them to live somewhere near their jobs; Hollywood screenwriters, directors and actors worried about the future of their professions; theme park workers grinding out life at $16 an hour and wanting something more.

Each group had its own contract to worry about — but all of the groups understood that they were better together. So commenced a period that became known as the “hot labor summer,” during which the organizations took turns supporting each other’s demonstrations and showing out en masse, sometimes thousands deep, to drive home the point.

“Solidarity is everything within our unions and among our unions, and we have that,” Meredith Stiehm, president of the Writers Guild of America West, said at the time. “We feel that.”

In a more direct way, the same thing just happened within the L.A. school system. Three distinct unions — representing teachers, administrators and district workers, respectively — joined forces to set a single strike date, a mass walkout that would have brought the LAUSD’s operations to a halt and shut down schools for more than 400,000 students.

Faced with that reality, acting superintendent Andrés Chait and the district’s negotiators reached separate tentative agreements with United Teachers Los Angeles; SEIU Local 99, which represents support staff, from bus drivers to cafeteria workers; and the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles/Teamsters 2010. The last of these, with the support staff workers, came just hours before a scheduled strike on April 14. (Disclosure: The Service Employees International Union is a financial supporter of Capital & Main).

The tentative agreements include major gains for each set of workers, along with staffing and other enhancements that will benefit students directly. And while each union likely would have achieved a new contract eventually, the collective show of force sped up the clock considerably.

“Tens of thousands of educators, school workers and administrative staff stood together in solidarity to demand change, and that collective power helped make this moment possible,” said Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of the teachers’ union. “The agreements reflect what happens when workers organize, stand united and demand better for their students and themselves.”

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Labor unions working collectively is hardly a new tack, and for that matter it has been seen in past LAUSD contract negotiations. In March of 2023, teachers walked out for three days in solidarity with an unfair labor practices strike by SEIU Local 99.

The teachers’ union was within its contract at that time, having achieved a new agreement in 2022. But the teachers’ refusal to cross the picket line redirected public focus on the plight of the staff workers, who are the lowest profile and, on average, the lowest paid group in the district.

“They are never in the conversation,” Max Arias, SEIU Local 99’s executive director, said then. “This process has made them visible, and I think the parents and the public now realize that these are the people caring for the kids and supporting the teachers, so the kids can get education.”

This time around, the staff workers’ contract was up for renewal at about the same time as the teachers’. Those two unions represent some 67,000 district employees. The administrators’ union, which includes school principals, assistant principals and middle managers, brought the total to nearly 70,000.

Chait, thrust into LAUSD’s top role in February after Superintendent Alberto Carvalho was placed on administrative leave amid an FBI investigation, inherited difficult negotiations and a ticking clock. Several teachers and support staff told Capital & Main weeks ago that Chait, more openly cooperative and less antagonistic toward the unions than Carvalho had been, gave them a sense of hope that a strike could be averted.

That proved true — but it had significantly to do with the unions coordinating a single strike date. Chait was also open to the participation of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who has generally had strong union support, and Bass was part of the negotiations that led to a new deal for the support-staff workers.

“A strike was always the last resort,” Arias said in a statement to Capital & Main. “We are proud that we could work with the school district and Mayor Karen Bass to reach an agreement that recognizes the contributions of front-line workers in our schools.”

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The district workers, whose average salary the union said was about $35,000, won a 24% pay increase over three years, along with protections against subcontracting and the reversal of layoffs for hundreds of tech support staff.

Teachers will see a nearly 14% raise over two years, plus an immediate 12% increase in pay for a first-year teacher to about $77,000. Their new agreement also adds hundreds of positions for counselors, school psychologists, psychiatric social workers and others. The administrators, meanwhile, will see their pay rise by an average of nearly 12% over two years.

They are significant gains that union members argue are not only necessary at a time when the cost of living in Los Angeles continues to soar, but also may prevent the kind of turnover that ultimately costs the district money and disrupts the educational process.

Notably, the teachers’ contract came up for renewal at roughly the same time as those of dozens of other educator unions in the state, part of a coordinated plan by the powerful California Teachers Association to align as many agreements as possible on the same timeline. Teachers have gone on strike in the Sacramento area, San Francisco, Oakland and several other districts since December, and a walkout was set for April 16 in the Little Lake area of southeastern Los Angeles County unless a last-minute agreement was reached.

That coordination of contracts places public focus on the shared issues of teachers and workers in California who are straining to keep up with basic living costs. The triple threat of unions in Los Angeles just did the same — and provoked resolutions that kept schools open and addressed workers’ real-world needs.

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