‘We Just Want Life to Be Sustainable’: LAUSD Workers Near Strike in Contract Fight

As a food service worker at a charter high school in West Los Angeles, Tinesha Wirt is well aware of the importance of her job. More than 75% of the students at University High qualify for free or reduced price meals, which for many of them may be the most nutritious food they eat that day.

The thought of going on strike — and potentially cutting off that critical supply of freshly made food — puts a chill in Wirt, who has worked in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 12 years. “We love our jobs,” Wirt said. “We love taking care of these kids, and we know how they need the service that we’re providing.”

But when Wirt leaves school each day, she returns home to a studio apartment that she shares with her 22-year-old daughter — what she can afford, Wirt says. By her account, she’s had two raises in more than a decade. She earns less than $23 an hour, well below the estimated $50.23 an hour that an adult with one dependent and a fulltime job needs to make in order to meet the basic cost of living in Los Angeles.

She may have to strike, she says, to focus the district’s attention on realities like hers.

“We’re not trying to get rich,” Wirt said, “but is it too much to ask that we be able to go to sleep without worrying about the next bill? We just want life to be sustainable.”

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An April 14 strike date set by two unions representing nearly 68,000 teachers, cafeteria workers, bus drivers and others in L.A. appears closer than ever to becoming reality. This week, one of the unions, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), rejected proposals by an independent fact-finder that appeared to favor the district’s side of negotiations.

Both the teachers’ union and SEIU Local 99, which covers other district workers and aides, say they’ve been locked in fruitless bargaining with the district for months. Setting a strike date was intended to jump-start those talks, but little progress has been made since the mid-March announcement that the unions would walk off at the same time.

The setting of a strike date is hardly uncommon in labor negotiations. The teachers union conducted a six-day strike in 2019, and its members walked out in support during a three-day strike by Local 99 in 2023. But the two full unions going out, with no end date specified, marks this action as different.

“Nobody wants a strike,” Andres Chait, the acting superintendent of the district, said in response to the unions’ announcement. “Strikes are not good for students. They are not good for our schools. They are not good for our families. I truly believe that our labor partners also do not want a strike.”

LAUSD English teacher Gina Gray.

Gina Gray, an English teacher at Middle College High School in South Los Angeles, doesn’t disagree with Chait’s sentiment — but she says something has to give. Now in her ninth year, Gray said she has pleaded for adequate resources for her students, including asking the L.A. County Library system for 50 copies of a more recent novel so they’d have something new to read.

“We have so many [outside] contractors and so many ed-tech things that are brought to us, but it’s not what we need,” Gray said. “We want books, supplies, arts. And a teacher just starting out here shouldn’t be paid so little that they qualify for food assistance.” New teachers earn roughly $69,000 per year before accounting for potential extra earnings like working during summer school.

The unions are pressing not only for higher wages, but for increased staffing in a number of areas, including mental health counseling and special education. UTLA, citing the spiking cost of living in the Los Angeles area, has proposed a 17% wage increase, on average, over the next two years, with a special emphasis on immediately boosting pay for new teachers to nearly $80,000. The district has proposed an 8% increase overall, plus a one-time bonus.

Union negotiators have pointed to the district’s nearly $5 billion in reserves, which could be tapped to help resolve the negotiations. The district has resisted the idea of using the reserves in order to pay salaries, which constitute an ongoing expense rather than an emergency need. District officials have said they may use all of that money over the next couple of years to offset rising budget deficits.

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Everyone involved appears to understand what a fraught moment this is. With student enrollment declining, school districts, including LAUSD, are trying to project the future without much cost certainty. Inflation and California’s perpetually hostile housing market, meanwhile, are putting the squeeze on teachers and other district workers, who increasingly say they can’t afford to live anywhere near where they work.

And if families fearful of ICE and other anti-immigrant activity continue to keep their students home from school, the district’s financial picture will worsen, as its state funding is dependent upon average daily attendance.

“It’s an extremely tense time for our students and our communities,” Gray said. “I’d rather be in my classroom making sure we’re advancing. But it has come to the point where the district isn’t trying to be reasonable. I don’t want to strike, but I will strike, if that makes sense.”

The Los Angeles City Council on March 27 unanimously supported a resolution urging the school district “to come to the bargaining table and reach a fair deal” with the unions. The resolution noted that a first-year teacher can’t afford the median rent anywhere in the city, and that 65% of SEIU Local 99’s school district workers say they experience food insecurity. (Disclosure: The Service Employees International Union is a financial supporter of Capital & Main).

Maria Guadalupe Avalos is one of those. A school supervision aide at Fernangeles Elementary in Sun Valley, Avalos said she recently began selling tamales to supplement her earnings through the district. She and her daughter are two of 10 people living in a one-bedroom apartment

“I just want them to hear us,” Avalos said of the district’s leadership. “They have the money to give us what we deserve.”

During the 2023 strike, the school district set up “grab and go” meal sites for its students around Los Angeles, a recognition of the reality that more than 80% of the district’s 520,000 students from kindergarten to high school qualify for free or reduced price meals.

A similar system could operate this time around. Wirt, the food service worker, knows that’s not comparable to the fresh food prepared on site at her school, and she doesn’t enjoy the thought of her students missing any meals.

“But we have to do something,” she said. “We’re saying to the district, help us help you by making it possible for us to do our jobs.”

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