LA teachers headed for a showdown

AS THE school year begins to wind down, a major labor battle is looming in the country's second-largest school district.

Contract negotiations between the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and the 31,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles have reached an impasse, prompting the intervention of a state mediator to try to hammer out an agreement. If the mediator fails to broker a deal, then LAUSD management could impose its "last best final offer," and UTLA could go on strike, according to the provisions of California law governing public-sector employees.

UTLA has launched an ambitious organizing campaign to prepare our members to do exactly that, with a series of escalating actions throughout the school year designed to increase our "strike readiness." This campaign included a huge downtown rally on February 26, with an estimated 15,000 UTLA members attending to support our contract demands for the "Schools LA Students Deserve." UTLA has also begun a series of faculty meeting boycotts, timed to coincide with three scheduled mediation sessions in March and April.

Mainstream media reports have tended to focus on negotiations over salary, where the gap between the LAUSD's initial anemic offer of a 2 percent raise and UTLA's opening demand of an immediate increase of 10 percent has narrowed to a 5 percent offer from the district versus the union's proposal of 8.5 percent.

The salary component of these negotiations--which began last fall after UTLA members had worked for three years under an expired contract--is critical, because LAUSD has not given us an across-the-board salary increase in over seven years. Moreover, UTLA members suffered pay cuts in the form of furlough days imposed in the wake of massive budget cuts during the recession of 2007-09.

However, the largest sticking point in negotiations is school staffing. LAUSD officials have flatly refused to make any meaningful proposals to use hundreds of millions of new dollars in state funding to guarantee smaller class sizes or counselor ratios or to restore some of the thousands of school-site jobs eliminated in recent waves of LAUSD layoffs.

THIS REFUSAL comes in spite of the fact that LAUSD's operating budget is about 12 percent greater this year than two years ago and is projected to increase again by as much as 10 percent for the coming school year. Despite a budget proposal from Gov. Jerry Brown that prioritizes austerity, California schools are projected to receive $4 billion in additional funds, due primarily to voter-approved tax increases on the rich and increased revenues as a result of the robust economic recovery enjoyed by California's corporate elite.

But if there's one thing LAUSD officials are good at, it's hiding money and pleading poverty in order to deny desperately needed resources to LAUSD's 650,000 students--most of whom live in actual poverty, while administrators enjoy six-figure salaries.

Two days before UTLA's first day of faculty meeting boycotts, the news hit that former Superintendent John Deasy was paid a jaw-dropping $440,000 in 2014--the same year that rampant corruption and incompetence in two of Deasy's signature technology initiatives cost the district hundreds of millions of dollars, forced Deasy to resign in disgrace and prompted a surprise visit from the FBI at LAUSD headquarters.

Ramon Cortines, returning to serve his third stint as LAUSD chief, replaced Deasy in October and took over negotiations with a hard-line approach.

In March alone, Cortines has threatened to dock UTLA members' pay for boycotting faculty meetings, falsely claimed that UTLA is jeopardizing $171 million in state funding by not giving in to the district's punitive evaluation system, and pushed through hundreds of needless layoff notices in an extortion move to make it look like the teachers' demands are bankrupting the district.

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl condemned the layoff threats:

There's a national civil rights movement to curb the school-to-prison pipeline. Yet LAUSD is cutting counselors and social workers. There's huge income inequality and a tremendous need for job training for adults. Yet LAUSD is cutting adult education. There are 3,000 classes in the city with over 45 students. Yet LAUSD is cutting educators to raise class size. LAUSD is simply out of step with the needs at schools.

THE LEAD-up to a possible UTLA strike in the coming months will coincide with hotly contested races for three of the seven seats on the LAUSD Board of Education, with voting to be held on May 19. Unfortunately, the school board elections were a major focus of UTLA's March 25 House of Representatives meeting, leading to some strange endorsements in races that lack any clear-cut pro-teacher candidates.

In one race, delegates voted to endorse challenger Scott Schmerelson--a registered Republican and former leader in the Association of California School Administrators--against incumbent Tamar Galatzan, who is a favorite of the charter school industry and corporate school "reformers" who brought us John Deasy.

Then, the House also voted to endorse incumbent Richard Vladovic, whose record of gaining support from corporate interests and voting against UTLA is comparable to Galatzan's--on the basis of the argument that his opponent, Lydia Gutierrez, is a Republican!

Even more worrisome was the House's vote to divert $400,000 from UTLA's crisis/strike fund for spending on these races. The delegates who raised this motion explicitly pitched it as a way to avoid a strike, based on the flawed assumption that a "friendly" school board majority will shift the balance of forces and deliver us a fair contract.

This approach isn't consistent with UTLA's "strike readiness" strategy. Now, at the very time that we need to show LAUSD that we really can and will strike for our demands, UTLA will be expected to devote major financial resources toward electing school board candidates, which can only come at the expense of organizing at our school sites.

At the least, Caputo-Pearl and most members of the Union Power caucus, which won a landslide victory in last year's union elections, failed to challenge this wrong direction. That's unfortunate--the caucus won with a militant platform that was consciously modeled on lessons from the Chicago Teachers Union's successful 2012 strike. The new leadership understands the extensive organizing groundwork that was necessary for the strike in Chicago, both before and after reformers took office.

After years of demoralizing defeats, concessions and paralysis under past UTLA administrations, we need to devote all the resources we can muster towards building our collective power to fight back against LAUSD--up to and including strike action.