UTLA signs tentative agreement for 21% raise over 3 years
The union-led militant actions of teachers and classified employees in the largest school district in California brought both bargaining units impressive contract gains.
Following a week of round-the-clock bargaining, and with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) facing faculty meeting boycotts and the looming ultimatum of a strike authorization vote in the absence of an agreement, the chief officers of the nation’s second largest public school district on April 18 signed a comprehensive tentative agreement (TA) with United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). The TA, which was struck at 6 am in the UTLA offices after a marathon 18-hour session, represents a humiliating defeat for LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. Carvalho was forced to tap into the District’s more than $5 billion in projected reserves (over $3 billion of that being unrestricted), pony up a 21% across-the-board raise over three years (which compounds to 22.9%), to reduce class sizes by two students in every grade, and to lower caseloads for the District’s thousands of social workers, psychologists, counselors, and other specialists.
The TA came after eleven months and more than thirty bargaining sessions. Instrumental in securing the final deal was the three-day strike between March 21 and 23, when UTLA members walked off the job in solidarity with members of SEIU Local 99 striking in protest of LAUSD’s unfair labor practices. In the wake of that major work stoppage, which saw the Superintendent forced to close schools for the duration, LAUSD raised its salary offer from 11% to 19%. The parties then began to meet with increasing frequency, culminating in a Saturday session that lasted until 4 am and the final Monday session that lasted until 6 am. Though the District initially refused to grant across-the-board reductions to caseloads and class sizes, and repeatedly insisted a higher salary offer required postponing the bulk of the increases until the final semester of the proposed three-year agreement, the District ultimately granted these concessions rather than continuing to play a game of chicken with the formidable UTLA.
DSA-LA members, including city council representative Eunisses Hernandez, stand in solidarity with education workers from United Teachers Los Angeles and SEIU Local 99
UTLA thus won big. The gains secured in our contract are nothing short of historic, and the agreement is expected to be ratified by the rank and file before being voted on at the next school board meeting on May 9th—a school board that includes UTLA-endorsed Rocío Rivas, representing Glassell Park, Highland Park, Boyle Heights, and Echo Park, who billionaires Reed Hastings (Netflix) and Bill Bloomfield (residential laundries) collectively spent $8.8 million hoping to defeat. Though they were outspent 4 to 1, UTLA’s field operation in East Los Angeles, buoyed by DSA-LA’s Green New Deal for Public Schools campaign, successfully mobilized voters for the teachers’ choice, decisively reducing the charter-school industry’s control of the 7-member school board. Whether the continued growth of charter schools–which are publicly funded but privately managed–will accelerate the decline of LAUSD’s enrollment in a rapidly gentrifying city in which working-class families are regularly displaced, depends in critical part on the decisions of that board.
