An agreement between Service Employees International Union Local 99 and the Los Angeles Unified School District, signed at 2 AM–five hours before pickets went up, closing down Los Angeles schools–has averted a strike by three labor unions representing 68,000 education workers.
I had expected (and told our members) that if an agreement wasn’t reached by 7 or 8 PM Monday night, LAUSD would send out a message announcing that schools would be closed Tuesday. Negotiations would have continued with the hope of opening schools on Wednesday.
Instead, all our students went to sleep Monday night not knowing whether there would be school on Tuesday. LAUSD would only have allowed such confusion if they were highly motivated to make a last-minute deal and cut off the three-union strike.
SEIU says it “secured major wins for our members—including significant improvements to wages & hours, stronger protections against subcontracting, increased staffing, & we successfully STOPPED layoffs for IT workers.” (Apparently, this means they were unable to stop certain other layoffs.
The IT layoffs would have been very damaging. For example, the most important man on our campus – our young IT guru who routinely bails teachers out of IT jams – was slated to lose his job but now apparently will stay with us.
SEIU won a 24% wage increase over 3 years (including 12% in retroactive pay) and a range of guarantees on minimum hours for various types of employees.
SEIU Local 99 represents 30,000 teacher aides, campus aides, gardeners, custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and tech support staff. Of the three unions set to strike–SEIU, United Teachers Los Angeles, and Associated Administrators of Los Angeles/Teamsters Local 2010–as well as the five other LAUSD unions, SEIU members are the lowest paid, with an average salary of $35,000.
While UTLA had been working without a contract since June 30, 2025, SEIU had been without a contract since June 30, 2024–over 21 months.
Much of what SEIU won in this contract is a wide variety of guarantees on minimum hours for various types of employees. This matters both for the money SEIU workers earn and whether they qualify for healthcare benefits. For many years, SEIU has been subjected to LAUSD’s petty chiseling, which hurts both our students and SEIU members.
During the 2023 SEIU strike (joined by UTLA in a solidarity strike), I detailed the damaging effects of this in Why Los Angeles Teachers Are Striking (RealClearPolitics.com, 3/23/23):
“Forty minutes can be a long time.
“It’s Friday afternoon and I receive a substitution summons to cover the last class of the day. It’s a special education class, and the rules say there must be a certified teacher there.
“Teaching SpEd classes is often complicated and demanding, and it requires special training. I’m about as qualified to teach SpEd as I am to teach ballet.
“Fortunately, there is a SpEd teacher’s assistant there to help. She knows her craft and she knows the kids – who has emotional or self-control issues, who needs a gentle touch, who needs to be pushed – and she helps me with the kids.
“Then…she leaves!
“After only 18 minutes, I’m left to stumble through a long 40 minutes of solo teaching.
“Why would critical staff both students and teachers rely on be taken away at such an inopportune moment?
“The Los Angeles Unified School District keeps these paraprofessionals at only six hours a day so they won’t be considered full-time employees, and thus the District can adjust their schedules or reduce their hours whenever they want.”
Special education assistants and other SEIU members often want and need to work more hours, but their commitment to LAUSD often makes it difficult for them to fit in work at other jobs. Winning them more work hours is crucial.
UTLA won big in its negotiations, including a strong raise combined with the salary table reforms we sought, over 450 new Pupil Services and Attendance Counselors, Psychiatric Social Workers, School Psychologists, and Counselors, lower secondary student-counselor ratios, reforms helping Special Education and inclusion teachers, limits on LAUSD subcontracting, four weeks of district-paid parental leave, and more.
AALA also did well, making progress on, among other things, limiting the many uncompensated hours they’re expected to work beyond the 40-hour work week. While teachers inevitably work much more than 40 hours a week, we work fewer days a year, and these burdens on administrators are quite real.
LAUSD was wise to cut a deal to head off the strike. UTLA is a well-organized, disciplined union, and make no mistake–our picket line showing this week would have been very strong.
