Photograph Source: Fahim Fadz – CC BY 2.0
The tentative agreement United Teachers Los Angeles signed with the Los Angeles Unified School District on April 12 has been approved by UTLA members with a 92% “Yes” vote, with almost 27,000 members voting. This is similar to the result of our May 2023 vote on the tentative agreement we won in the wake of our March 2023 strike. Service Employees International Union, our ally in both contract battles, begins voting on their TA with LAUSD this week.
‘Extortion’ & ‘hostage-taking’
The right-wing media is not happy.
The Washington Post calls our strike “immoral” and “little different from extortion”. The Wall Street Journal condemns our “rich new union contract” and cites us as a major reason for “the exodus of families” from Los Angeles. The Editorial Board of News Corp’s California Post and New York Post denounces our strike as a “cynical form of hostage-taking”.
They and others emphasize LAUSD’s claims of impending fiscal apocalypse–its oft-stated reason for rejecting union demands–and take them as good coin, as if any employer negotiating with a union has ever been anything but “broke”. Consider:
+In 2018, then-LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner claimed LAUSD was broke, its reserve down to a mere $700 million. Yet as the parties went through mediation and fact-finding, more information trickled out, and the reserve “grew”, first to $1.2 billion, then to $1.86 billion.
+After UTLA won numerous contract gains, LAUSD, far from cratering, saw its reserves almost double from 2019 to 2023, growing to $3.5 billion.
+We heard more tales of financial doom before our strike in 2023, when we won a 21% raise over three years. This settlement again was supposed to financially devastate the district, but somehow star-crossed LAUSD, which had projected that at the end of 2024-2025 its reserve would be down to $1.45 billion, started this school year with a $5.03 billion reserve, its highest ever.
During both strikes, as today, anti-union voices condemned us for forcing LAUSD to spend money it allegedly doesn’t have. But the percentage LAUSD holds in reserve is often double or triple that held by other major California school districts, and LAUSD has greatly underprojected its reserves every year from 2013 to 2025. Yes, the district does face challenges, but how can we be expected to take LAUSD’s cries of poverty seriously?
News Corp: this ‘fight over money could easily have waited until the summer’
Whenever a union strikes or is about to strike, there is always a “Why are they rushing into this?”-type backlash. Before our January 2019 strike, for example, we were criticized for rushing to strike but had been working without a contract for 18 months and negotiating for 21 months.
Today News Corp’s publications lecture that this “fight over money could easily have waited until the summer”. Actually, we began negotiating in March, 2025. Until September, 2025, LAUSD’s wage offer was precisely zero percent.
By the time we finally declared a strike date, we had been working without a contract for nine months, and LAUSD’s salary offer was still a mere 2.25% a year. Two days away from the strike, its offer was 3.3% a year. And it had taken LAUSD until November to even begin discussing reforming our salary table–a table it later acknowledged was deeply flawed. UTLA and its allies gave LAUSD every opportunity to settle this conflict long before a strike.
Craft unionism v. industrial unionism
News Corp is also unhappy that “unions across [California] have coordinated their strike threats”. One reason for organized labor’s many decades of losses and failure is that workforces with the same employer or in the same industry are often divided into many different unions. LAUSD, for example, has eight different unions. Being divided into different unions, with contracts expiring at different times, means unions fail to act in concert. Instead, they often undermine each other by crossing each other’s picket lines.
The three LAUSD unions in this conflict–UTLA, SEIU, and Associated Administrators of Los Angeles–and the teachers unions throughout the state coordinating the expiration of their contracts seek to overcome these divisions.
It is an echo of the early 20th century battle between craft unionism, whereby workers with the same employer are unionized by their trades, versus industrial unionism, which organizes all workers in a particular industry into one union. The strike victories of the 1930s firmly established industrial unionism as the optimal method, but, unfortunately, American labor still has elements of craft unionism.
Some of these remaining divisions are caused by squalid union turf wars and competition that are not the bosses’ fault. Regarding the K-12 education field in general and LAUSD in particular, teachers have at times resisted industrial unionism, seeing themselves as “educated professionals” above and distinct from the members of LAUSD working class unions like SEIU, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, etc.
Teachers occasionally still voice this distinction, but the UTLA-SEIU alliance and its victories of 2023 and 2026 have clearly demonstrated the tactical superiority of teachers unions uniting with other LAUSD unions.
But what about the children?
And, as usual, we’re accused of not caring about our students. This is an odd accusation–who cares more about LAUSD children, the teachers working 60+ hours a week to serve them, or the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal?
LAUSD’s student body is 86% low income, overwhelmingly minority, and heavily immigrant. We see students’ struggles and the toll they take. Their conditions in life have a large, negative impact on their academic performance and standardized test scores. Most of what we’ve gained in the 2019, 2023, and now 2026 strikes/near-strikes is designed to help them.
That includes ensuring that their teachers and fellow education workers are fairly compensated.
