Three unions comprising 68,000 Los Angeles education workers stuck to their guns and, with a strike only 4 ½ hours away, the Los Angeles Unified School District agreed to terms–a decisive victory for labor. Whenever a teachers union strikes or threatens to strike, we face an avalanche of criticism from conservative and big business media as well as many billionaire-funded anti-union advocacy groups. These anti-union forces will say either:
The union(s) got way too much money, we’re bankrupting the school system and robbing the taxpayer.
The union(s) caused all that disruption and trouble and didn’t even get their members much.
This time critics’ line is very much the former, which I suppose is good news.
Is UTLA ‘driving the district toward a financial cliff’?
Writing for the conservative Southern California Newspaper Group, Marc Joffe of the anti-union California Policy Center accuses UTLA of “step[ing] on the gas and driv[ing] the district toward a financial cliff”.
He emphasizes that UTLA is wrong for rejecting the state-appointed “neutral” factfinder’s conclusions and advice. Yet the factfinder himself acknowledged that he didn’t have a clue about LAUSD’s real finances, writing:
“…given the size and complexity of LAUSD’s budget, verifying the accuracy of these claims would require considerable time and effort, well beyond the scope of the chair’s expertise in forensic accounting…thoroughly examining…would be time-consuming and labor-intensive.”
LAUSD has a long history of crying wolf over its finances–for example, over the past seven years of outrageous union demands bankrupting the district, LAUSD’s reserve has skyrocketed, reaching $5.03 billion. No employer going into a contract negotiation ever acknowledges having money in its coffers, yet, incredibly, PERB comported itself as if a dispute over the employer’s ability to pay is a curve they somehow didn’t anticipate.
How could anyone expect UTLA to take the report seriously when its author refused to deal with the central issue of the entire dispute?
Joffe, to his credit, does acknowledge that “UTLA is not entirely wrong that LAUSD has a history of making conservative financial forecasts. The district’s actual year-end reserves have come in above projections for the last 12 fiscal years.” But he then tells us “some of the variances were relatively small”, when the differences have generally been enormous.
He also opposes our contract demands because he says California income tax revenue might decline as “US-Israeli military operations against Iran…have roiled financial markets, driven oil prices sharply higher, and depressed the technology stock indices…” But there is always a potential crisis on the horizon–if we put aside salary increases over such prognostications we’d be waiting indefinitely and inflation would have long ago devoured much of LAUSD teachers’ income.
SEIU Under Attack
SEIU workers are the lowest paid of all LAUSD employees–in one of the most expensive cities in the world, they earn an average salary of $35,000. As a result, most media have hesitated to attack them, but not the Washington Post. (If you want to know just how much Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post has moved to the right, take a look at There is no right to strike against public schools–hopefully while sitting down.)
After SEIU settled, averting a strike, the Post’s editorial board wrote:
“[T]he support staff union’s concerns weren’t about education at all. Its negotiators wanted the district to give them more work hours, hire fewer nonunion subcontractors and rescind a previous layoff of tech workers…the district haggled over [SEIU’s] labor contract minutiae for non-teachers late into the night.”
SEIU was right to fight the tech layoffs, which are counterproductive from any angle. During and after COVID, LAUSD greatly upgraded its IT and generally did a good job of it, making education noticeably more efficient. Given this, however, teachers depend on campus-based IT support–when there’s a problem, the teacher needs it fixed now, not after hours or days of instruction have been marred or eviscerated.
Moreover, this service is relatively inexpensive, as our IT people generally don’t make that much.
The IT layoffs would have been very damaging–after the settlement rescinded the layoffs, there were teachers at my school who appeared to be as happy that our IT guy, who was slated to lose his job, will now stay with us as they were about winning the salary raise. And how is keeping this vital support service useless “minutiae” or not “about education at all”?
SEIU was correct to push the district to give its people more work hours–for example, we often depend upon Special Education assistants but it is difficult for them to work 30 hours a week for the district and then cobble together another job or two to pay their bills. Teachers want them to have more hours–one can only marvel at how the Post editorial board knows more about our classroom needs than we do.
Was the strike really about getting Democrats elected in 2026?
The editorial board of News Corp’s California Post and New York Post writes that “LA is the latest city whose public schools have folded under pressure…It’s an election year, and the all-powerful teachers’ unions often control who wins and loses. Democrats rely on union organizers to get out the vote, and a union endorsement is also a signal to donors that a candidate is viable.”
With the exception of the non-partisan school board races and a ballot proposition, throughout this entire 2025-2026 contract fight/near-strike I can’t recall a UTLA leader once mentioning this year’s elections. And why shouldn’t an organization of teachers be active in campaigns deciding who their district’s school board members should be?
Union opponents certainly are active. To pick one example of many, Nick Melvoin, the most consistent anti-UTLA/pro-charter voice on the LAUSD Board of Education, first landed a school board office when charter school advocates gave $5.8 million to his campaign. In 2022, Melvoin was re-elected with largesse from the California Charter Schools Association, billionaire Bill Bloomfield, and other anti-UTLA interests.
Melvoin was former LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner’s closest ally on the Board and is arguably LAUSD leadership’s closest ally today. In the face of our enormously popular 2019 strike, most of the Board abandoned Beutner, leaving him to twist in the wind. Melvoin, by contrast, remained loyal to his anti-union paymasters up to the end, reminding one of the famous statement from 19th century businessman Simon Cameron–“An honest politician is one who, when he’s bought, stays bought.”
To be fair…
News Corp is correct that teachers unions often operate as practically a subset of the Democratic Party. Of course, much of this is caused by the GOP’s relentless hostility to public education and teachers unions.
Modern public school teachers are generally teaching a heavily low-income, minority, and immigrant student body whose conditions in life necessarily have a substantial negative effect on their standardized test scores and overall academic performance. LAUSD’s student body, for example, is 86% low income. Republicans criticize us relentlessly while uttering nary a word about all that teachers are up against–is it surprising they don’t make a lot of friends within our ranks?
It’s not my place to advise our conservative opponents, but when I hear Republicans decry that teachers and their unions back Democrats, I think the same thing as when I hear liberals complain over allegedly “racist” white males voting for Trump–instead of stigmatizing them and complaining about them, why don’t you do the self-reflection and work needed to win them over?
In Teacher union dues is money well spent (The Hill, 10/23/25), I laid out many of the crucial workplace issues teachers face and how our unions fight for us. I follow conservative media’ treatment of teachers unions quite closely, and I can’t recall ever seeing a conservative critic meaningfully address these issues. If conservatives can’t even address the key issues teachers face, how can they expect us to support them?
