Union Opens Its Ranks to Non-Teachers

In a move that could ease organizing in charter schools and preschools, leaders of the state’s largest teachers union announced Sunday that they have opened their ranks to school secretaries, bus drivers and other education professionals who aren’t teachers.

The vote by the State Council of Education, the top policy-making body of the powerful California Teachers Assn., immediately turns about 5,000 support staff into full CTA members. Those school workers are members of the National Education Assn. and were affiliated with the 335,000-member CTA, but they sought full membership so they could vote and would no longer have to sit in the “visitors” section at union meetings.

In the long term, the change could have its greatest effect on California’s charter schools. CTA has launched an aggressive effort to organize teachers at charter schools, which are public schools that have flexibility under state law to encourage innovation. Charters are often small schools with distinct missions, and their tiny staffs have in many cases chosen not to unionize.

CTA officials say the decision to allow non-teachers to join will make organizing efforts easier by allowing the union to recruit teachers and support staff together at each charter school. The change “will also facilitate wall-to-wall charter school organizing,” the union’s top executives wrote in a June 2 letter to members.

And if Proposition 82, the ballot initiative to expand pre-school, passes in Tuesday’s election, the change would allow CTA to include preschool staffers, the letter added.

California teachers had previously preferred to limit the union to teachers. But that had put CTA out of step with other teachers unions. Teachers unions in 48 other states already count education support professionals as members.

In California, more than 230,000 school support staff are represented by a different union, the California School Employees Assn. Its president, Rob Feckner, said in an interview that CTA leaders had assured him they would not try to steal his members.

Feckner said he also had asked CTA to sign a formal “no raid” agreement with his union. So far no such deal has been reached, but he said conversations continue.

“We all need to stay on the same page,” Feckner said. “Labor needs to unite and fight the foes that are out there, not each other.”

The vote came at this weekend’s meeting of the CTA state council, composed of about 800 teachers from around the state.

The group gathered at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton, which has been the locus for an effort by a different union, Unite Here Local 11, to organize housekeepers and other staff at 13 hotels near LAX.