L.A. School Board Imposes 3% Pay Cut on Employees

To head off the prospect of financial insolvency, the Los Angeles school board took the unprecedented step Monday of ordering an immediate 3% pay cut for the district’s 70,000 employees, setting the stage for a confrontation with 36,000 teachers union members.

As thousands of classroom instructors angrily protested outside district headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, Helen Bernstein, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, said teachers could stage a walkout in two weeks if they vote to reject the pay cut.

“I know there’s going to be a lot of anger, and rightfully so,” said board President Warren Furutani. “But the other alternative--letting the district go bankrupt--is unacceptable. It’s a very terrible situation, but we’re looking out for what we believe is the best interest of this whole district.”

The seven-member Board of Education, which unanimously approved the drastic action, has already decided to cut $275 million from its $4-billion 1991-92 budget. Officials said more than $70 million of those cuts are slated to come from employees’ salaries.

The salary reductions are part of a package of cuts which also include unpaid employee furloughs, teacher reassignments and the loss of paid conference time.

The proposals were subject to union approval, but months of talks have failed to produce an agreement, allowing the district to unilaterally impose the cuts.

Together, the series of cuts will reduce each district employee’s annual income 4% to 7%. Teachers who earn the district average of $45,000 annually would lose about $1,800 a year.

The pay cut will take effect on employees’ next paychecks, which will be issued Dec. 11. The 3% cut will actually amount to 4.5% monthly because it will be retroactive to last July.

Board members, who earn $24,000 a year, are included in the pay cut.

The school board had hoped to negotiate the cuts with employee unions, but only one group--representing 1,700 school principals--has agreed to the reductions.

Negotiations are deadlocked with the other unions, including UTLA, which represents 36,000 of the district’s teachers, counselors, nurses and librarians, and the California School Employees Assn., which represents 5,000 office workers. Because the state-mandated mediation process failed to settle the impasse, the district is now free to unilaterally impose the cut.

District officials call the cut a “salary deferral,” promising that it will be repaid, with interest, next year or as soon as the district receives additional state funding.

But Bernstein said her members want a guarantee that the lost wages will be restored next year. “Otherwise, what we give up now, we’ll never see again,” she said. “We’ve worked too hard for what we have to give it up that easily.”

In the biggest test of its political muscle since its nine-day strike in 1989, the union ferried between 5,000 and 10,000 chanting, jeering teachers to demonstrate outside board offices Monday in an effort to pressure the board to reject the pay-cut proposal.

“Our task here today is to harness the collective indignation we all feel into a singular voice that shouts ‘Don’t you dare!’ ” Bernstein told the cheering teachers who jammed the courtyard outside the school board’s meeting room. They carried signs and banners depicting administrators as “fat cats” and proclaiming that “Supt. Bill Anton is robbing your child.”

Bernstein said ballots will be sent out to all district teachers next week asking them either to approve the pay cut, send union leaders back into negotiations or authorize an immediate strike.

Bernstein said she was “stunned” at the size of the turnout--the largest since the strike two years ago, when the union won a three-year contract with 8% annual raises, making Los Angeles teachers among the nation’s highest-paid. “Teachers are extremely angry and indignant,” she said. “They’re dying in their schools--they’ve got too many kids, not enough supplies, no stability . . . and now this.”

And though the union has not challenged the district’s contention that it cannot afford to grant raises this year, several teachers at the rally said they would not hesitate to strike over the pay-cut issue--even though a strike would hurt children already suffering from this year’s cuts.

“It will hurt my students more in the long run if they’re denied the things that make them good people and good citizens,” said Rosemary Donerson, a sixth-grade teacher at 96th Street School in Watts, who said she used about $100 a month of her own money to provide materials for her classroom.

Three separate fact-finding panels overseeing negotiations between the district and its unions have recommended that employees accept the pay cut as a way to keep the financially strapped district afloat.

“The district is faced with a true financial crisis, has exhausted all of its financial alternatives and has arrived at a reasonable package,” according to the report, released Monday, by the panel mediating the talks with teachers.

In the past two years, the district has cut $667 million from its $4-billion budget, largely by raiding its reserve funds. As a result of two years of deficit spending, only the minimum reserve required by law remains and the district has no other alternative than to cut salaries, the report says.

“It would be nice if we could just rearrange a few bureaucrats and solve the district’s problems,” said board member Jeff Horton, before voting to support the pay cut. “But the choice is between making this district bankrupt and keeping it solvent.”

Times staff writer Henry Chu contributed to this story.