Teachers Vote to Remain on Job, Seek Talks : Education: Overwhelming majority decides not to strike next month. District officials say 3% pay cut is likely to remain in effect because of ‘deteriorating’ state finances.

Despite unhappiness with a pay cut, Los Angeles teachers have decided not to strike next month, voting overwhelmingly to remain on the job while their union resumes contract talks with the Los Angeles Unified School District.

With 21,995 of the 30,000 members of United Teachers-Los Angeles casting ballots this week, the strike option received support from only 7% of the teachers, librarians, nurses and counselors. Eighty-eighty percent voted to send union leaders back to the bargaining table.

Four percent of the union members voted to accept the cut, which will cost a teacher making the district’s average salary of $45,000 about $1,800 this year.

“They hate the offer, they’re angry about it, they’re frustrated, but they’re also realistic enough to know that December is not the right time for us to be out on strike,” UTLA President Helen Bernstein said Thursday, shortly after the ballots were counted.

If teachers had voted to strike, the walkout would have begun Dec. 2--three weeks before most classes are slated to end for the district’s seven-week winter recess--and cost teachers up to 10 weeks pay.

“That would mean teachers wouldn’t receive a paycheck in December, in January or in February,” said Bernstein. “That would have been a real hardship for people.”

Bernstein said a strike next semester is still a possibility if the district does not improve on its final offer of a 3% pay cut and a two-day unpaid furlough that will cost teachers another 1% of their annual salaries.

The school board imposed pay cuts of 3% and unpaid furloughs of two to five days on all 58,000 full-time employees to help the district close a $275-million budget gap.

The salary reductions will save the district about $70 million this year, and the furloughs another $15 million.

The cuts took effect this month, but are retroactive to July, meaning employees’ monthly paychecks from December to next July will be reduced by at least 4.5%.

District officials say they plan to repay the 3%, with interest, next year, if additional state funding materializes--an unlikely occurrence given the state’s deepening fiscal crisis.

Dick Fisher, the district’s chief negotiator, said no talks with the teachers are scheduled, “but we have an ongoing invitation to them to talk on economic and non-economic items.”

He said a change in the contract offer is unlikely, given that the pay cut is necessitated by the drop in the district’s funding from the state, “and the economic picture in Sacramento is certainly not getting better. If anything, it’s deteriorating.”

UTLA spokeswoman Cathy Carey said talks will likely focus not just on the pay cut, but on non-economic issues, such as expansion of the school-based management plan teachers won in 1989, and procedural matters relating to teacher transfers and discipline.

This month, a report by a fact-finding panel that included representatives of the district and union and a state mediator recommended that teachers accept the cut, contending that their salaries have risen significantly during the past eight years and an employee pay cut is the only way the cash-strapped school system can remain solvent.

“The district is faced with a true financial crisis, has exhausted all of its financial alternatives and has arrived at a reasonable package,” the report concluded.

Two years ago, teachers staged a nine-day strike that resulted in a 24% raise over three years--about 4% more than the district had offered. That contract expired last June, but has been extended on a day-to-day basis.