L.A. Teachers Give Union OK to Call Strike

Los Angeles Unified School District teachers voted overwhelmingly Thursday to empower their union to call a strike, heightening the prospects that the nation’s second-largest school district, already staggering under unprecedented cutbacks, could be thrown into deeper turmoil.

The action, which gives union leadership the authority to order a walkout as a last-ditch effort to win a contract settlement, was approved with 89% of the vote. Ballots were cast by a record 22,069 teachers, driven by an impending 9% salary cut, union leaders said.

“What this tells me is that teachers are incredibly angry and very hostile about this offer and are willing to make a very major sacrifice to stop the downward spiral,” said United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein. “There aren’t five people out there who don’t believe that this is not going to happen again next year.”

Union officials said the balloting, conducted Tuesday and Wednesday in district schools, could authorize them to call a strike at any time, although negotiators on both sides said a walkout is not imminent and that talks are continuing.

While falling short of setting a strike deadline, Bernstein said that the union and district must be close to a settlement by Nov. 6, the day the pay cuts take effect.

“Once that happens, unless I can go to the membership and say we are close to something that I think you will accept, I would suspect it’s all over,” she said. At that point, the union leadership would convene “to plan strategy for what’s to occur next.”

Leaders of the 28,000-member union are seeking to find ways to cushion this year’s salary cuts and are fighting for a crucial guarantee from the school board that there will be no future pay reductions, an issue that school board members have said they cannot agree to because of bleak economic forecasts.

Board of Education President Leticia Quezada, fearing that violence will break out in a strike because of employees’ anger and hopelessness, appealed to parents and others to raise their voices against a walkout.

“The city is more fragile today than it was in 1989,” when teachers struck for nine days, Quezada said. “In contrast to the spring riots, where the only place that was safe was our schools . . . now we’ll come back to riots in the schools.”

She said negotiators are working to restore some pay to teachers through cost-saving incentives, such as improving teacher absenteeism and student attendance.

“The board is very willing to look at incentives, but I do not believe we can make 100% assurances,” she said.

School board member Roberta Weintraub said the union is headed for a potentially volatile strike.

“The anger and frustration is overwhelming,” she said. “It’s really hard to know where else to go once you call for a strike vote.”

Bernstein said that board members are acting irresponsibly by predicting that a strike would be violent.

“They are unnecessarily scaring young people,” she said. “Teachers have struck twice in this city and there has not been any violence. The same people they are accusing of violent behavior are the same people who are taking care of children every day. If they think those people are so violent, they ought to get them out of the classroom tomorrow.”

This week’s voting comes at a time when morale of teachers and other district employees is at an all-time low. Confronted with a $400-million budget deficit this fiscal year, the school board imposed across-the-board pay reductions, eliminated programs and cut positions.

Late Thursday, union leaders representing 29,000 district clerical workers, teacher assistants and other service employees agreed to contract settlements that include 6.5% to 11.5% pay cuts but also guarantee that the teachers union will not receive favorable treatment in the event of layoffs or salary cuts next year.

The agreement must be ratified by the union memberships.

Like other district employees, teachers have been forced to do more work for less money. District and teachers union leaders described this week’s voting as a no-win decision, given the deep recession and the concern that they would be striking to reduce pay cuts instead of to win pay increases.

District officials said that a strike could cost more than $1 million a day.

Although the district would not have to pay the salaries of striking teachers, student attendance likely would drop dramatically, and the district would not receive state reimbursement for students whose absences are unexcused.

After the May, 1989, strike, district officials estimated that net strike-related salary savings for teachers and others who honored their picket lines totaled about $20 million.

At that time, the state did not penalize the district for student absences because the official student attendance tally, which is reported in April, had been submitted. School districts are funded by the state largely through calculations of average daily attendance. During the 1989 strike, about 50% of the district’s 595,000 students did not show up for class and about 67% of teachers walked out.

This time, the April enrollment figures would reflect strike-related absences and lead to the sharp reduction in district funding.

“A million (dollars a day) is significant because all the accounts have been reduced and the budget is tighter that it has ever been,” said Henry Jones, the district’s budget director.

Bernstein said the union would urge parents to keep their children in school during a strike.

For teachers, each day on the picket line would cost them $216, or a half-percentage point pay cut.

Under the pay cuts approved by the board last month, teachers and most administrators would suffer a 9% pay cut this year in addition to a 3% cut imposed on all of the district’s 58,000 employees last year--for a total reduction of 12% below their earnings in 1990-91.

The salary of the most veteran teachers would drop from about $53,500 to $47,280 a year. The money would be taken primarily through 19 unpaid furlough and vacation days.

The Los Angeles teachers’ pay reduction is the deepest of any school district in the nation, according to a recent national salary survey of 15,500 school districts by the American Federation of Teachers.

“No other district in the country is even remotely close to these cuts,” said Jewell Gould, research director for the federation.

But, said Quezada, no other district made the extraordinary commitment to boost salaries 24% over three years, which was won by UTLA in the 1989 strike settlement. At the time, the board approved the raise believing that the level of state funding and lottery revenues would not drop.

But when the state slipped into a deep recession and Sacramento spending priorities shifted, state funding decreased, forcing the board to enact salary cuts.