L.A. Teachers Authorize Strike Feb. 22

A sizable majority of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers voted Thursday to walk out of their classrooms in February, rejecting a district contract offer that fails to protect teacher salaries from further cuts next year.

After three days of balloting, 78% of the more than 21,000 teachers, counselors and nurses who voted turned down an offer that keeps cumulative 12% pay cuts this year and falls short of a key union demand for a guarantee that salaries will at least stay the same next year.

The action widens the gulf between union and district officials as negotiations continue in a stalemate.

If a better offer is not approved, teachers will strike Feb. 22, one week after students return from an eight-week winter break. School board President Leticia Quezada said she hopes that the break can serve as a “cooling down period” in the increasingly bitter dispute.

Although Thursday’s vote fell short of the 89% margin by which union members voted in October to authorize a strike, United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein said it was a “very hard and solid vote” to shut down a district that, they charge, will not make funding classroom teachers top priority.

“The most important part of this vote is that our members have decided to put students and our profession first to force this district to turn priorities around,” Bernstein said. “The policies of this district are upside-down and all wrong.”

Ballots were cast by 21,194 members of the 28,000-strong union, with 16,534 members voting to strike. When teachers last went on strike for nine tumultuous days in 1989, 81% of the membership voted to walk out.

In a brassy sign of their anger over the dearth of formal negotiations the last two weeks, union leaders said they will camp out in two motor homes parked at district headquarters until a mediator is called in to help end the dispute.

In a letter to Quezada, Bernstein said she has suggested former state Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, chairman of a recent commission that reviewed the district budget crisis. Bernstein said she would also welcome Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.

“It always helps to bring in somebody new who has good ideas of how to bring both sides together,” Bernstein said. “We are willing to try anything.”

Quezada said Thursday that the school board “would be happy” to have a mediator and that she asked Brown to step in two weeks ago.

But arrangements apparently were never formalized to invite a mediator to help move along the process. Quezada and Bernstein rarely speak directly to each other and communicate instead through negotiators, staff and letters.

The labor strife was touched off after the school board imposed pay cuts ranging from 6.5% to 11.5% on all district employees on Oct. 2 to help make up an unprecedented $400-million budget shortfall. Salaries were reduced 3% last year, so the majority of teachers are making 12% below what they did two years ago.

In what Quezada described as the district’s “last and best” contract, the board has promised to undertake a management audit this year, seeking ways to absorb a projected $25-million to $100-million budget shortfall next year without further decreasing salaries, and has offered an incentive program that would pay teachers for unused sick days.

The contract offer states that teachers will not suffer pay cuts next year only if state funding is kept even. A majority of board members believe that, given the faltering state economy, it would be poor policy to make a firm guarantee to teachers.

State schools chief Bill Honig blasted the district’s offer Thursday, saying it is “crazy to not give the teachers the guarantee” that their salaries will not be cut next year, given the assurances by Gov. Pete Wilson that school funding will remain the same and a Legislature that Honig believes will be strong on education funding.

“It seems to me the (district) leadership is not making choices about priorities,” he said. “The odds are the governor and Legislature will do what they said and the flat level of funding will stay the same.”

Maureen DiMarco, Wilson’s secretary for education and child development, said that although the governor has said he will try to maintain funding levels based on daily student attendance, it is unclear whether other special programs will receive the same funding.

She said Honig’s criticism of the board is “unwarranted” and that it would be “irresponsible for the board to make a guarantee to teachers without some contingency.”

Honig also sharply criticized the board’s approval this week of contracts with six other unions, which contain controversial “mutual protection” clauses that essentially prevent the board from giving teachers a better deal at the expense of other employees.

Echoing the complaints of the teachers union, Honig said the agreements are poor public policy.

“Teachers are central to the whole enterprise,” Honig said. “To say they are going to treat everyone the same is not leadership, it’s not making choices.”

But Quezada responded that it is wrong to “say who is more important than whom. To engage in that is to pit one set of employees against another. Right now all our employees are very important.”

The union is opposed to that philosophy, arguing that teachers are the most important employees. “I’m tired of people who’ve turned this into an employment institution instead of an education institution,” Bernstein said.

Several school board members said that it is difficult to negotiate a contract without knowing what impact the state budget will have on district finances in the next school year.