A Way to Head Off Disaster : Speaker’s plan to avert teachers’ strike deserves support

The understandably angry teachers of Los Angeles now have a good reason not to go out on strike. A well-timed intervention by State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown has produced a worthy new plan that reduces the pain for teachers without bankrupting the school district.

The plan also contains a number of power-sharing proposals to give teachers more control over their classrooms, their schools and even their health-care coverage. The teachers will be voting this week on the Brown compromise, and the results are to be announced Friday. If adopted by the members of United Teachers-Los Angeles, the strike threat that has hung for months over Los Angeles will disappear; and the teachers and other UTLA members, including nurses and counselors, will have as sensible and equitable a wage pact as possible under these difficult economic circumstances.

The Brown plan stipulates that UTLA members take only a 10% instead of a 12% pay cut over two years, as first proposed by the board. This is nothing to cheer about, of course, but it was the previously proposed 12% cut that triggered the union’s move toward a strike. Brown targeted the emergency reserve fund for reallocation into salaries. As Brown put it, a strike would be an emergency every bit “like an earthquake.” Exactly.

The compromise received the approval Monday of the school board. Now a thumbs-up vote from a majority of the 58,000 members of the union would certainly relax tensions and clear the air. A teacher strike would only heighten ill will toward the district, which is facing attacks from those who want to break it up and those who want taxpayer support of private schools.

We hope Brown’s intervention--and his strong, plain-spoken warning to both union and management to face economic reality--averts the disaster of a strike. Brown’s plan deserves to be resoundingly approved by the teachers’ union. The biggest beneficiaries, among the many interests involved, would be the children--for whom, after all, the schools exist.