Teachers, District Remain Divided Over Pay Increase

After months of on-and-off negotiations, Los Angeles teachers and school district officials are still divided over salary increases and a series of other issues, and both sides report that positions are hardening.

The district is several weeks away from the possibility of a strike that would close schools, but both sides say they have now set limits beyond which they will not move, even if it means a walkout. Teachers union President Day Higuchi said union leaders have begun preparations for a membership vote to authorize a walkout.

For his part, Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Roy Romer said he has substantially boosted the district’s salary offer.

When talks began in the spring, the district proposed a 6% raise. Publicly, the district now is offering 10%. Romer said, however, that he has privately floated a higher number, which he declined to specify.

Higuchi, head of United Teachers-Los Angeles, said the two sides remained roughly $80 million apart--a figure that would translate to about four percentage points. UTLA officials would not confirm that they had reduced their opening demand for a 21% increase, but Romer said the union’s current proposal is for an 18.8% hike.

With both Romer and Higuchi attending the Democratic National Convention as delegates, no talks have been held this week. Both men said in interviews that they hope to avert a strike, but acknowledged the hardening of positions.

“It was clearly indicated you should not take this and start building on it,” Romer said of his latest proposal. “That isn’t going to happen.”

“Everybody is desirous of a strike not happening,” Higuchi said.

A strike authorization vote would not come until the end of September, and public statements of intransigence are a common tactic in labor negotiations. Still, even the possibility of a strike that would close city classrooms could be a problem for school officials who are struggling to hold the confidence of parents and fight off proposals to break up the massive district.

The last Los Angeles teachers strike, in 1989, virtually shut down the district’s 660 campuses for nine days. Teachers won pay raises of 24% over three years. But much of that gain was wiped out during the recession of the early 1990s.

Neither side is yet ready to declare an impasse in negotiations--the step that would trigger a process lasting several weeks, after which the union legally could strike.

“I would say there’s been some genuine give-and-take,” Higuchi said.

Although contract talks began in the spring, the appointment of Romer in June as the district’s superintendent caused a turnover in the district’s negotiating team. Because of that, the two sides have had relatively little opportunity to probe each’s other’s positions.

After initially leaving the talks to senior bureaucrats, Romer recently decided to take charge. His goal, he said, is to move the negotiations quickly to a conclusion.

“I’m trying to find a bottom-line figure for both sides before this conflict is escalated,” he said. “To escalate this conflict is very damaging to the children of the district and to the people of this city.”

Without being specific, Romer said he has put new ideas on the table to try to resolve some of the other issues that have blocked negotiations. For example, he already has substantially modified the district’s previous demand that some amount of any raise be restricted to teachers whose students perform well on tests.

A spokesman for the union said Romer also had introduced a new topic, asking for a discussion of how seniority rules affect the performance of schools in poorer areas of the city. Schools in poor neighborhoods historically have had difficulty keeping experienced teachers.

Negotiators also have made no progress on the district’s demand to restore the authority of principals to assign teachers to specific grades. The current system allows teachers to choose their assignments on the basis of seniority. The district bargained away that power in exchange for a cut in teachers’ salaries during the early 1990s.

To this point, the talks have not touched on the union’s demand for what teachers call a classroom bill of rights. That proposal would require schools to be kept clean and safe and would limit class sizes.

In attempting to justify his negotiating stance, Romer is pitting issues such as school cleanliness against the union’s salary demands.

“I’ve got bathrooms out there that are really important to people that won’t get supervised because I won’t have the money,” Romer said. “People of the district want to pay teachers fairly and competitively, but they don’t want us to spend so much on salaries that we won’t be able to improve the quality of the institution.”

The union counters that the district’s salaries are too low to retain good teachers. Because Los Angeles pay falls in the bottom quarter of districts in the county, teachers have a strong incentive to leave for higher-paying districts after gaining experience in Los Angeles, the union argues.

A union representative said a raise of 17.4% would be needed to move Los Angeles teachers’ pay into the top quarter of county districts.