LA Teachers Don't Cross Picket Lines as Los Angeles School Workers Are on Strike, and Parents Say They Get It

 Over 60% of parents support LA teacher union -- a left wing leadership -- how many NY would support the right-center UFT leadership?

Los Angeles School Workers Are on Strike, and Parents Say They Get It

Both parents and the striking school district employees are on the same side of the economic divide in one of the nation’s most expensive cities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/us/la-schools-strike.html

By Kurtis Lee and Jill Cowan

• March 22, 2023

LOS ANGELES — Since Tuesday, Diana Cruz has juggled her stay-at-home job as an executive assistant with the care of her children after the Los Angeles school strike forced their classes to be canceled for three days.

 

Ms. Cruz earns $36,000 a year and is raising her two daughters and teenage son in a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, where she splits the $1,700 rent with her mother.

A few miles away, Yolanda Mims Reed makes about $24 an hour as a part-time special education assistant at Hamilton High School. She supplements her income by caring for an older woman and by doing hair.

Parents like Ms. Cruz may be flustered by the strike, but few are angry with the strikers like Ms. Reed.

The parents see their lives mirrored in the struggles of the bus drivers, cafeteria workers and classroom aides walking the picket lines — working-class residents who take on multiple jobs to survive in Southern California.

“If you’re not making massive six-figure salaries, then, yeah, it’s hard,” Ms. Cruz, 33, said. “How can you not support their cause?”

The strike has sharply illustrated the economic divide in modern Los Angeles, where low-wage workers can barely scrap together rent while affluent professionals blocks away are willing to pay $13 for a coconut smoothie. In this case, the school district’s working-class parents and school workers are on the same side of the divide.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, relies on tens of thousands of staff members who are struggling to keep up with rising costs in a state that lacks enough housing. Most of the families they serve are in the same boat, with 89 percent of the district’s households qualifying as economically disadvantaged, according to district data.

Housing is the biggest expense for people living in the Los Angeles area, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Residents devote 38 percent of their yearly spending to housing, compared with the national average of roughly 34 percent, according to the agency.

 

“The high cost of living in Los Angeles permeates every aspect of life and often forces low-income residents into impossible choices between basic needs like housing, safety, health care and food,” said Kyla Thomas, a sociologist at the University of Southern California Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research. “Many in L.A. live on the brink of crisis.”

What to Know About the L.A. Schools Strike

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A walkout in California. Tens of thousands of Los Angeles school employees began a three-day strike on March 21, forcing hundreds of campuses to close and canceling classes for 422,000 students  in the nation’s second-largest school district. Here is what to know:

Who is on strike? The dispute involves Local 99 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents people in a variety of nonteaching jobs, including bus drivers and cafeteria workers. United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents teachers and some other district employees, has said that its members would not cross the picket line in solidarity.

Why is the strike only three days? Local 99 said that it was calling for a limited strike specifically to protest unfair negotiating tactics by the school district, rather than calling a general walkout over pay and work conditions. Under the law, the union said, this type of strike comes with protections for workers who walk out, but must have a set time limit and cannot be open-ended.

What are the workers seeking? The union is seeking a 30 percent overall raise, an additional $2-an-hour increase for the lowest-paid workers and other increases in compensation. A counterproposal from the district announced on March 21 included a 23 percent recurring increase and a 3 percent cash-in-hand bonus.

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LABarometer, a survey that the Dornsife Center conducts to track social conditions and attitudes in the region, found that about 60 percent of local tenants were “rent-burdened,” meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their household income on housing.

Griselda Perez, 51, said that her family stretched to afford their $2,000 rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the Boyle Heights neighborhood. Her eldest son, 20, shares a room with his two younger brothers, 11 and 9, who attend district schools. Every day, she said, the family feels the squeeze of gentrification, as more people with higher incomes move east from downtown.

Ms. Perez said she tried to explain the strike to her sons by likening their situation — they cannot afford birthday parties and trips to Disneyland — to the challenges faced by the people who work at their schools.

“When I see the cafeteria workers, when I see the lady at the front door, when I see the lady working at the parent center, we talk mom to mom,” she said. “The struggles that they have are the same struggles that we have.”

The walkout continued on Wednesday with picket lines at schools and campus facilities, including at district headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. School support employees have been joined by the district’s 35,000 teachers in the work stoppage. The strike is expected to end on Thursday.

The Local 99 branch of the Service Employees International Union, which represents 30,000 support workers in Los Angeles Unified, said that half of its members who responded to a 2022 internal survey said they worked a second job.

The union also said that its members earned an average of $25,000 a year — a figure that Los Angeles Unified officials said included both part- and full-time employees. The full-time salary average was unclear.

The union noted that 64 percent of its members were Latino and 20 percent were Black. The families they serve are likewise overwhelmingly Latino, some 74 percent, an outgrowth of broad migration and population trends.

Austin Beutner, who served as the district’s superintendent during the coronavirus pandemic, said that a vast majority of parents understood the plight of the Local 99 members because they lived in the same neighborhoods. He said the half-dozen school principals he spoke to on Tuesday said they were seeing overwhelming support from parents for the staff members.

“The intersection of school staff and the community is tight and close,” Mr. Beutner said. “They are the community. So many of them have family members in schools or neighbors in schools.”

Local 99 has leaned on that support and tried to frame its contract battle as a fight for low-wage workers across Los Angeles. And parental backing — for now — could help the union at the negotiating table.

Workers are seeking a 30 percent overall raise, as well as an additional $2-an-hour increase for the lowest-paid employees. The union’s members have been working without a contract since 2020.

Alberto M. Carvalho, the current district superintendent, acknowledged “historic inequities” that workers had faced, in a statement on Tuesday.

“I understand our employees’ frustration that has been brewing, not just for a couple years but probably for decades,” Mr. Carvalho said.

School districts cannot raise revenues as quickly as private-sector businesses might through price increases during an inflationary period. The Los Angeles district relies on funds that are determined at the state level, and, after years of growth, California is projected to face a deficit in the coming fiscal year. The school district also continues to lose students each year, which means it receives less money because funding is based on enrollment.

The district has countered with a 23 percent wage increase, spread across several years, and a 3 percent onetime bonus. Mr. Carvalho said that the latest proposal sought to address the union’s needs “while also remaining fiscally responsible and keeping the district in a financially stable position.”

At a time when public support for organized labor is high, strikes by teachers and education workers have become increasingly common. Faced with rapid inflation and the prospect of higher pay in the private sector, public employees have been feeling a need for drastic change.

“Everybody else gets raises. What about us?” Jovita Padilla, a 40-year-old bus driver, said on Tuesday.

In a high-poverty district like Los Angeles Unified, school closures not only cut off class instruction but also crucial school meals. The district offers free breakfast and lunch for all of them, regardless of income, and many children rely on those meals during the school week. With negotiations at a standstill, the district set up supervision sites where working parents could drop off children, as well as locations where families could pick up three days’ worth of breakfasts and lunches.

Gabriela Cruz, a district parent who is not related to Diana Cruz, dropped by one of the distribution sites this week and picked up a box of food, which she said was a big help. “My kids need to eat everyday, and the free food is good for us because we spend a lot on groceries,” she said.

Ms. Cruz, 44, said working as a receptionist at a real estate office on the first day of the strike was not easy. She had to take her young daughter and son to work.

“The truth is that it was difficult to work,” she said.

Her family of five depends on her part-time job that pays her $15 an hour. She works 30 hours a week. Her husband works full time in a restaurant and is paid the minimum wage.

“Everything is so expensive,” she said.

Reporting was contributed by Shawn Hubler from Sacramento, and Corina Knoll and Ana Facio-Krajcer from Los Angeles. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Kurtis Lee is an economics correspondent based in Los Angeles. Before joining The Times in 2022, he was a national correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, writing about gun violence, income inequality and race in America. @kurtisalee

Jill Cowan is a Los Angeles-based reporter for the National desk covering California. @jillcowan

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2023, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: L.A. Schools Strike, and Parents Say They Get It. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

L.A. Schools Strike Day 2

• Political leaders are keeping a low profile on the school labor dispute.

• The schools chief, Alberto Carvalho, moved to L.A. after rising to the top in Miami.

• Many students in Los Angeles Unified are economically struggling.

• Worker organizing and strikes have surged over the last 18 months.

• Here’s why the strike will last for three days.