The Biggest Teachers’ Strike in Years Is Happening in Los Angeles Right Now
Los Angeles is the second-biggest school district in the country, serving nearly 500,000 students across 900 public schools. And on Monday, 30,000 teachers, librarians, school nurses, and counselors walked out in the first teachers' strike that the city has seen in 30 years. The Los Angeles Times reports that an "estimated 400 substitutes and 2,000 staffers from central and regional offices fill in for 31,000 teachers, nurses, librarians and counselors. At 10 schools, nonteaching employees will take part in a sympathy strike, which will create additional headaches as administrators struggle to manage such tasks as preparing and serving meals."
This comes six years after a massive teachers' strike in Chicago, and not even a year after large-scale strikes in states across the country. But unlike with the strikes in Kentucky and West Virginia, the two sides in L.A. aren't actually that split on salary—in fact, the district would prefer if the negotiations were entirely salary-based. And the union, United Teachers Los Angeles, has already won an extra $130 million from the district to reduce class sizes. But the sticking point for the union is a commitment to more hiring—like librarians, counselors, and a full-time nurse on every campus—and that the new positions be funded for more than a year. The strike in L.A. is also different from last year's strikes because those all happened in Republican-dominated states, not in reliably blue California and Los Angeles. But Democrats are often just as aggressively pro-privatization of public schools as Republicans are, underfunding education, then using the ensuing crises as a justification for even deeper cuts.
In an interview, Arlene Inouye, the secretary for UTLA, described the strike as a "struggle to save public education," saying that originally the union was also pushing for “common good” demands, "such as the establishment of a teacher training program; more green space in schools; an end to the discriminatory security wanding of students, which made students of color feel criminalized; housing possibilities in LAUSD; free bus passes for LA students; and the establishment of an immigrant defense fund to pay for undocumented parents’ legal costs." Ultimately, the union dropped the "common good" demands, since the district said they were outside the legal scope of contract negotiations, but they're holding firm to their demands for more staff support and smaller class sizes.
While the pressures on teachers have only multiplied in recent years—including the expectation that teachers start firearm training—nearly 30 states spend less on education than they did in 2008. That includes California, home to Silicon Valley and the bulk of the film industry, and the fifth largest economy in the world if it were its own country. According to NPR, 81 percent of the city's public-school students qualify for free or reduced-price meals. There are few other places in the world with such glaring inequality and so much wealth that could do so much good.
