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STRIKE? – On April 14, 68,000 Los Angeles education workers will strike, and the California Public Employment Relations Board has squandered its chance to reconcile the conflicting parties.
United Teachers Los Angeles, along with Associated Administrators of Los Angeles and Service Employees International Union, will shut down Los Angeles Unified School District schools, beginning April 14. The conflict is simple–LAUSD claims it's in a financial crisis and can't pay for the salary raises and other improvements the unions want, and UTLA and its allied unions believe LAUSD is vastly overstating its financial challenges.
UTLA and LAUSD argued their case before the PERB Board in early March, but the much-anticipated report is a severe disappointment. In short, PERB punted.
Rather than making the determination many waited for–whose depiction of LAUSD’s finances is correct–PERB concluded:
“…given the size and complexity of LAUSD’s budget, verifying the accuracy of these claims would require considerable time and effort, well beyond the scope of the chair’s expertise in forensic accounting...thoroughly examining...would be time-consuming and labor-intensive.”
No employer going into a contract negotiation ever acknowledges having money in its coffers, and LAUSD has a long history of crying wolf over its finances. Yet, incredibly, PERB comported itself as if a dispute over the employer's ability to pay is a curve they somehow didn't anticipate.
What UTLA seeks is a badly-needed reform of the LAUSD Salary Table, which even LAUSD has now acknowledged is problematic, with a substantial pay increase baked into it. But PERB ignored this crucial issue--perhaps they felt it "beyond the scope of the[ir] expertise".
A new LAUSD teacher starting at the first salary level sees an increase of only $6 a month in their second year, $61 a month in their third and fourth years, and less than $10 a month in their fifth and sixth years. For veteran teachers, unless a teacher has taken a number of education units equivalent to two master’s degrees, after 10 years the teacher receives no yearly raises.
UTLA’s proposed salary table would raise new teachers’ starting salaries to $80,000 and improve anniversary increases.
During the first six months of 2025-2026 contract negotiations, LAUSD offered no raise at all, then only 2.25% raise a year, with a one-time 3% bonus that does not raise the salary table or count towards retirement.
Last week LAUSD told UTLA they were bringing proposals that could settle the contract and avert a strike but, in what UTLA negotiators must at first have thought was an April Fool’s Day prank, their offer was just 3.3% a year (10% over three years), plus the one-time bonus.
In 2018, then-LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner claimed LAUSD was broke, its reserve down to $700 million. Yet as the parties went through mediation and fact-finding, more information trickled out, and the reserve “grew”, first to $1.2 billion, then to $1.86 billion.
After UTLA won numerous contract gains, LAUSD, far from cratering, saw its reserves almost double from 2019 to 2013, growing to $3.5 billion.
We heard more tales of financial doom before our strike in 2023, when we won a 21% raise over three years. This settlement again was supposed to financially devastate the district, but somehow star-crossed LAUSD, which had projected that at the end of 2024-2025 its reserve would be down to $1.45 billion, started this school year with a $5.03 billion reserve, its highest ever.
In fact, LAUSD has greatly underprojected reserves every year from 2013 to 2025.
Moreover, the percentage LAUSD holds in reserve is often double or triple that held by other major California school districts. Legally, LAUSD is required to hold only 1% of its budget in reserve ($188 million).
LAUSD does face real problems, as the unaffordability of housing and changing demographics have combined to shrink LAUSD enrollment, and federal immigration actions have stemmed the flow of new students into LAUSD.
LAUSD attempts to link these problems to contract negotiations and pile on the doom and gloom to mislead Los Angeles educators into accepting an inferior contract. It’s indicative of how unreasonable LAUSD’s bargaining position is that they’ve even managed to alienate AALA–their partners in management.
Between LAUSD’s lowball salary offers and PERB’s punting, UTLA will have little choice but to strike.
(Glenn Sacks teaches Social Studies at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District.)
