CounterPunch+ Exclusives

CounterPunch+ Exclusives

LA Teachers Strike: SEIU Rising

On the eve of the 2023 Service Employees International Union Local 99 strike, Los Angeles Times Columnist Robin Abcarian wrote “I don’t blame the union one bit” and condemned Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho for “just one more slap in the face” after Carvalho “responded to the (strike) vote by comparing the union’s action to a circus.” In reference to SEIU, Carvalho had tweeted:

“Circus = a predictable performance with a known outcome, desiring of nothing more than an applause, a coin, and a promise of a next show.”

For SEIU, LAUSD’s poverty-level wages should be OK

Carvalho was hardly alone in expressing contempt for SEIU’s members, LAUSD’s lowest-paid education workers.

Criticizing SEIU’s strike, John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, hosts of the popular, long-running John and Ken Show then on Los Angeles’ KFI AM 640, explained, “These [SEIU] jobs aren’t meant for you to have a home and a family…you can’t have families if you make so little money—it’s not responsible, it’s not practical.”

John and Ken were openly stating what many American conservatives believe but usually are too prudent to say–having kids and having a home are privileges to be reserved only for the social classes who can “afford” them.

‘My pay hasn’t really raised much since I started’

At the time of the 2023 strike, my colleague Eric Hernandez, a school custodian, was featured in the Los Angeles Times piece Three-day LAUSD strike means three days without pay. How are low-paid workers coping?:

“At one point in his life, Eric Hernandez, who has worked as a school custodian for 17 years, said he was forced to choose between sleep or increased stability.

“He worked two jobs: handling buildings, grounds and custodial duties at James Monroe High School in North Hills, while taking evening shifts at his neighborhood Target.

“But the lack of sleep ‘burned him out,’ forcing him to quit Target and return to his single salary — and the anxiety it induced.”

“It’s unbelievable, but my pay hasn’t really raised much since I started. Guys who start tomorrow are only making a little less than me.”

When on March 21, 2023 SEIU–which had been working without a contract since 2020–finally struck, Carvalho seemed surprised that United Teachers Los Angeles honored their picket lines. Given his experience in the anti-union South managing Miami-Dade County Public Schools and contending with a much weaker teacher’s union–I know, I was once a member of it–Carvalho probably expected that teachers would cross the line and work.

With teachers and administrators in place and personnel brought in from Beaudry (LAUSD’s central offices) on an emergency basis, Carvalho figured LAUSD could roll right over SEIU, as school districts often do in similar situations.

Carvalho’s view wasn’t without foundation. At the time, the anti-teachers union LA School Report unwittingly paid UTLA a complement, writing:

“State law allows one bargaining unit to go on a sympathy strike with another union, but Bradley Marianno, an assistant education professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said it’s ‘highly unusual,’ for a teachers union to join a walkout with non-teaching employees.

“‘They may issue statements of support, but to join in [a] strike is a different, and relatively rare, matter…”

Labor Solidarity—an American tradition…

While our solidarity strike may have surprised LAUSD, what UTLA did was very much in line with the traditions of American labor. American labor unions were built through labor solidarity, and in recent decades unions have been undermined by the lack of it.

The 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, arguably America’s most important labor law, specifically targets sympathy strikes. President Truman denounced the bill and vetoed it, but Congress, concerned about the massive post-war US strike wave, overrode his veto.

The 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act further tightened restrictions on solidarity (aka “sympathy” or “secondary”) strikes.

UTLA’s solidarity strike served as a harbinger of the future and as an example for other unions.

Building support for the 2023 SEIU-UTLA strike

In early 2023, some UTLA members noted that SEIU did not honor our picket lines in 2019, and questioned why we should honor theirs. UTLA had to build support for honoring SEIU’s picket lines but there were good reasons to do so, both moral and practical:

+The eight unions representing LAUSD workers had long been hamstrung by the fact that our contract negotiations often did not line up, so LAUSD played us off against one another. This time our negotiations more or less lined up–if we passed up this opportunity, when would we be able to harness the joint power of our two organizations? In five or 10 years? This was a unique opportunity, and UTLA and SEIU leaders were wise to take advantage of it. +UTLA is a union of educated professionals–we have higher social and economic status than SEIU, which is disproportionately low-income, minority, and immigrant. We are stronger than they are, and more fortunate. If one group must go the extra mile to achieve this unity–a unity which benefits both unions–it was appropriate that it was us. +If SEIU had honored our picket line in 2019, my understanding is that this would have been illegal. We were able to legally honor their picket line in 2023 because it was an unfair labor practice/“Unfair Practice Charge” strike. I believe in honoring picket lines under any circumstances, but asking a union to carry out an illegal strike is not a small thing. +We were both up against a common adversary. What sense would it have made for UTLA to watch 30,000 SEIU workers battle Carvalho and stand on the sidelines or, worse, actively undermine them by crossing their picket lines, when we too were in negotiations?

+The eight unions representing LAUSD workers had long been hamstrung by the fact that our contract negotiations often did not line up, so LAUSD played us off against one another. This time our negotiations more or less lined up–if we passed up this opportunity, when would we be able to harness the joint power of our two organizations? In five or 10 years? This was a unique opportunity, and UTLA and SEIU leaders were wise to take advantage of it.

+UTLA is a union of educated professionals–we have higher social and economic status than SEIU, which is disproportionately low-income, minority, and immigrant. We are stronger than they are, and more fortunate. If one group must go the extra mile to achieve this unity–a unity which benefits both unions–it was appropriate that it was us.

+If SEIU had honored our picket line in 2019, my understanding is that this would have been illegal. We were able to legally honor their picket line in 2023 because it was an unfair labor practice/“Unfair Practice Charge” strike. I believe in honoring picket lines under any circumstances, but asking a union to carry out an illegal strike is not a small thing.

+We were both up against a common adversary. What sense would it have made for UTLA to watch 30,000 SEIU workers battle Carvalho and stand on the sidelines or, worse, actively undermine them by crossing their picket lines, when we too were in negotiations?

Breaking News: Florida Man Causes…

According to observers, on March 22, 2023, when tens of thousands of striking UTLA and SEIU members surrounded LAUSD’s downtown headquarters on Beaudry Avenue and Carvalho’s driver struggled to get him through the massive crowd, he seemed taken aback by what he had set off. One of the best picket signs at that rally was a “Florida Man” picket sign made by my Monroe Social Studies colleague Stephanie Memije–“Breaking News: Florida Man Causes LAUSD Strike”.

But Carvalho is skilled…

At the March 24, 2023 press conference with Mayor Karen Bass and SEIU Local 99 Executive Director Max Arias in which they announced the tentative agreement, Carvalho began by speaking so convincingly about the mistreatment of SEIU workers that you almost forgot he was the superintendent–he sounded more like a SEIU organizer.

He followed by subtly and skillfully working in some key talking points:

+Let’s forget how in this strike I got my head handed to me–let’s focus on the future +Don’t blame me, it’s my predecessors’ fault. +Let’s forget how I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making this deal—I’m leading the way with “transformative” changes

+Let’s forget how in this strike I got my head handed to me–let’s focus on the future

+Don’t blame me, it’s my predecessors’ fault.

+Let’s forget how I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making this deal—I’m leading the way with “transformative” changes

In announcing the healthcare aspect of the agreement, Carvalho sounded like Bernie Sanders as he emphasized “healthcare as a human right.”

Carvalho also paid UTLA and SEIU union leadership a backhanded compliment by noting that “This agreement is going to make a lot of superintendents very nervous…”

Did 2026 LAUSD leadership shakeup help lead to a settlement?

In March, after a year of negotiations, UTLA Valley East Area Chair Scott Mandel said that in 41 years, he had “never seen the district so intransigent in contract negotiations.”

Carvalho felt that he had erred in his handling of the 2023 strike, had been forced to give away too much, and wanted to claw back some of it in the 2025-2026 negotiations. But the dominant figure throughout the 2025-2026 battle was LAUSD Chief of Employee Support & Labor Relations Kristen Murphy. UTLA bargaining team members described Dr. Murphy’s demeanor as disrespectful and imperious, and many felt that she, more than Carvalho, was the real hardliner in LAUSD.

By the time the SEIU/UTLA v LAUSD conflict came to a head between April 8 and April 14, both Carvalho’s and Murphy’s influence had been weakened.

Carvalho was put on administrative leave by LAUSD on February 27 after his home and office were raided by federal agents as part of a Department of Justice investigation into the failed artificial intelligence company, AllHere, that the district contracted with for a chatbot called Ed.

At the end of March, LAUSD/Murphy told UTLA they were bringing important new proposals that could settle the contract and avert a strike. Educators on the 150-member UTLA bargaining team undid their Spring Break plans and returned but, in what they must at first have thought was an insulting April Fool’s Day prank, LAUSD’s offer was only a tiny bit better than before.

LAUSD apologized to UTLA the following week, the chastised Murphy was much more respectful in subsequent negotiations, and LAUSD accepted that UTLA, a disciplined and well-organized union, was not bluffing.

LAUSD’s mulish hardline stance–“stuck on stupid”, as one UTLA leader had put it–had brought things to this point. Acting superintendent Andres Chait had less connection to LAUSD’s failed strategy and thus something of a freer hand. Two days before the unions were to strike, Chait helped make a deal with UTLA and Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, then, with only hours remaining until we struck, with SEIU.

Glenn Sacks teaches social studies at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

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