CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Right-Wing Media Distorts LAUSD Education Worker Battle

Photograph Source: Fahim Fadz – CC BY 2.0

The tentative agreement United Teachers Los Angeles signed with the Los Angeles Unified School District on April 12 has been approved by UTLA members with a 92% “Yes” vote, with almost 27,000 members voting. This is similar to the result of our May 2023 vote on the tentative agreement we won in the wake of our March 2023 strike. Service Employees International Union, our ally in both contract battles, begins voting on their TA with LAUSD this week.

‘Extortion’ & ‘hostage-taking’

The right-wing media is not happy.

The Washington Post calls our strike “immoral” and “little different from extortion”. The Wall Street Journal condemns our “rich new union contract” and cites us as a major reason for “the exodus of families” from Los Angeles. The Editorial Board of News Corp’s California Post and New York Post denounces our strike as a “cynical form of hostage-taking”.

They and others emphasize LAUSD’s claims of impending fiscal apocalypse–its oft-stated reason for rejecting union demands–and take them as good coin, as if any employer negotiating with a union has ever been anything but “broke”. Consider:

In 2018, then-LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner claimed LAUSD was broke, its reserve down to a mere $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 2023, 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,........

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