“What Happened Today Is Just Capitulation to the Privatizers and Union Busters”
Powerful L.A. Teachers Strike
Was Betrayed in Settlement
Strikers cheered when settlement was announced. The cheering stopped when the terms of the deal were revealed. "It wasn't a party, it was a funeral, nobody knew it though," commented one rally participant.(Photo: Scott Heins / Getty Images)
Leadership Rammed Through a Sellout - UTLA Membership Should
Demand the Right to Debate and Vote on the Final Agreement
Demand the Right to Debate and Vote on the Final Agreement
LOS ANGELES, January 23 – At 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, on the sixth day of the powerful teachers strike that electrified working people across the U.S., Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), stood with Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) superintendent Austin Beutner and Democratic mayor Eric Garcetti at a City Hall press conference to announce that a strike settlement had been reached. It was a “historic agreement,” said Garcetti. Caputo-Pearl called it “a historic victory for public education educators, students and parents.” It’s not. Instead, the deal maintains the intolerable conditions which UTLA tops have agreed to for years.
So the tremendous energy of a strike that brought an outpouring of support from parents, students and key sectors of L.A. labor was squandered in a deal, brokered by the Democratic Party, which achieved none of the major goals educators fought for on the picket lines and in daily mass marches. Jam-packed classes of over 40 students per teacher are to continue for another three years; the salary hike is actually a pay cut when adjusted for inflation; charter “co-locations” in public schools will continue, and while hiring a couple hundred librarians and nurses is a limited gain, the agreed-upon ratio of 500 students per counselor is an abomination.
When Caputo-Pearl left the press conference and walked across the street to Grand Park, music and dancing filled the lawn as thousands of red-clad striking teachers were awaiting an agreement that would at least partly reverse decades of attacks on L.A.’s funding-starved public schools. When the UTLA leader said there was a settlement with reductions in class size and gains in staffing, that the strike was over and teachers would be back at work on Wednesday, many cheered. But by mid-afternoon when the 47-page tentative agreement was posted online, the cheering turned to shock. This was what tens of thousands had marched and picketed in the rain for?!
A little over two hours later, a “streamlined voting process” was held at school sites during rush hour (5-7 p.m.). At 7:30 p.m. Caputo-Pearl declared that a “supermajority” had voted “yes.” “Streamlined”? It was steamrollered. The whole business made a mockery of union democracy. The UTLA Facebook page exploded with thousands of angry comments complaining about the terms of the deal and the rushed vote before teachers and parents could even figure out what all the legalese meant. The agreement is a shameful sellout of the strike, forced down the throats of UTLA rank-and-file by a leadership that ultimately seeks to keep the class struggle in check.
The most positive comment we heard about the agreement on Tuesday afternoon after the terms were revealed was that it was “a few baby steps in the right direction.” It’s not even that. What the Internationalist Group said about the Chicago teachers strike of 2012 holds true for L.A. today: “strike was huge, settlement sucks.”
So why did this happen? For the misnamed Union Power caucus that talked of a “social justice strike” even as it engineered the sellout, this strike was all about the Democratic Party. As Class Struggle Education Workers said in our leaflet widely distributed at yesterday’s rally:
“The governor, state superintendent of education, Los Angeles mayor and almost all members of the L.A. school board are Democrats, who also hold huge supermajorities (over 70%) in both houses of the state legislature, which they have controlled almost continually since 1970. They are the ones directly responsible for the perilous state of public education in California today. Yet both the UTLA and the LAUSD are looking to the Democrats to resolve the issue in the strike.”
–“To Win the Teachers Strike We Must Shut Down L.A.” (21 January)
Sure enough, the Democrats “resolved” the strike issues, in their (capitalist) class interests. As a comment on the union’s Facebook page said: “What happened today is just capitulation to the privatizers and union busters.” But remember, the membership is the union. The UTLA ranks should demand the right to debate and vote on the final agreement. And the most determined should undertake the difficult task of forging a leadership with the program and determination to wage the class struggle through to victory.
Sold A Bill of Goods
The makings of the settlement were clear even before the strike. An initial look at the agreement shows the following:
- Salary “increase”: The 6% increase retroactive to 2017 is the same figure the LAUSD has put forward since last summer. Yet inflation in the Los Angeles metropolitan area was 3.6% in 2017 and 3.2% in 2018. On top of which, there are no raises scheduled for the next three years. Do the math: this is actually a pay cut.
- Section 1.5: The leadership is hailing the elimination of the infamous Section 1.5 of Article XVIII of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). This allowed the District to increase class size at will. But the LAUSD had already agreed to drop 1.5 in their January 7 pre-strike offer.
- Class size “caps”: The leadership is touting the agreement to lower class sizes by one student a year and two in the third year, which won’t make a dent. That’s not all – read the fine print: this “reduction” is from the current 2017-2018 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) which allows for up to 46 students per class in high school. Only after three years, by 15 October 2022, will class size maximums be reduced to the outrageously high levels established in the 2014-2017 CBA (see table on page 218), which allows 39 students per high school classroom. And note that Alex Caputo-Pearl personally signed off on the huge increase in class sizes (see his signature on the 2017-18 MOU).
- ELA, Math and elementary school class sizes: The “hard cap” of 39 students in secondary ELA and Math classes would actually be an increase in maximum class size for those classes currently capped at 37 students. Not to mention that there is no reduction at all in class sizes up to fourth grade.
- Student/counselor ratio of 500-to-1: Actually, the agreement says an additional counselor will be hired only when a school “has exceeded 50% of the ratio,” i.e., 750 students per counselor! But even 500:1 is a slap in the face, ensuring that overburdened counselors will be consumed by classroom problems, with limited or no time to help students with applying to college, for example.
- UTLA charter school co-location coordinator: This would make the union co-responsible for existing charter school expansion instead of mobilizing to stop co-locations.
- L.A. School Board appeal to state legislature for cap on charter schools: Here the UTLA is collaborating with LAUSD, which has been aggressively pushing charters, instead of fighting these privatizers tooth and nail.
- Nurses and librarians: The only step forward in the Tentative Agreement is the hiring of 300 nurses and 81 librarians. But on January 11, the LAUSD offered to hire 1,200 teachers, counselors, nurses and librarians. What happened to that?
As we wrote in the January 21 CSEW leaflet, “Every educator knows that you can’t effectively teach, much less give individual attention, to 45 students in a high-school classroom – or even 35, or fewer still in lower grades. To cut class sizes in half will require the hiring of thousands more educators at full union scale.”
The Pro-Capitalist Labor Bureaucracy and Its “Left” Apologists
When teachers saw the temporary agreement there was an explosion of outrage, frustration, bitter disappointment and confusion on social media. Some of the comments:
“This agreement is no win!! It’s a big fat LOSS!!”
“This was a set up. They must have had this contract last week, but needed to pump us all up and wait until day 7 to make a decision in a few hours!”
“Why was a ‘victory’ announced before we voted on this agreement??? Why were we RUSHED into voting on something so important???”
Clearly, many teachers saw that Caputo-Pearl had pulled a fast one on them, and rightly felt betrayed. Yet some were so demoralized that they questioned paying dues and the very need for a union. This would go along with last year’s Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court ruling seeking to financially cripple public sector unions and to encourage people to leave or refuse to join unions by outlawing “agency shop” fee collection.
That is also the line of the so-called World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), which has put out leaflets during the strike. Teachers and strike supporters should be forewarned that this sinister anti-union outfit seeks to destroy the UTLA. The WSWS fraudsters appeal to demoralized teachers by equating the union tops with the union itself. Yet unions are an essential first line of defense against the bosses. Without the UTLA there would have been no strike. Class Struggle Education Workers criticizes the class collaboration of the “Union Power” sellouts because we defend the unionsby building a core of militants on a political program of hard class struggle.
For their part, the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America (DSA) and International Socialist Organization (ISO) act as apologists for, and in fact are part of the UTLA leadership. During the strike a joint DSA/ISO statement admitted that “local and state Democrats” had overseen the underfunding of L.A. schools, and meekly called for “holding these Democrats to account and breaking with their pro-business agenda.” As if the Democratic Party politicians can be made “accountable” to anyone other than the capitalist class they serve! No, it is necessary to break with the Democratic Party as a whole in order to throw off the stranglehold of this ruling-class party and fight for the political independence of the workers from the bosses throughout the U.S.
ISO spokesperson Gillian Russom, a member of the ruling Union Power caucus and of the UTLA Board of Directors, presented the sellout agreement to teachers at Roosevelt High School on Tuesday. That night she described it as a “victory on many levels” to an ISO meeting where she repeated the bureaucracy’s falsehood-filled talking points (“We Won a Historic Victory for LA Schools,” Socialist Worker, 23 January). The same line was taken by the DSA’s Jacobin (“After LA’s strike, ‘nothing will be the same’,” 23 January). Meanwhile, the “Left Voice” media group runs interference for these reformists, trying in standard centrist fashion to split the difference between victory and betrayal, with a piece (23 January) claiming “important gains” while reporting teachers’ “mixed feelings” about the contract.
During the strike, there was an overwhelming outpouring of solidarity from the working-class population, including from some of the most powerful unions that make this city move. Longshore dock workers who have the power to shut down the ports, bus and rail workers who could paralyze the public transit system – these are key allies of the teachers. Their presence on the picket lines and in mass rallies was a threat to the bosses who fear more than anything the spectre of labor mobilizing its power to defeat the privatizers and shut down the flow of profit.
As the CSEW wrote in our first leaflet, “Victory to Los Angeles Teachers Strike” (7 January), “To build massive picket lines that no one crosses, the active support of the entire L.A.-area labor movement is needed.” We did our best to build such support. The solidarity strikes by SEIU Local 99 workers were also very important, pointing the way to shutting down all the schools. But UTLA leaders didn’t attempt to shut down the schools, instructing strikers not to stop anyone crossing the lines, and the agreement doesn’t even have a “no reprisals” clause for the solidarity strikers. In line with its policy of class collaboration, the leadership didn’t have a strategy to win the strike: what they sought was to pressure the Democrats.
Forge a Class-Struggle Opposition in the Unions
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| Picketing at Roosevelt High School on January 18. (Internationalist photo) |
In the strike, ILWU union halls were used as strike support centers to plan and prepare concrete solidarity action for the teachers, such as organizing food distribution to the picket lines and making hundreds of picket signs declaring “ILWU stands with Teachers”. At schools near the harbor and beyond, longshore workers and their families turned away scabs and gave confidence to the teachers. The CSEW worked alongside them. But to win the strike and real gains in the fight against privatization of public education, a port shutdown by this powerhouse of labor would have hit the privatizers and union-busters where it hurts.
The struggle is far from over. The strike at the Accelerated Schools charter chain in L.A. is still on and needs solidarity. Teachers in Denver, Colorado have voted to strike as early as January 28, while teachers in Oakland (where Democratic Party billionaire Eli Broad tries out his charter schemes before generalizing them in Los Angeles) are about to vote to strike next month. While the second unionized charter chain in Chicago has set a strike date for February 5.
The momentum building behind the L.A. teachers strike posed the prospect of a raging class battle engulfing the whole city, in which the loyal agents of the Democratic Party in the union leaderships could find the reins of control slipping out of their fingers. That is why there was such a frantic rush to shut the strike down by ramming through this sellout agreement. The main obstacle standing in the way of defeating the money men who seek to take over the schools is the labor bureaucracy that holds back class struggle in the service of the bosses’ Democratic Party, along with the so-called leftists alibiing their betrayals, and whose fundamental loyalty is to U.S. capitalism.
Class Struggle Education Workers fights to oust the bureaucrats, break with the Democrats, Republicans and all capitalist political parties and to build a class-struggle workers party. The urgency of this task is the most crucial of all the strike’s lessons. ■
Class
Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a
revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an
instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.