The Los Angeles Unified School District strike has been called off after LAUSD reached a tentative agreement Tuesday morning with Local 99 of the Service Employees International Union. Schools will be open as usual on Tuesday.
The proposed agreement was the third and final milestone needed to avoid walkouts and closings in the nation’s second-largest school district.
On Sunday, United Teachers Los Angeles and the United Superintendents of Los Angeles reached tentative agreements with the school district. Their agreements still need to be ratified by union members. The Board of Education must also approve established agreements.
Local 99 represents approximately 30,000 teachers, campus assistants, farmers, custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers and technology support workers. These union members are the lowest paid in the school system. Their median annual salary is about $35,000 — though the jobs often include health benefits for union members and their immediate families.
The agreement was announced by the school district shortly after 2 a.m
Local 99 and LA Unified discussion groups also held lengthy face-to-face meetings on Thursday and Sunday. Sunday’s mediation meeting started at 10:00 a.m. until 9:30 p.m., according to a source close to the negotiations.
On the other hand, the Board of Education met closed on Friday and Monday from 10 a.m. Such meetings are usually used to update the board and receive other instructions, if necessary. Monday’s meeting clocked in at less than three hours – board members using less than the four hours they had set aside in their schedule.
99 local members were working under a contract that expired on June 30, 2024.
The union wanted stable work schedules because some members had reduced hours due to budget cuts. In some cases, employees fall below the required hours limit to qualify for health benefits.
Among regional workers, Local 99 members are generally ill-equipped to resist a strike – where they would not be paid.
Details on two other deals
The three unions, each with separate contracts, employ about 70,000 of the county’s 83,300 workers and almost all workers are local. For the first time in LA Unified, the three joined together and vowed to walk out if agreements could not be reached with each union.
UTLA represents approximately 37,000 teachers, nurses, counselors, psychologists and librarians.
AALA represents approximately 3,000 workers in two units. Some faculty have members with teaching credentials, such as principals and assistant principals. A separate unit consists of middle managers who do not have teaching certificates.
Other unions — including those representing school workers, restaurant and cafeteria managers, building workers and school police — have terminated their contracts earlier.
The management agreement includes an 11.65% wage increase over two years and an opportunity to negotiate additional increases in the third year of the three-year contract.
Also important to management was an agreement to set limits on what could be unlimited, non-compensable work expectations associated with the principal and assistant principal duties. According to the union, the district has agreed to a framework of 40 hours per week with flexible breaks for additional hours. It is not clear whether all the details of this offer have been finalized.
UTLA said the average wage increase for its members is 13.86% over the two-year agreement period.
In its proposal, UTLA sought a steep increase in the automatic “step and column” raises teachers already receive based on years of experience and additional education credit. The union on Sunday said that the important goals in this area have been achieved.
The union also wanted to increase the annual salary of a new teacher. Under the agreement, this payment will increase immediately to $77,000 from $68,965, an 11.7% jump.
UTLA said the increase is necessary to reduce the effect of inflation on an already high-cost region. If a raise results in better teacher retention, then the district and students will benefit as well – as long as the raise is affordable.
Other UTLA proposals include adding more than 450 potential counselors, psychological social workers, school psychologists and counselor positions and better controlling class sizes for students with disabilities — including more pay for teachers whose classes exceed the maximum.
