US, Black Rose Anarchist Federation: AN EARLY DEATH FOR THE LA TEACHERS' STRUGGLE?

For once in my life, let me get what I want, Lord knows it would be the first time ---- 
Morrissey ---- United Teachers Los Angeles, the union for 31,000 public school teachers in 
Los Angeles, announced late Friday that it had reached a tentative contract settlement 
with the LA Unified School District in the final hours of mediation. ---- The settlement 
offer itself is a step forward from what had been on the table days ago, but still 
underwhelming. While most of the language remains unreleased, it's clear that UTLA could 
have won more if they had kept fighting and not given up at this critical moment. The 
question is, why didn't they keep fighting? And why hasn't the left in UTLA, which is 
larger and more organized than in almost any other LA union, been able to push for an 
alternative path? The past year of this three year contract fight was marked by a new, 
more militant union leadership elected by a reform caucus, that promised to take the 
example of the Chicago Teachers Union and organize for a strike to win the schools LA 
students deserve. So why suddenly rush to settle for something so far short of that 
instead of fighting to win?

During the years of the financial crisis, Los Angeles teachers sacrificed immensely as the 
state, city and district balanced the budgets on their backs. The last time teachers had a 
raise was 2007. In the meantime, the cumulative rate of inflation has been about 14%, 
meaning that teachers have seen a large effective wage cut since 2007. The cost of living 
in LA has gone up even more than that, with the average rental rate in LA going up by 
about 50% (not inflation adjusted) to $2000. Now that LAUSD's budget is rapidly growing 
once again, it is time for teachers to get back what the lost in the past 8 years - and 
then some, given that the teaching profession had already been underpaid before the crisis 
hit. The new settlement offers a 10% raise over the first two years of the three year 
contract, and then re-opens the contract for further salary negotiations in the third 
year. This is much better than LAUSD's last offer of a 5.5% salary increase, but given how 
much teachers have sacrificed, and how this still doesn't restore teachers' salaries to 
what they had been, it seems reasonable to keep pushing for UTLA's original demand of a 
17.6% raise.

The settlement offers the first official class size cap for LAUSD. However, what this cap 
is has not yet been announced. The last word that teachers inside UTLA heard was that it 
would be set so high as to affect almost no classes, thus making it more of a symbolic 
victory. We will have to wait until the full language of the contract is available to make 
a judgement on whether this offer is really worth settling for or not.

Another point in the negotiations is the issue of the teacher re-assignment, informally 
called "teacher jail", which is when teachers serve detention time at home or at 
administrative offices for months at a time pending investigation for discipline, which is 
a form of punishment before due process. The contract outline suggests that the union has 
accepted LAUSD's demands that this punishment tactic become officially recognized and 
managed when it should be outright eliminated.

The counselor-to-student ratio is set to one counselor for every 500 students in the 
proposed settlement. This is clearly inadequate. It's unclear how any counselor can 
provide effective individual support to 500 students. What's more, the settlement doesn't 
seem to address other issues with support staff, like the fact that therapists for special 
needs students are having to cover 17 or more schools each.

Meanwhile, more than 600 UTLA members have recently received notices from the District 
that they could be laid off. This has not been addressed at all by the union.

All of this in the settlement is much more than LAUSD had initially offered teachers. It's 
clear that UTLA has won small victories by pushing the struggle this far. UTLA has been 
without a contract for three years, and it has only been in the past year, as the union 
started organizing their base for the first time, that LAUSD budged at all. By beginning 
to mobilize teachers, by speaking about building for a strike, by bringing thousands of 
teachers out to the rally in Grand Park, by expanding their demands and by the faculty 
meeting boycotts, the union was able to force concessions.

But if LAUSD was moving this much at the bargaining table before negotiations had reached 
the final fact-finding stage, and before UTLA had taken a strike vote, how much more could 
UTLA have won for teachers, for our schools and for our city, if they had really committed 
themselves to building a movement for the schools LA students deserve (a movement that has 
to go far beyond the limited and fatally flawed process of collective bargaining and 
contract negotiations)? If instead of rushing to settle, they had fought to win? UTLA was 
organizing around a plan to strike to win their demands, inspired by the Chicago teachers' 
strike, which would have been their first strike since 1989. But the UTLA leadership never 
gave the membership a chance to decide on whether to strike or not, or on what the 
campaign for the contract would be at all. Instead the one choice and input that LA 
teachers will have is whether to accept this settlement or not.

UTLA had clearly decided against a strike even before they had reached their settlement. 
It seems that they didn't win this offer from LAUSD, decide that it met their minimum 
demands (actually, the union never once articulated a specific set of minimum demands), 
and then choose to call off the strike in favor of settling with the offer; more likely is 
that the UTLA leadership wielded the threat of a strike as an empty rhetorical weapon to 
shake up both the union's base and LAUSD, and had already decided that they would take 
whatever offer they could get at the end of mediation.

During their contract fight, UTLA drained their strike fund to hire more staff organizers 
and to fill their political fund for the upcoming school board election. While continuing 
to claim in the last few weeks that the union was escalating in preparation for a strike, 
UTLA was actually de-escalating, calling off a major public action at the beginning of 
mediation and instead having a smaller silent indoor protest demanding that LAUSD "settle 
now". From the leadership's words and actions, it has seemed like they were accepting 
defeat before the battle had even begun - which of course is the surest way that they can 
guarantee defeat.

What is most remarkable is the response to the settlement from the many leftists within 
UTLA. Many teachers who are members of revolutionary anti-capitalist organizations seem to 
have lost any critical perspective of decisions being taken by the union leadership to 
back down from this fight. Instead of having discussions about what kind of vision for 
education we all need to be fighting for, and how we can fight for that vision, the 
discussion among most leftist union activists has been limited to how the decisions of the 
leadership can be carried out. Before the settlement had been announced on Friday, before 
anyone knew what would be in it, the main discussion among the militant union activists of 
the reform caucus was how to sell a yes vote on the predicted settlement to the 
membership. Union leadership came to the emergency caucus meeting on Thursday with the 
message that there would be a settlement soon, and it was the reform caucus' job to 
convince the membership to back off the strike plans and accept whatever settlement came. 
There wasn't any debate on whether a no vote would be justified, or if the union could 
gain anything more by continuing the fight - the only discussion brought up by the 
leftists in the reform caucus was why it was necessary to take the leadership's decision.

There is not a single organized, critical voice anywhere in the union that we're aware of 
raising the idea that maybe unions are stronger when they take strike action seriously, 
that maybe this settlement isn't perfect, that maybe the union should push for escalation 
instead of de-escalation, and that maybe teachers can in fact get something a little 
better with a little bit more fight.

This particular reaction to the union leadership and this absence of left opposition seems 
to be because the reform caucus that is supported by many leftist and social justice 
teachers is the caucus that elected the current leadership. The Progressive Educators for 
Action Caucus formed a slate with the Latino Caucus and the United Valley Caucus called 
Union Power to run in the UTLA officer elections in 2013. Union Power won the elections, 
and PEAC member Alex Caputo-Pearl is now the president of the union. After the election of 
the Union Power slate, Union Power and PEAC became something of a withered appendage to 
the new union leadership. Because of this they have lost most of any orientation to the 
rank and file, and have instead been politically focused on supporting the leadership.

Much like progressives who called out Bush's war crimes, then campaigned for Obama and 
became silent on drone strikes and spying because they had 'one of theirs' in office, 
reformers in UTLA would probably be calling for a no vote on the contract and a continued 
organizing push towards a strike if they didn't have their own candidates in the union 
leadership.

We're not going to get very far as grumpy spectators always saying "The union should do 
this", "The union leadership is selling us out again" - union leaderships will sell out 
union members as long as there exists a leadership separate from the whole organized body 
of workers, so that's not at all novel or surprising. But we should be aware of the traps 
in certain strategies for union organizing that lead us to situations where the rank and 
file is unable to continue organizing and agitating independently of the leadership.

What is happening in UTLA should be a warning to other union militants about the dangers 
of relying on electoral work and of not organizing to create our own independent vision of 
what we want our unions to be. Union militants should focus on building strong democratic 
rank and file organization that can move the politics of the union and that has the 
strength to push for its demands independent of the union leadership or staff. Building 
caucuses focused on union leadership elections results in weak organization, undemocratic 
decision making, and a movement that will lose its direction once the elected leadership 
doesn't behave like they had dreamed.

The UTLA leadership and most of the militants who follow them will try to claim this new 
settlement as a victory. But really it is a surrender that does not give teachers at all 
what they deserve, or what they could win. The only way to build the education movement we 
need is to fight for democratic unions that don't put their hopes in the leadership, to 
hold true to our own goals and demands, to build organization through struggle, and 
remember that no fight is won when you accept defeat before it's begun.

- By Zancudo

Black Rose Anarchist Federation / Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra.

http://www.blackrosefed.org/an-early-death-for-the-la-teachers-struggle/