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Our strike, our democracy and our movement
Our strike galvanized support for educators and public education in a transformative way. An entire city embraced us for the first time and joined our movement. The nation spoke out in solidarity. Each of you who put your heart, soul, and creativity into your picket lines and the rallies – you were the most important component of our victory. Read The Nation article on this here.
While six days and one contract can’t solve 40 years of disinvestment in our public schools, we won an enormous number of victories in this contract. It was because you were willing to strike. While the most revolutionary gain is the complete deletion of Section 1.5 on class size, which will allow for the first real program for class size reduction across all grades in 25 years, the wins on permanent nurse, counselor, and librarian positions, the shared goal of a 50% cut in standardized testing, the new policy on charter co-location, the opportunity to move towards a charter cap, and many other items, are huge. See a list of the wins in our agreement here. Yet, these victories, just like our movement, are only the first steps of a larger fight to reinvest in public education.
Over the last few years, we have built up a structure of effective communications and organizing that made this strike a success. In the world of teacher strikes, having nearly all of our members out on the picket lines is remarkable. We had more than 30,000 members and tens of thousands of parents, students and community members join us each day of the strike, regardless of the rain. That didn’t happen by accident. That happened because of your essential role in our systematic organizing work over the last several years.
In the final moments after reaching this tentative agreement, we had to make decisions quickly about the most democratic, yet efficient, way to hold a vote on the tentative agreement (TA) and on ending the strike.
We want to share with you some insight into the decision. We invite feedback, as there is no clear template for this, and as we must continue to be strategic partners as we move forward.
At 9am on Tuesday, after 24 hours of a marathon session and in the final hours of bargaining, we solidified the best possible agreement we could. In this moment, we had to make a difficult but quick decision on how and when to vote. Here were our three options:
- Have the UTLA Board of Directors call off the strike without having members vote on the issue. We did not like this option because this strike belonged to you, the members. You embraced it, you made history with it, you won historic gains with it, you moved a city and nation with it, you put your heart into it, and it should be your right to vote on whether to end it and accept the TA. Having the Board call the strike off would have seemed undemocratic to us.
- Strike a 7thday (an additional day, Wednesday) in order to educate members on the tentative agreement before voting. This would have allowed the members to vote on whether to end the strike. We gave great consideration to this, and, frankly, there would have been some advantages to being able to talk through the TA in a more relaxed way on Tuesday before voting on Wednesday. However, we were concerned about the financial impact of a 7thday striking on UTLA members, and we were unclear on whether the public would understand us striking essentially for two additional days (Tuesday and Wednesday) after a TA had been reached.
- Move to vote on the TA on Tuesday and return to class the next day, Wednesday. Use the following days, after being back at work, to do deeper education and discussion on how we will implement the agreement. This also would have allowed the members to vote on whether to end the strike. Taking this path seemed possible to us given that we still had much of the day on Tuesday to work with, with the agreement having been reached in totality by 9am.
None of the three options were perfect – each had dilemmas. After thinking about this deeply, but quickly given the urgency, we chose option 3 as we felt that it was the approach that best balanced both democracy and efficiency.
We are being self-reflective about this, and are very open to hearing your further thoughts should we end up having to strike again in the future. We need to engage these issues of strategy together, as sisters and brothers.
It is important to remember that there are two separate issues here – first, the voting process and, second, the new agreement itself, which ended up being affirmed by 81% of our members.
Regarding process, on Tuesday starting at 9am, we got voting materials to all 900 worksites within hours, and over 24,000 members ended up voting, but we were not happy with how rushed the voting process may have felt.
The new agreement itself, on the other hand, is an unambiguous win for educators, students, and parents. We look forward to diving into dialogue with members, parents, community, and students about the agreement, and how we use it to continue building our momentum from the strike. We are scheduling a series of meetings over the coming weeks to do just this.
We wanted to share our thinking with you, have strategic dialogue with you, open ourselves to your thoughts on the process, and move forward together.
From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for one of the most magnificent demonstrations of collective action that the United State has seen in decades. You are wonderful.
Yours in struggle,
UTLA Officers and Executive Director
Alex Caputo-Pearl, Cecily Myart-Cruz, Juan Ramirez, Gloria Martinez, Daniel Barnhart, Arlene Inouye, Alex Orozco and Jeff Good
Please read the summary of the TA agreement here
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