Los Angeles Unified School District Education Workers Strike for Respect
After over a year of failed negotiations, LAUSD education workers are on strike this week, demanding full-time employment, a living wage, and the respect of their employer.
Thousands of teachers and education workers picketed Tuesday in front of the Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) headquarters downtown. Members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99 are going on strike this week following months of negotiations with LAUSD. SEIU Local 99 represents 50,000 education workers who support LAUSD as custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers and special education assistants. 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) are also striking in solidarity.
SEIU has been negotiating with LAUSD since April 2022 for better pay and more full-time employment. Eduardo Jacobo, a special education assistant who participated in the strike, explained that the strike is a direct response to LAUSD’s treatment of its education workers.
Jacobo said there have been instances of LAUSD administrators violating workers’ right to unionize by restricting their access to meetings.
“When we were trying to see how many people wanted, you know, to talk about adjusting our liveable wage, some managers would lock the doors and not let some members into the break room so they can talk,” he said. “Administrators would come and sit in the break room with us, to see what's going on, to see who’s coming in, who’s talking to who.”
Jacobo also said that some members were threatened with job loss if they participated in union activities. While he said he is “hopeful, in reality, how we were met was with harassment, with disrespect and threatening.”
The strikers are asking for respect from LAUSD as they negotiate better employment conditions. Amalia Flores, an educator at Brooklyn Early Education Center, had a lead role in organizing union members at her school.
“We notice that LAUSD, they’re bringing high school students, college students, to work two or three hours,” she said. “They pay them $16 an hour and I don’t think it’s fair when we’ve been working there 25 years, and we're only at $18 an hour. That’s a slap in the face.”
The hardest part, Flores said, is convincing education workers to join the strike.
“A lot of them say, ‘You know what, it’s three days, I don’t think I can afford it.’ ‘I’m a single parent, you know what, I have a lot of bills,’” she said. “Well, you want more money? You want better wages? We need to do this.”
Citlalli Perez, a special education assistant at Lankershim Elementary School and single mother of two children, was at the strike because she hasn’t had a pay raise in the last 10 years.
“I end up going home very tired,” she said. The poor pay has caused persistent understaffing, leaving employees with additional work.
“I’m a sole provider. And for so many years, I have actually struggled financially,” she said. Perez said that she has to work three jobs to support her family, leaving her with little time to spend with her two children.
The strike will continue until Thursday, with organized picketing at schools and LAUSD offices around the city. Jacobo explained that if the strike is not successful, the “next step forward would be an economical strike … where we just walk out and we don’t come back.”
“We’re literally here fighting to keep our jobs … I believe that we’re all here for the children,” Jacobo said. “We work for the children.”