California Educators Sync Up Negotiations for More Leverage

Public school educators in 32 union locals across California are joining forces to maximize their power in a campaign called “We Can’t Wait.” It covers 77,000 educators—about a quarter of the California Teachers Association’s total membership—serving a million students.

The campaign started with 11 locals that worked to align their contract expiration dates for the end of June: Anaheim, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Natomas, Oakland, Richmond, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, and Twin Rivers. And it quickly spread from there.

Locals have organized educators to sign onto the campaign’s platform, rally before school and walk in all together, and join informational pickets. The goal is to have educators strike-ready in the fall.

“I feel like this is a historic thing we’re doing,” said high school math teacher Emilia Calderon in Contra Costa County. “Educators have had enough. We’re done waiting for these basic necessities.”

SEEDS PLANTED EARLY

Getting the contracts lined up was challenging, said San Diego Education Association President Kyle Weinberg, since each local had its own established practices and executive board. Some districts aren’t used to letting their contracts expire and were concerned about how that might impact their negotiations.

But the seeds of collaboration were planted more than a decade ago as local leaders compared notes and started to realize they were all facing similar attacks, like privatization.

Some locals began working together to establish community schools—guided by parents and educators, and tailored to meet the needs of particular areas—as an alternative to the non-unionized charter schools that were popping up in the highest-need communities.

“We were able to build those relationships by collaborating on developing a vision for what community schools could look like in California and how we were going to fight to win them,” Weinberg said.

The locals also coordinated to demand more accountability from charter schools, and later to negotiate the protocols for reopening schools after they shut down in the pandemic.

“We realized that a lot of us are facing the same issues in terms of staffing and educator pay and lack of stability for students,” said San Diego speech pathologist Sarah Darr. “And, especially with the Red for Ed movement [of 2018] as a model, we came to realize that if we combined our strength, we could have a really powerful campaign.”

BORROWING IDEAS

Darr is one of eight educators who are on full-time release to organize on the We Can’t Wait campaign. She and the others meet online twice a month to discuss issues and problem-solve, and gather in person quarterly with local presidents and union staff as part of the coalition fighting for community schools.

Bargaining team members are also meeting across locals and sharing contract language, which can be helpful for locals adopting demands that others have won.

“Oftentimes our locals are working in silos when it comes to bargaining and contract campaigns, and so being able to learn about other locals—–how their bargaining process works, their ideas for how to organize and how to have a strong contract campaign—–we’re able to really put our heads together and support one another,” Darr said.

GENUINE COMMITMENT

When the coordination starts with local presidents, engaging the rank and file can be challenging. Weinberg said it was key to talk with the boards, site reps (like stewards), and members about how aligning contracts and coordinating statewide would give the unions more power.

Councils of site reps in each local signed on to the four commitments of the campaign:

1. A shared platform
2. Aligning their organizing and escalation statewide on a common timeline
3. Focusing on building member power at the school level
4. Collaborating with families, students, community organizations, and other unions

The campaign’s shared pillars—full staffing, safe and stable schools, and competitive wages and benefits—were also brought to each local’s membership for a ratification vote.

Brittoni Ward, who is on release time in Twin Rivers near Sacramento, said they wanted members to really understand the campaign and sign on with a serious commitment to do whatever it took, including getting strike-ready, not just a “Yeah, sure.”

Gina Gray, a ninth-grade English teacher in Los Angeles, said some of her co-workers were initially uncertain about the new approach, so it took two or three conversations to get them on board. One site rep expressed at a meeting that he worried the campaign was just too big and impossible. But it clicked for him later, after she talked with him one on one.

“I could tell him, ‘These are the locals that are involved so far, and this is the power that each of these locals has; and coming together—what do you think that means for public education?’” Gray said. “Just like you’re thinking ‘This is unheard of,’ so are the people and power that we’re pushing against.”

THE ‘NO-DAYLIGHT’ CONCEPT

Another way that some locals have gotten members invested in the campaign is with open, transparent bargaining and expanded bargaining teams.

Union leaders have been working to expand the “no-daylight concept,” said United Teachers of Richmond President Francisco Ortiz—meaning no daylight between the leaders and members. Everything the leadership team hears, they bring back to their site and department representatives, who talk with members about it.

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“That’s an iterative process,” Ortiz said, meaning the steps of circulating information and gathering feedback are repeated over and over. “We’re in the messy middle of it, because this is the first time we’ve done big bargaining and connected it to something larger than our local context.” But for some members, he said, having “something that connects us all” statewide makes the campaign more exciting than ever before.

The Richmond local has expanded its bargaining team from eight members to 25 or 30, depending on the session; planning meetings can have 45 to 50 people, Ortiz said. The Twin Rivers local, with 1,400 educators, has been expanding its bargaining committee each contract cycle for a decade; the current team, averaging 40, is the largest yet, Ward said.

United Teachers Los Angeles is one of the biggest teacher locals in the country, with 34,000 active members. It began expanding its bargaining team in 2019, physical education teacher Denisha Jordan said, as part of a push to engage the community, make bargaining more transparent to members, and make demands that promoted the common good.

“We went from having a team of initially eight people to 16 people, to last bargaining session we had a little over 80,” Jordan said. “And then this bargaining session, we have up to 140. We found it super-valuable to have so many voices.”

‘EVERYONE IS AN ORGANIZER’

The We Can’t Wait campaign emphasizes “giving our members the power to organize themselves and really feel like they are a part of the campaign,” said Natomas Teachers’ Association member Nico Vaccaro, another member-organizer on release time.

It’s “a big shift” in the union’s approach, Vaccaro said, to move away from the “service model,” where “you go to the union leadership and they solve your problems.”

Vaccaro tells members, “Everyone is an organizer.” He has seen schools in his local that previously had no reps or communication trees build them out and become engaged. Building up those structures at the school level, so that members have the confidence to organize in their own workplaces, he said, contributes to winning at the bargaining table.

Calderon said the We Can’t Wait campaign has made bargaining more exciting. At the February kickoff, she loved making signs together with students and educators from Berkeley, San Francisco, and Oakland, and then rallying together despite the pouring rain.

“I got to meet educators from my area who are wanting the same things,” she said. “It felt very united. When there’s other people with us, it just feels like we’re stronger.”