Chapo Trap House - Bonus: L.A. Teachers’ Strike

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Will talks to Betsy and Gloria, two LA public school teachers, ahead of the three-day teachers’ strike planned to begin this Tuesday. They discuss their demands, the conditions in the schools, engaging the local community, and challenges from the LA school district superintendent. Support the UTLA & SEIU 99 through the links here: https://linktr.ee/ctowne1115?utm_source=linktree_profile_share&ltsid=c4187339-a6f3-459a-9e58-874764f6c580

Hello, everybody. It's Will coming at you on Sunday, March 19th, with a bonus shampoo interview. By way of introducing this episode, I'll just say, it just so happens that Catherine and I watched Waiting for Guffman last night, and all morning preparing for this, I've had Parker Posey singing, teachers, pet, I want to be teachers, pet. That's right. We're talking LA Teacher Strike. And joining us now are two friends of the show who are LA Public School teachers. Please welcome Betsy and Gloria. Hello. My name's Betsy, and I'm a coordinator at an elementary school in LAUSD, a proud UTLA member, and a proud DSA LA member. Hi, everyone. I'm Gloria Gallardo, and I am a kindergarten and first grade dual language

immersion Spanish teacher. And I work in Korea town, also proud UTLA member. Thank you guys so much for joining us today. Just to give some background here, I'm just going to read a little bit from a CNN article covering the impending strike. Just to begin, it says here, our union representing school workers in Los Angeles plans to strike for three days next week with support from the district's teachers union. It said setting up what could be a shutdown of the nation's second largest school system. Cafeteria staff, bus drivers, custodians, teachers assistants, and other members of the SEIU Local 99 Education Workers United voted to approve a strike next Tuesday through Thursday after nearly a year of negotiating

with the Los Angeles United School District. So Betsy and Gloria, just to begin, can you talk a little bit about, like, you guys are UTLA? Can you talk about UTLA joining SEIU in this strike? But also more so, like, what you see as the conditions that led to the need for this labor action. Betsy, let's start with you. Okay, yeah, so as a UTLA member, I work alongside SEIU Local 99 members. Local 99 includes cafeteria workers, bus drivers, custodians, special education assistants, and other essential school workers in LAUSD. So when I heard that they've been bargaining already for 11 months, and there hasn't been any agreement from the district on an increase in pay, I thought,

oh, that sounds like what we went through in 2019. It sounds like every negotiation we've experienced where you ask for something just to survive as a worker, and the answer's no. So as UTLA members, we understand that strikes can be very effective in getting what you need as a worker and for our schools. So when UTLA members were told, hey, SEIU is going on strike, we thought, okay, let's go. It's time to use our right as workers to get what we're asking for. Yeah, SEIU is asking for a 30% raise. That may sound like a lot, but SEIU members are among the lowest paid LAUSD employees with an average annual salary of $20,000 a year. And so I work with people who are living under the poverty line, even

though they work two to three jobs. And I see that and I see how hard they work. They are caring for our most vulnerable children, our students who have disabilities who need help with feeding. They are driving our children to school and school buses. They are literally feeding the children in LAUSD and themselves are living in poverty. So this is absolutely a time to band up and get them the pay, benefits, and the working conditions they deserve. An interesting fact that I really wanted to bring up is that the SEIU contract actually expired in 2020, and they have not negotiated since 2020. So if you can imagine, we're in a very different world now. And they've had an expired contract for the last three years.

They've only just begun to negotiate it. The other thing that I think is causing, that has led to this UCP strike, this unfair practice charge strike, is the way that the district has handled the negotiations very disrespectfully with these working class workers. And the other thing that I think is making this situation even more tense is that we are living in a housing crisis, a greed crisis in Los Angeles. And a lot of these workers are renters. And the rent is horrible right now. A lot of the protections that were put in place during the pandemic have already been, have gone away. The eviction moratorium, I think, is over now. So this makes things very difficult for these workers, who a lot of them don't

even have cars. They take the bus to work. I have a worker at my school who takes the bus for like two hours every day to work in Korea town. So these people are really going through it with food prices, with inflation, with housing costs. They really need this race just to be able to subsist, not even to be able to save money, because these people are not saving money month to month, you know, they are living paycheck to paycheck. So like, yeah, I mean, as you described here, like this seems like it's really an instance of like, is LA going to have people to like drive their kids to school in a bus? Because like that, as you mentioned, that the housing conditions and inflation, things like that,

the wages are not cutting it. Betsy, you mentioned that in 2019, UTLA went on strike. How have how have you guys like, what did you learn from that experience? And what are you bringing to organizing with the SEIU? Something that UTLA members learned in 2019, including myself, was that we need the community. So when educators go on strike, when workers go on strike, it's really important that we demonstrate that the community, parents, neighbors, that they support the education workers that makes that makes school happen. So one thing we've been doing is having like meetings with parents, we've been having meetings altogether, SEIU members and UTLA members.

And we've been even, you know, making go fund me's to help support some of the SEIU members who can't afford to strike. So we just, we've learned we need the community when our superintendent in 2019, Austin Butner, he observed the power and the numbers of people that threw down for our contract campaign in 2019. He and the rest of the city just, they provided what we were asking for. They put a hard cap on school class sizes. But I don't think we could have done that without the community support. So this time around, we're also getting our communities to show up. So a little bit later, we'll talk about how people can support. But it's, it's just clear, like, we need the community, we need everyone to support these

workers in order for them to be successful and get the things that they deserve. Gloria, like, have you heard from parents in the community of the school you teach at? And how about your students as well? Like, how do they perceive all this? I think, you know, we're fortunate that we have muscle memory from the last time. There was a lot of community building and relationships that were formed through the 2019 strike. We had more time to prepare for the strike than we did this time, because this is a solidarity strike. And I've been hearing for parents that they support us, that they know how hard we work. They saw firsthand during the pandemic, how difficult it is to teach one

child, let alone a classroom full of children. You know, I've been hearing from parents that they are ready to support us again, but that they do wish that we had, they had been given more time to prepare mentally, because, you know, we didn't know the dates until this last Thursday. And I think sometimes that's okay, because now we have to build the momentum in. And through this energy, I think, you know, we'll be able to have a successful strike, I hope again. But I am hearing from parents that, you know, they understand what we're fighting for. It is a very different world than it was in 2019, even though we have a lot of the same problems, right? It's just, it's just a different place.

It's something to add is that a lot of, a lot of SEIU members and a lot of UTLA members are parents. We are the people who send our children to LUSD schools, among, you know, many other parents, but like a big portion of SEIU members send their kids to LUSD schools. So obviously, there's heavy, heavy support for these workers, because we're also parents. Yeah, no, and the point is well taken about the need for community and support and particularly parents of kids in public schools, because I think like a lot of the ways like sort of like as a bargaining tactic, like people are cleaved away from teachers and teachers unions is the idea that they're inconveniencing parents or that they're, you know, you're glorified

babysitters and like, oh, we pay you, you get some vacation, we have to be a parent all the time. But it's good to hear that, yeah, like parents definitely understand the conditions that you guys are dealing with. I want to ask you about how has this strike, how is it, how is it being covered in the LA media and like how has it been received by the LA city politicians and as well as could you talk a little bit about your school superintendent as well? Like who are the people on the other side of this equation? Gloria, do you want to start off with our superintendent? Well, if you've seen anything that the superintendent has said, you'll have seen that he's had a

very negative attitude towards us and our organizing and prior to our rally this last Wednesday, he was sending, he sent letters to parents, emails and voicemails, putting us down, apologizing because we had decided to go on strike and saying that to the parents that they don't deserve this, already trying to put them against us. And, you know, that sends a really terrible message to parents that, you know, that strikes are things that inconvenience when strikes are one of the only tools the working class has to challenge power. So, obviously the LA Times has been covering, you know, what he has been saying, but prior to this, I don't think they had been paying that much attention to the buildup.

Again, this is like SEIU strike and you got to think like why, you know, SEIU are the lowest paid workers and LAUSD. So like the attitude is sort of like the parents, the parents don't deserve to have teachers go on strike, but they do deserve to have people working at schools who like can't afford to like live in a house or buy food. Precisely. Yeah. We even have some facts that one out of three SEIU 99 employees say they have been homeless or at risk of becoming homeless while working for LAUSD. So we see, we have SEIU 99 members making about $20,000 a year. Guess what our superintendent Carvalho

makes every month? He makes about $36,000 per month as a superintendent of LAUSD. He gets paid $440,000 a year, which is higher than the president of the United States pay. He gets paid more than the president to tell SEIU 99 workers that they cannot make any more money. Yeah. He makes more than Karen Bass, our new mayor, which is absurd because he only just got here, you know, about a year ago. He makes more than Gavinor Newsome. And I think that's something that the media hadn't covered up to this point. And I don't think we were even aware how ridiculously paid he is. The other thing is that since the rally, I think

the media has been covering us very favorably because we have been able to make some movement and negotiations. We're still, you know, not done. But before the rally, LAUSD had only offered us an 8% increase and had lied about another increase saying that they were lying and saying they were going to give us a 10% increase, but they were omitting the fact that part of that increase was like a one-time bonus. But now they've decided to, they propose a 14% increase. So you could see already sort of the power of the rally and helping us with the negotiations. And you can only imagine what it will look like when we strike, right? He's trying really hard to avoid that happening. And so now that all of this stuff is happening,

now that two unions are joining together to strike, we are getting a lot of attention like we should be. And this has been a very unique opportunity. And last time, it was just us on the line. Now we have two unions. And just to be clear, you know, UTLA, we are bargaining for our own contract at the same time. So some things that UTLA, we are asking for as members, we're asking for a 20% raise. We've already been bargaining for 10 months. We're asking for fully staffed schools, nurses, social workers, counselors, librarians. We're asking for smaller class sizes. We're asking for green spaces. We want to see solar panels on schools. We want to see electric fleets

of buses. We want to see a Green New Deal for public schools. We want to fully fund special education. And we want to increase the number of community schools and LUSD that provide wraparound services to students. So UTLA, we're asking for a really robust things that will change the long-term projection and quality of LA schools while SEIU is asking for, you know, basic safety and pay and benefits. So together, we're really asking for a lot because our school district actually has about $5 billion in reserves, where that is just a ridiculous amount of money sitting there being held on to by our superintendent saying that we're on the brink of bankruptcy. All the time, we have $5 billion in the bank.

What are they doing with that $5 billion? They are sitting on it, and they are saying, oh, we need to save this for a rainy day. But so we have $5 billion in reserves. It's been raining in LA all week. Yes, it's raining now. Right. And the districts only require to have $1.96 million in reserves. And we have way more than that. They're supposed to have like $1.75 billion in reserve. And then, yeah, they just are sitting in a lot of money. And, you know, they have enough money to pay for these races for the foreseeable future and to pay for the things that we're asking for. Other districts in the surrounding area, they have teachers that get paid a lot more than

we do in LA. And so, like, it makes sense now to me that they are sitting on so much money because they are not budging when it comes to these negotiations. And they haven't, even last time, they didn't budge as much as we wanted them to, right? So, yeah, they're just hoarding money. Who knows what for, but we do know that some of that money was used by Carvalho to remodel his bathroom, his office bathroom in LA, USD. And he, you know, yeah, he remodeled the executive washroom. And I'm sure, you know, like part of his salary goes to maintaining his collection of luxury cars. Like we know him to have a Rolls Royce, some other kind of item, you know, this is no wonder, you know, no wonder we're in this situation.

I've got to ask yourself, you know, how many Bugatti's does your city's school superintendent have? I don't know. I have to look into that about New York. But I mean, you bring up the issue of how much money the LA school superintendent is being paid more than the governor and more than the president. And it has to wonder, like, why would the superintendent of, you know, admittedly the second largest school district in the country, like, why are they paying them all that money? And I think the answer is, like, in the context right now in America, and this is like both in Democrats and Republicans, I think a concerted effort to do away with public education and to break teachers unions, like all public sectors unions,

but teacher unions in particular, and to basically get rid of the Department of Education and the concept of education as a public good. And I'm wondering if you, if both of you could talk about, like, as public school teachers, like, like, like how you conceive of education as like, like as something free for all and like the virtue of maintaining excellent public schools and like, you know, like what that means for the rest of society, what it means for your kids. Yeah. So public the public school system in America is kind of like the last stronghold on public goods that we have access to. And some of our public schools are not not so great.

They're not funded. The teachers are not treated well. So if you did have a like a negative public school experience, which there's many people who have had that, it's most likely because it's been underfunded for years, far before you were even born. So we see people like Carvalho, they come in, they get huge pay, huge salaries, all the benefits in the world, they come in and they come in ready to bust unions that he came in really strong. He came in within a week, he had repealed our mask policy, which had been in place for a long time. And it's not so much that he, you know, got rid of that mask policy is that he didn't ask anyone, he didn't talk to parents, he didn't talk to educators, he didn't talk

to any school staff about what we democratically want. He just came in, he moved straight from Florida, came into California and said, get rid of these masks in our schools where we have a large number of people who are immunocompromised, they're children. So that's kind of been his leadership style is come in top down, not a lot of engagement, authentic engagement with parents or educators. If you follow him on Twitter, social media, you'll see he's always posting pictures with celebrities posting pictures with luxury cars or riding horseback or skydiving. And it's really like he's not a very approachable person. And so I too, I'm curious, why did our school board choose this person to represent the second largest

school district and the school district that has a lot of families that are living in poverty. So like you were saying, I do see this as, hey, in 2019, teachers got two, everyone liked teachers way too much when they supported them on strike, we need to bring them down a level. So I think he was brought in to check us as union members and to change and even privatize our schools more. So in Los Angeles, we have like more charters in our school district than anywhere else. And so I see this as an opportunity to underfund schools so that there's no one left to work in schools in these traditional public schools. And so we underfund them, we can't get workers, guess what, that is why charters move and charter schools will

open up, they will recruit students, they will collect all that federal money, and then they will not do what the public wants because charters are not held accountable to the public in the same way that traditional public schools are. Yeah, Gloria, what do you what is your spend on it? Well, yeah, I know, I think public schools are great. As Betsy said, they've been underfunded for decades. And so when you're criticizing them for what they are, that's wrong, you should really be criticizing society because like all the other problems like not having not having universal health care, not having universal rent control across the country, all these things affect the conditions that students have when they come to schools,

schools end up being places that where the people the adults at work, they feel like they're responsible for fixing it all. But that's not our job. Our job is to teach students. And so yeah, like Betsy was saying, our superintendent is an example of the neoliberal agenda. Already since he's come to the district, he's done things that we've never seen before. He tried to add four days for school calendar without negotiating with us. He's already collapsing some of the infrastructure that we've had in LA USD, and we've been moving certain positions. He's lying about vacancies, we had almost four, we've had like about 4000 vacancies, and he lied, he lied to the media and said that we didn't have any we do, we have a lot

of schools that are are not fully staffed, even my school is not fully staffed, not just by teachers, but also by SDIU workers, which at the most urban schools like mine, we see that's a problem. We don't have enough cafeteria workers. We don't have enough custodians. My school is actually a complex of five or six schools, a bunch. So yeah, we see how all those problems affect us day to day. I mean, I think when you think about that, I think people really need to like ask themselves what a fully privatized model of like kindergarten through high school education would actually be like, because look at higher education. And then I think people should really ask themselves, what is the loan that you would

take out to learn to read? You know, like how much debt would you be willing to go into to learn arithmetic? Because that's really what we're talking about here. And when it comes to the conditions in public schools, like people who have bad experiences in public schools or hated public schools, it's like, all the people put in charge of them are creating a situation in which they will be worse, and therefore the need to replace them will seem all the more, you know, important, right? But then like, that is why it is so important for unions like yourselves to use the power of collective bargaining and labor action to create the conditions that will is the only way now that we're going to get conditions

that are going to be make schools better. Yes, absolutely. And we know that, like, one thing I love, I have a shirt that says it, the shirt I got from when the Minneapolis teachers were on strike last year. It says, teacher working conditions are student learning conditions. So when you hear SEIU 99 workers say we need to be paid more, we need better hours so that we can afford to pay our bills, we need more staffing, we need more respect in the workplace. All of those things actually do support students. Can you imagine going into school and your teacher is or a special education assistant is so concerned about making ends meet? Do you think they will be

able to provide to you the best version of your education? Maybe not. It's hard to say how traumatic it is to live in poverty and how difficult it is to function if you can't have all your basic needs met. And so we see that our students, they are also benefiting when we have adequately paid staff. Students benefit when their class sizes are smaller. Students will be the first one to tell you that smaller class sizes are really important to student progress. But LUSD is not willing to invest in our students right now with smaller class sizes. I mean, when it comes to class sizes and the style of learning that all of the advocates

of the charter school movement, you'll notice that they send their kids to private schools with small class sizes. And it's all based on individuality and expression and art programs and stuff like that. Not some Dickensian borstal where you can't blink without getting docked or something like that. But I mean, Gloria, you mentioned that this is all part and part of neoliberalism. I think it's just the devaluation of education as something for people other than the elite. I think what undergirds all of this, because without education, they want people who are disposable, disempowered, people who are just smart enough to do the tasks that the economy

that they've created will require of the masses of people that are largely superfluous outside of the people who are accosted in privilege. Right. And that's one of the reasons why charter schools have such high turnover, because that's how they view their teachers. Usually, it's newer teachers who enter these charter schools. And I actually used to work at one. And year to year, you'd see almost half the staff leave, you know, either to another charter school or to a district school. And even those ones that have unions, even the charter school networks that have unions, their unions are not strong at all. And they easily fall prey to like union testing tactics. And I've seen

that happen even at the charter school where I worked before, where in their recent contract, they negotiated separate contracts for veteran and newer teachers, which divided the teachers in that charter network. So yeah, you know, teaching is a very hard career, but it's made just it's just made harder when we don't have these conditions that we've been talking about smaller class sizes, more supports, more teacher, more adults in the classroom. That makes a big difference in the long run. And it's very hypocritical for people who are, you know, the leaders of our, of our government, a lot of these charter CEO, they like you said, they don't send their kids to, to public schools or charter schools even

because they know those conditions are not, are not the best, you know, they're not ideal for, for helping all students learn. All right. So we're, we're recording this on a Sunday afternoon. You were set to go on strike on Tuesday, I assume negotiations will be, you know, ongoing up until the deadline. But you know, assuming you do go on strike, like what are you doing to prepare for it right now? And most importantly, for anyone listening, what can they do to, even if they're not in Los Angeles, what can they do to support, support you guys, SCIU and UTLA? At my school, we are getting prepared. We are communicating in a group chat about who's

bringing tents, who's bringing chairs, who's bringing water. We're just getting ready for the physical experience of the strike, which will be in the pouring rain, just like 2019 will be in the rain again on Tuesday and Wednesday. And so we're getting ready for the physical demands of that, which if anyone ever says, Oh, yay, I want to go on strike. It's fun. They're right. But it's also really hard. It's a lot of, it's kind of like a massive field trip with adults and, you know, the community. So we're getting ready. Get your buddy, get your buddy and sound off. Yes, buddy system is activated. We're getting ready and we have some, some ways that people in Los Angeles can support us and also ways

people outside of LA can support us. We can share the links and here's kind of a rundown of ways to support. If you're in Southern California, you can join the picket lines at your neighborhood school. We have a link for you to go through DSA LA and find a school that's convenient for you. You can also join us at our afternoon rallies. The location is TBD. So stay tuned. But we'll, we have the link there. And then also donate to tacos for trabajadores. So tacos for teachers is what DSA LA did in 2019 for our strike. And now it's tacos for trabajadores because it's tacos for workers. We're not just UTLA on strike or UTLA and SEIU on strike together. And we are going to be hungry. So get us some tacos. Yes, we

like tacos. And also we have some GoFundMe projects that UTLA chapters have put together to support the SEIU 99 members at their school sites. At my school, we were hearing that a lot of our SEIU members want to go on strike, believe in the cause, are ready to show their worker power, but they couldn't make their bills. They couldn't pay their bills if they lost three days of income. For an employee at my school site, they said that they would lose about $300 by going on strike for three days. Now $300 is huge if your income is $20,000 a year. So please throw some money at those GoFundMe's and we're going to be paying out for SEIU members to be able to strike and to express their right to withhold their labor.

Excellent. Given till it hurts, folks, all of the necessary links will be in the show description for this episode. Gloria and Betsy, if you have any concluding thoughts, please share. I just want to express gratitude for the last time people donated to us in 2019. I know your podcast has a lot of reach. This time we didn't have as long to prepare, so those donations will be clutch. We don't even know if we'll be getting donations, you know, donuts and things just because things have been so quick. So if you have changed to spare, please donate to these strike funds. Please donate to Tacos, para los trabajadores, Tacos for

workers because it's going to be a long three days for us again. And thank you for inviting us. Always a pleasure. Anything to support? Any support? The teacher is in LA, SEIU, UTLA. This will be a Taco Tuesday for the for the ages. Wishing you from all of us here at Tapa Trappas the best of luck on this. Thanks Betsy and Gloria. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much. Thanks. Bye.