A teacher's strike is on the horizon

What's on the line? A lead UTLA negotiator spells it out for NBD.

This week, I had my friend Erik Abriss—who you may know as either a mutual aid organizer, comedy producer, or just a good pal—interview one of UTLA’s bargaining leads about the impending teachers’ strike. I’m trying something a little different this week: you’ll read Erik’s conversation after the news digest, and this weekend’s events at the bottom.

Next week we talk about running, clowning, and an ALTCHELLA weekend event guide.

Got tips, feedback, story ideas? Email me at nobaddaysinla@proton.me

LA Public Press’s Pheonix Tso obtained 200 pages of emails between LA Public Library staff and administrators discussing the cancellation of Read Palestine Week. In the emails, a staff librarian accuses Palestinian children’s book writer Jenan Matari and Jewish-American writer Nora Lester Murad of “anti-Jewish hate”.

A Rabbit’s Foot talked to Otessa Moshfegh about Los Angeles, which has been her home since 2011, in their California issue. “Los Angeles had this lightness and magic to it that felt strange and foreign,” she said about moving here. “I didn’t understand the place, but I sensed there was space here. It felt literally like there was room for me.”

Have you seen these anti-ICE parking signs around town? They read, “NO I.C.E. Please get a real job,” and they’re showing up around places like Solarc Brewing in Glassell Park and Downtown LA. The anonymous artist talked to LA Taco about the guerilla art project.

Elizabeth Chou reports on the temper tantrum Zach Sokoloff (who has billionaire backing) is throwing because the city decided to grant incumbent Kenneth Mejia matching funds. Sokoloff has outraised Mejia’s campaign by 5-to-1. Mejia’s campaign manager told LA Material: “This guy has all of the money in the world. He has donations from so many billionaires. And he’s trying to block a grassroots candidate who clearly doesn’t have as many wealthy donors from unlocking matching funds.”

The beloved Samosa House closed its Santa Monica Main Street location after inspectors dinged them for “unsafe food temperatures.” A number of other Santa Monica established like Coffee Commissary and Elephante have closed and reopened over the last few months after health inspections. Man, Santa Monica is really going through a rough time.

There have been a lot of headlines about restaurant closures, but a closer look at the data shows that LA is actually experiencing a restaurant renaissance. “758 new restaurants opened last year, surpassing the previous record set in 2024, when 729 restaurants opened.”

Saying goodbye to Bernie’s Coffee Shop: “I’ve never seen anything like it before, and it opened up my imagination for what is possible.”

On the subject of rest stops, an effort to save Pea Soup Andersen’s from demolition has failed. Pea Soup Andersen’s closed suddenly in January 2024, just months shy of its 100th anniversary. Every California kid with a road-tripping family has memories of stopping there for a bowl of electric green pea soup.

Chef Ifrah F. Ahmed was interviewed for The Cut and Vogue over the last week! She’s the guest of honor at the first No Bad Days IRL event, in conversation with Angel Dimayuga, at Flavors from Afar on April 17. There will be free refreshments prepared the Michelin-recognized team at Flavors and a vinyl DJ set. Don’t forget to RSVP at nobaddaysinla@proton.me.

This interview was written and conducted by Erik Abriss, whose new newsletter, A General Inquiry, will feature labor-focused interviews about the history and future of the general strike.

In February, the union representing over 35,000 public educators in Los Angeles (UTLA) saw a resounding 94% of their membership vote YES on authorizing a strike on April 14.

UTLA is demanding a new contract with increased wages, improved supportive staffing ratios, AI guardrails, and greater protections against the increasingly escalatory attacks by ICE on immigrant students and their families. But with time running out, LA Unified School District negotiators aren’t playing ball.

LA Unified itself acts as if they’re cash-poor (they aren’t) and can’t accommodate the spending teachers argue is needed to restore the school system to the kind of social foundation that serves and benefits the broader public rather than private concerns (they can).

On the heels of historic educator strikes in San Francisco and Sacramento earlier this year—not to mention an FBI raid on LA Unified School District superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s offices—I spoke with one of the bargaining leads on UTLA’s staff, Julie Van Winkle.

Van Winkle currently serves as vice president for the teachers union’s national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers. She was a middle school math teacher in the late 2000s in both nonunionized charter schools and LAUSD public schools when the district’s RIF (Reduction in Force) policy enabled mass firings of highly credentialed teachers. Van Winkle and her colleagues were forced to become substitute teachers in the same classrooms that they were once full-time, salaried employees. “That’s what radicalized me,” she recalls.

Those old battles—against precarity, against a systemic lack of dignity and protections on the job—inform the new. And UTLA having organizers like Van Winkle in leadership positions is why the union stands out for having the kind of militant character that is mostly missing in the American labor movement. On Monday, March 30th, Van Winkle hopped on the phone to discuss exactly what the teachers union is fighting for in this new round of contract negotiations, schools as sites of resistance against the deportation regime, the creeping hand of privatization, and what is on the line for the future of public education.

NBD: What are the key demands that UTLA is fighting for?

Julie Van Winkle: We’re predicting a teacher shortage. As we’ve seen across the country, the cost of living keeps getting higher and higher. People are having a hard time retiring when they expect to. So, one of our economic demands is for the district to revamp our pay scale. It’s hard, expensive, and time-intensive [for teachers] to get all the training credits [they need for salary increases], which especially leaves educators who are single mothers behind.

Our demand is to decrease the number of units required to max out and to just have even intervals across the pay scale. Because right now it’s all over the place: From your first year of teaching to your second year, your pay only increases by 0.12%. We want to standardize it so that it’s even percentages across and down the salary point boxes.

You know, when I started teaching in the late 2000s, people would complain about how difficult it was for teachers to be able to buy a house, and it was true then too. It has always been difficult for teachers to buy their own homes. But now? Even being able to rent your own apartment anywhere within the district boundaries is a harder and harder thing for our members to achieve. 20% of our members are housing insecure. So, our demand is to raise the beginning teacher salary from $65,000 up to $80,000 and then to adjust everybody else accordingly.

NBD: And beyond salary scales?

Julie Van Winkle: We also have social and workplace culture demands, too. We want the district to invest in more psychiatric counselors, social workers, and school psychologists. These are the mental health professionals that our students really need right now. We’ve had our schools and communities be terrorized by ICE. There are still effects of the pandemic that are being felt and seen in the classrooms, right? And most schools don’t even have a full-time social worker on hand. So if a kid is going through a crisis, there’s not necessarily an adult who’s trained on how to handle it and help them. While the district has not met us where we need them to meet us in regard to salary demands, they’ve at least engaged with us about it. But hiring these extra mental health supports? The district has not even acknowledged our proposal. Like, they have just fully rejected it the whole time during these negotiations.

We also have a proposal to get arts and PE teachers full-time at our elementary schools. Right now, the elementary teacher is responsible for teaching all the academic subjects, giving a grade for art, and doing everything related to physical education. Just think: this is L.A. This is one of the art meccas of the country. There should be art teachers at elementary schools full-time. It’s impossible and unfair to ask teachers to handle the workload of all the core subjects, plus art, plus PE at a high expert level. Most other school districts have, per student, more arts teachers. So we just want L.A. to use the millions of dollars it got from the state through Proposition 28 to fund more robust arts programs and PE programs in our elementary schools.

LA Unified gets around $70 million a year from Prop 28. And I know last year they left almost $30 million unspent. And so we’re, like, just spend this money! It’s there! Hire more arts teachers! But, again, the district has not even entertained our demand on this.

NBD: ‘The money is there.’ This has been the most consistent and persuasive messaging from the union, one that really highlights the contradictions across the district’s budgetary mismanagement. The district itself admits it’s sitting on an unrestricted $5 billion cash reserve, then claims it can’t afford to fix the broken salary system or spend on staffing needs, all while dishing out billions on private third-party vendor contracts.

Julie Van Winkle: It’s very frustrating talking to them about numbers. Our bargaining team had a meeting with the district’s chief financial officer who admitted that our numbers are accurate. They did admit, yes, we have over $5 billion in reserve. The district has about 35% of its annual intake in reserve, which is much higher than any other district in the state of California, probably than most or all districts in the whole country. We have found that since Alberto Carvalho came in as superintendent, there’s been somewhere around $10 billion in contracts with private companies that have been established.

Now, after we made that claim, the acting superintendent, Andres Chait, held a press conference the next day to say, “No, no, no, that’s not true. We’ve only spent $700 million in contracts.” So while it’s true that they’ve only spent the $700 million, they still have that other $9 billion and change held in a category that the district calls “committed.” They also have another bucket of money called “restricted.” Their excuse is that they can’t spend any of that cash on contracts with unions because it’s already been committed to all these other subcontractor line items. It’s just these different buckets of money that the district is arbitrarily putting things in. We just feel this is not being done in the most transparent way.

NBD: I’m sorry but that is insane and sounds…legitimately criminal?

Julie Van Winkle: You know, the really sickening thing is that they do this with books and supplies, too. The district always grossly overestimates how much their books and supply budget will be. They’ll budget upwards of a billion dollars every year for them, and then they usually end up spending, maybe, $500 million or less. So less than half of what their projected amount is. And you might be wondering, “Why would they do that?” And the answer is because the district’s bond rating is higher if you have more money in the reserve. So it’s being run like private equity, just prioritizing a bond rating. It’s more beneficial to the district to have all this money in reserves, and it’s really criminal that, like, there are kids right now at our schools right now that don’t have toilet paper and soap in the bathrooms because the district’s trying to get a better bond rating. This is the public’s funds! Funds mostly from the state, some from the federal government. Unfortunately, our system favors large corporations and private equity and bond markets more than it does making sure that students have art teachers.

NBD: How is the union responding to the creeping influence of startup logic and the tech industry’s attempts at bending public education to the AI economy’s will?

Julie Van Winkle: We have demands in our contract to limit AI encroachment in our schools. And these are things that the district is always telling us are too expensive. Except these demands wouldn’t cost them anything! In fact, it’s cheaper to use your employees instead of subcontracting out to purchase AI tech. But the district is loath to agree to those demands that we have. And I think a lot of it has to do with wanting to have all these partnerships with these tech companies because it makes for an exciting headline.

When I first started teaching, we were so worried about the digital divide, especially [about] students in lower socioeconomic situations being able to afford this new technology at their house and have a laptop. And now what I’m seeing is it’s the wealthier families in the district that are trying to shield their kids from AI. I know at some of the more affluent schools, there are parent groups that want students to get landlines so the kids could call each other and not have to have a smart phone. So now it’s, like, a privilege to be sheltered from the digital landscape and all of this AI tech. I, as a union negotiator for a contract in the district, as a steward of all of these things, feel a responsibility to put up some guardrails and protect kids from the horrible consequences of what happens when you just roll out the red carpet to let AI into the school.

And since Carvalho has come to the district, the number of private contracts has really exploded. It’s up to something like $10 billion now in the last 10 years. It’s just another example of something that is so completely fraudulent. And now we have this Carvalho scandal. We’ve been telling the district for years that you shouldn’t be taking public tax dollars and putting them into private company investments. They don’t listen to us. And then this happens.

NBD: You mentioned Superintendent Carvalho. His connection to the failed AI tech firm AllHere led to allegations of kickbacks, bribes and funneling taxpayer money to private coffers. Just last month we witnessed the FBI raiding both his home and office at the LAUSD headquarters, and he has since been put on administrative leave. Many thought this might’ve been targeted political retribution because of his outspoken opposition to Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s threats to dismantle the Department of Education, and, credit where it’s due, his open defiance of Trump’s demands for compliance with overreaching immigration enforcement. Is Carvalho’s situation one of those classic cases of both things being true: That there were elements of a politically motivated hit here but also that this is just an inevitibility of reducing a public good into a profit-center?

Julie Van Winkle: Yeah, that’s a really good way to put it. I thought the same thing that you did when we first heard about this. Like, the raid happened the day after Trump’s State of the Union address. So, I was like, “Oh, man, it seems like they’re going after Carvalho to make him into this anti-MAGA martyr,” which would not be good for our bargaining. But there’s still a lot of stuff that we don’t know. We have learned that this whole investigation started before Trump took office, during the Biden administration. [But] it could still be true that the Trump administration is taking the opportunity to use this investigation to make an example out of a political enemy.

You know, something that’s really affecting a lot of our members right now is—and this is something that I didn’t even know until these raids happened—this guy Alberto Carvalho [reportedly] owns six homes in Florida. He also owns another home in San Pedro, which, if you know about L.A., is an extremely expensive place to buy a home. So, this man owns seven homes while the average teacher struggles to be able to afford rent in L.A.

And yeah, people are complex. He’s not wrong on every single issue. Like, we do agree on a lot of our immigration protections, sure. But it’s also true that he loves to have photo ops and doing all these big, shiny announcements about how our students are going to get this tech chatbot. He can be opportunistic in that way. I just ultimately think it’s hard for him to empathize with our typical union member who is struggling to afford rent when he owns seven homes, you know?

NBD: Since ICE’s invasion and occupation of the city last year, student movements have emerged as one of the vanguards of opposition applying direct action against federal immigration raids. Schools have also formed as points of deterrence. Is there any other language in the new contract that would protect students, their families, and teachers from the federal government’s targeted xenophobic threats?

Julie Van Winkle: We actually have a much more specific proposal about support for immigrant students and communities. We were able to win a memorandum of understanding in our last contract negotiations in 2023 outlining protections for immigrant students, but back then the situation was a little different. It was more general. It had some language reinforcing sanctuary status. But we really felt urgency this time to be more explicit in our demands. And, you know, we have made some progress with the district in terms of getting a tentative agreement on the immigration support items. But we’ve encountered some sticking points around our demand that our members cannot be disciplined for refusing to cooperate with an ICE agent. We just had a meeting with the district last week about this where we said, “What is your hesitation with this?” Like, at the very least, this would be a good PR move for you to agree to! And they said, “Well, we can’t agree to something that might contradict federal law.” We reminded them that a contract doesn’t contradict federal law. And if federal law ever changed in way that then caused the language to be in conflict, then the district still wouldn’t get in trouble for following federal law.

I think it’s really important to have that language in our contract because of how dangerous and difficult it is for anyone, especially teachers, to be in a situation where you open your door, see an armed ICE agent who’s demanding to speak with someone in your care, and having the moral clarity and courage to say no. But having that language in black and white would protect them even further from refusing to obey an ICE agent if they ever found themselves in that horrible situation.

NBD: Do you see any reality where a tentative agreement is reached and the strike that has been authorized for April 14 can be called off? Is there anything community members can do to apply pressure to the school board?

I am an optimist, sometimes to a fault. We have seven members on our school board. There are some of them that would agree to all our demands right now and just get this done with. And while others on the board might, you know, have some sympathy for what our arguments are, they’re not willing to give us everything we want. And the dynamic is even more complex now because Alberto Carvalho has been put on leave and we have an interim superintendent. I think of this like having a substitute teacher in the classroom—you know, the substitute teacher is not necessarily walking in there and coming up with their own crazy lesson plan. They’re just kind of trying to maintain things as they are. [Acting superintendent Chait] is just waiting until the superintendent gets back. So if this contract gets resolved before we have to go on strike, it will be because the school board proactively says, “We need to settle this right now. We need to authorize more money.” It’s in their hands.

Something that parents and community members could do is to email or call their school board member and urge them to authorize more money for our contract and for the contract of SEIU Local 99, which is the school employees union that represents workers such as janitors, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and Special Ed aides who are also scheduled to go out on strike with us. Nearly 90% percent of their members are under the poverty wage in Los Angeles and are housing insecure. So, you see that we’re not asking for crazy things. We’re asking to be able to afford to live where we work, and we’re asking for basic essentials at our schools, like toilet paper, and also more supportive staff for students like counselors and art teachers. The school board is the boss, and they have the power to settle this thing.

TONIGHT: I had the best time at a private Papi Juice party last week in New York (at which Mayor Mamdani and Rama were both present on the dance floor until 2 AM) so I deeply regret not being able to attend the LA edition of Papi Juice tonight at El Cid, featuring Brooklyn DJ Oscar NN and LA’s very own legend Bae Bae. Tickets here.

TONIGHT: Live Jazz LA at Flavors from Afar

TOMORROW: Sons and Daughters Books, a new Latino- and queer-owned bookstore, is hosting a grand-opening in Melrose with cinema-themed coffee from Cinebrew and tarot readings from author Chris Lilly. It will go from 11 AM to 7 PM at their location at 7817 Melrose Ave.

MONDAY: Live in Echo Park? Meet your neighbors at the Echo Park Mutual Aid monthly general meeting and share food, political education, and skills together.

Send events to be featured at nobaddaysinla@proton.me.