In a union town, Sacramento teachers have allies in power as their strike continues

Five years ago as Sacramento schools careened toward the first teacher strike in decades, Mayor Darrell Steinberg put his own political capital on the line to broker a deal between the administration and educators.

The intervention worked, keeping schools open and buying labor peace in the financially troubled Sacramento City School District until a one-day walkout in 2019.

Now, with the Sacramento City Teachers Association and classified staff represented by SEIU Local 1021 on an “open-ended” strike, Steinberg and other elected Sacramento leaders largely are staying out of the dispute aside from issuing neutral statements urging the two sides to reach a deal.

“To all of Sacramento’s hard working teachers,” Steinberg wrote Thursday on Twitter. “Like the kids you serve, you have been through so much these past years. I hope that these issues get resolved quickly, and that the results are fair and recognize how important you are to Sacramento and our children.”

Others are embracing the unions’ side. City Councilwomen Katie Valenzuela and Mai Vang spoke at a strike rally on Friday. Former state Insurance Commissioner and current state Senate candidate Dave Jones joined the teachers earlier in the week.

Those positions on the strike — neutral or siding with the unions — reflect the labor-dominated alliance that tends to win elections in Sacramento.

Steinberg, the former California state Senate president, began his career as an attorney for the California State Employees Association, a union that represents California state workers. It’s now known as SEIU Local 1000.

Jones has a competitive election seeking a Senate seat against Sacramento Councilwoman Angelique Ashby. Labor organizations would give him important boots on the ground for his campaign.

Valenzuela and Vang are on the council’s left wing, with each well-known as advocates for working people. Vang is also a former Sacramento City Unified school board member.

Valenzuela at a strike rally on Friday said she sat in on bargaining this week. She commended the teachers for working on the “front lines” throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and praised their solidarity.

“This district did not act like they did not want this strike to happen,” she said, referring to the bargaining she observed. “It’s almost like they did not think that the teachers and the classified staff would stick together.”

What do Sacramento parents want?

Across the region, many parents have grown frustrated with the district and union leadership.

“It’s not clear if they are being deprived of fair compensation/benefits/working conditions compared to other districts,” said district parent Sarah Allred. “It seems like there is some very technical nitpicking of vague contract language that can be endlessly disputed by either party.”

But it’s rare to hear those critiques from people in power in Sacramento. Democrats own supermajorities in the Capitol, and they’re just as dominant in local politics.

Bill Wong, a recently retired Democratic political consultant, said Democrats generally do not want to criticize unions because they share the same values.

About 15% of California workers belong to a union. Union membership is especially high in the public sector, such as in schools and police departments. Labor movements are strong, too, in deep blue cities like Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles and Sacramento.

Democratic leaders “don’t want to undermine the philosophy of why (unions) exist,” Wong said.

Some conservatives worry that Democrats’ political considerations take dominance over parents’ concerns.

Lance Christensen, a former chief of staff to a Republican state senator, is planning to run for state superintendent in part to raise concerns about labor. He now works for the California Policy Center, a libertarian organization that is critical of public employee unions.

“We have yet to see a Democratic legislator stand up and really demand accountability of the poor practices they have,” Christensen said. “The party is basically paid for by the teachers union, and they know this. They don’t want to go sideways with this.”

The California Teachers Association, which represents some 300,000 public school educators, often flexes its muscles in school board races and in statewide elections. It backed California Superintendent Tony Thurmond in 2018, helping him defeat Marshall Tuck.

Tuck was a well-funded candidate who had support from charter schools, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and the late philanthropist Eli Broad. Unions put up more than $12 million to help Thurmond. Thurmond is up for re-election this year.

Labor fact-finding report favored teachers union

Christensen said labor’s might extends to the California Public Employment Relations Board, the agency charged with giving independent opinions on labor disputes in government agencies.

“PERB exists for the purpose of protecting unions, and school administrators have a difficult time navigating that process, especially when the rulings are extra-judicial and can cut out the court system entirely,” Christensen said.

It became involved in the Sacramento teacher dispute when the school district in December declared an impasse in bargaining over its COVID-19 health and staffing plans. That declaration triggered a review by an independent fact-finding panel with the Public Employment Relations Board.

The fact-finding panel consisted of three people: teachers union representative John Borsos, district representative John Gray and the neutral chair, Joe Lindsay.

That made Lindsay the deciding vote on the panel. He issued a report this month that largely backed the union’s position on COVID-19 while also calling for the district to give teachers a cost-of-living wage increase.

Teachers union leaders have hailed Lindsay’s report, calling it a neutral assessment that the district should accept in full.

Lindsay comes from a background in labor. He had worked as a union negotiator for the California Nurses Association for years.

He was appointed to the fact-finding panel with support from the Sacramento City Unified School District. Both sides — the school district and the union — had to agree to his selection.

But two weeks earlier, the district later scolded Lindsay in a letter contesting his decision to consider salary and benefits as part of the fact-finding report. The district contends salary negotiations belong in a different set of bargaining with the teachers over a new contract, not the COVID-19 spending dispute.

“The current COVID and Reopening Negotiations and PERB Impasse Determination have never involved compensation, benefits, and other general economic items like “staffing” in the District. The COVID and Reopening Negotiations relate only to the 2021-2022 school year and issues related to the pandemic specific to this school year,” a school district attorney wrote to Lindsay on March 4.

In the final report, Lindsay stated that “issues of wages and benefits are clearly relevant to recruitment and retention of staff.”

School district turns down superintendent’s offer

Thurmond attempted to bring together the district, unions, Sacramento Office of Education and the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team on Friday. District Superintendent Jorge Aguilar turned down Thurmond’s offer.

“Because this is a local issue, we do not want to circumvent the appropriate process for reaching agreement with our local labor partners,” Aguilar said. “That process calls for the district to meet with SCTA to resolve these issues and bring an end to the strike.”

Steinberg negotiated between the district and Sacramento teachers union three times, twice while he was on the Legislature.

“You try to help the parties find a middle ground, and there are a lot of people who can do that,” Steinberg said. “It only happens if the parties themselves have some willingness to talk to one another.”

This story was originally published March 26, 2022 at 5:25 AM.