Union

LAUSD Teachers, Staff to Go on Strike Tuesday, March 21

March 17, 2023 By Staff Report 2 Comments

LOS ANGELES – A possible three-day strike that would force the closure of Los Angeles Unified School District schools will begin Tuesday, March 21 the Service Employees International Union Local 99 announced Wednesday evening at a rally in Grand Park.

The union representing roughly 30,000 cafeteria workers, bus drivers, custodians, special education assistants and other workers declared an impasse in talks with the district and announced plans earlier this month to cancel its existing contract.

A new round of negotiations to attempt to avert the three-day strike is set to begin Friday with Superintendent Alberto Carvalho saying the district is prepared to improve its offer.

District officials said last week that Carvalho had made the Service Employees International Union Local 99 “one of the strongest offers ever proposed by a Los Angeles Unified superintendent.”

United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents the district’s teachers and others, totaling another roughly 30,000 workers, said its members would honor picket lines if SEIU called a strike.

SEIU-represented workers voted in February to authorize the union to call a strike if negotiations failed.

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said schools will temporarily close and warned parents to start talking now with their employers and child care providers.

“We would simply have no way of ensuring a safe and secure environment where teaching can take place,” Carvalho said. “We will give you as much advance notice as possible, but we encourage you to begin discussions with your employer, child care providers and others now.”

On Wednesday, thousands of LAUSD union workers gathered at downtown’s Grand Park for a rally, during which the Tuesday strike date was announced.

In the wake of the news announced at Wednesday’s rally, Carvalho said in a statement that, “SEIU is simply refusing to negotiate. With a historic offer on the table that was created in direct response to SEIU’s demands, and with additional resources still to be negotiated, it is deeply surprising and disappointing that there is an unwillingness to do so.

SEIU officials are asking for a 30% wage increase across the board, while UTLA has been pushing for a 20% raise. The unions have pointed to the district’s projected $4.9 billion reserve fund for 2022-23, while also citing rising inflation and housing costs.

“Workers are fed-up with living on poverty wages — and having their jobs threatened for demanding equitable pay. Workers are fed-up with the short staffing at LAUSD — and being harassed for speaking up,” Max Arais, SEIU Local 99 executive director, said in a statement last week. “We demand that LAUSD stop the unlawful activity, or workers are ready to take stronger action to protest these unfair practices. Canceling our contract is not a decision we make lightly. But it’s clear that LAUSD does not respect or value the work of essential workers in our schools.”

Union officials have said the affected workers earn an average salary of $25,000 a year and have been working without a contract since June 2020.

The union declared an impasse in negotiations in December, leading to the appointment of a state mediator.

In addition to salary demands, union officials have also alleged staffing shortages caused by an “over-reliance on a low-wage, part-time workforce.” The union alleged shortages including:

Click here to read the full article at FoxNews11

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: California Politics, school districts, Union

California Lawmakers Reject Bill to Allow Their Staff to Unionize at the State Capitol

September 2, 2022 By Taryn Luna 3 Comments

For the fourth time in five years, the California Legislature rejected a bill to allow its staff to unionize, parting with other West Coast states that have approved similar legislation to try to improve workplace conditions and offset power imbalances between politicians and their legislative staff.

The bill died after Assemblyman Jim Cooper (D-Elk Grove) initially refused to allow a vote in his committee on the final night before the lawmakers adjourned for the year. Cooper reversed his decision minutes later and allowed a vote on the bill, which failed to earn enough support for passage.

“The reason I held this is not to make these folks take a hard vote,” Cooper said when he spoke in opposition of the legislation. “So you can get on Twitter. I don’t care. You can get on Facebook. I don’t care. It’s doing what’s right.”

For decades, legislative employees have not received the same right to unionize as other private and public sector workers despite the Democratic Legislature’s close ties with unions at the state Capitol.

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 grants most private-sector employees the right to join a union and engage in collective bargaining. California lawmakers granted state employees the right to collectively bargain over pay, hours and other employment conditions more than 40 years later under the Ralph C. Dills Act of 1977, but excluded legislative staff. An attempt to include legislative workers in the Dills Act failed in 2000.

Former state Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) launched an effort in 2018 to allow legislative staff to unionize. But despite several attempts, the powerful former lawmaker failed to move the legislation out of the Assembly before she resigned from the Legislature in January to lead the California Labor Federation.

To circumvent the Assembly, where the legislation had repeatedly died, Assemblymember Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley) amended a bill already in the state Senate in May with new language to allow staff to unionize. The labor federation added the bill to its priority legislation for the year and formed a large lobbying coalition of unions representing teachers, machinists, nurses, firefighters, building trades, truck drivers, engineers, autoworkers and other occupations to push for its passage.

The only registered opponent of Assembly Bill 1577, an organization called Govern for California, argued that unionizing legislative staff could create a conflict of interest if workers are represented by a union that opposes certain legislation.

But the biggest challenge for advocates was convincing lawmakers.

In most workplace settings, employees sign cards or vote in support of forming a union, often in defiance of the company. Those dynamics flipped in the Legislature, where essentially the employer had to vote to allow workers to unionize.

“It would be like being in a normal workplace and having to write up a proposal for your boss that said, ‘Hey, you know, you’re not doing a good enough job. We need better protections. And by the way, I want you to push for it,’ ” Gonzalez said days before the vote. “It’s a really awkward position given the power dynamic.”

The Senate passed the bill by a 31-2 vote Tuesday.

“If we believe in the right to organize, if we believe in our obligation to protect and defend workers, we owe that to our staff to give them a voice in their affairs, in their working conditions and their career paths,” Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) said during the floor debate in the upper house.

In the Assembly the next day, Cooper argued the bill did not go through the proper vetting process.

The demise of the legislation Wednesday marked the third time it had failed to get out of the Assembly Public Employment and Retirement Committee, which Cooper chairs.

In a statement, Stone said his office reached out to Cooper’s committee multiple times before and after the language was introduced earlier this year.

“I have made multiple attempts, since May, to talk to the chair and address his concerns, but the chair refused to engage in discussions around his issues,” Stone said. “The message is clear. This committee trusts staff with shaping the laws that govern California, but not to bargain for basic working conditions.”

Click here to read the full article in the LA Times

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: California Politics, Gavin Newsom, Legislature, Union

Chaos In One Of California’s Largest Government Unions As VPs Lock Out Local 1000 President

March 2, 2022 By Wes Venteicher 1 Comment

California’s largest state employee union reached a new level of disarray Monday as three top officers locked the union’s president out of the organization’s Sacramento headquarters. The lockout came after the three elected vice presidents of SEIU Local 1000 took action Sunday to suspend President Richard Louis Brown. Brown said Monday he would not recognize the suspension. The effort is the latest attempt from within the divided organization to remove Brown, who was elected in May on promises of dues reductions, pay raises and major changes to the traditional way of doing things at the influential public employee union. A group of board members has been trying to strip Brown’s leadership powers since October, and filed a lawsuit last month seeking to compel the change.

Two of the three vice presidents had been working with Brown on the union’s budget and other objectives, staying out of Brown’s fight with the board members. But they began discussing suspension last week.

In a letter Sunday addressed to Brown’s chief of staff, the vice presidents said Brown “posed an immediate threat to the welfare of Local 1000.” They cited language in the union’s governing documents that allow the vice presidents to suspend the president. “Troubling patterns emerged with Brown’s actions that dismantled both transparency and democracy that members expect,” the vice presidents said in the letter. “Due to his actions, the three Vice Presidents had no alternative but to promptly step in to restore fiscal prudence, board oversight, democratic procedures, and the proper delegation of officers’ duties all required for our members’ benefit.” Brown said Monday he is still the union’s president. “This is a travesty of justice to the voting membership of Local 1000 by the VPs!” he said in a text Monday morning.

Click here to read the full article at the Sacramento Bee

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: California Politics, SEIU, Union

Unions Attempting to Circumvent the Janus Ruling

December 12, 2018 By Edward Ring 5 Comments

The landmark ruling by the US Supreme Court in the Janus vs AFSCME case has given government workers the right to not only refuse union membership, but to refuse to pay any dues or fees to that union. In the wake of this ruling, new lawsuits have been filed on behalf of plaintiffs who allege the unions are attempting to circumvent the Janus ruling.

Enforcing Provisions of the Janus Ruling

A notable example of such a case is Few vs UTLA, In this case, the plaintiff, Thomas Few, is a special education teacher in Los Angeles. Few was told that he could end his membership in the United Teachers of Los Angeles union. But even as a nonmember, the union told him that he would still have to pay an annual “service fee” equivalent to his union membership dues. Few’s position, which is likely to be upheld, is that he cannot be compelled to pay anything to a union he does not choose to join, regardless of what the payment is called.

This lawsuit and others are likely to ensure that the Janus ruling is enforced. The practical result will be that government unions lose some of their members, and some of their revenue. But how many? After all, there is a valid economic incentive for public employees to belong to their unions. In California, unionized state and local workers earn pay and benefits that average twice what private sector workers earn.

For this reason, most people refusing union membership will be doing so for ideological reasons. They will find their objections to the political agenda of these unions to be more compelling than the economic reasons to support them. But there are additional ways the unions compel public employees to remain members.

For example, in some cases, within the same bargaining unit, unions will negotiate pay and benefit packages for their members that are more favorable than the pay and benefit packages they negotiate for the non-members. In some cases in academia, only union members are permitted to sit on faculty committees that determine curricula and hiring decisions.

Challenging Exclusive Representation

This right to exclusive representation is the next major target of public sector union reformers. They argue that it is unconstitutional for public sector unions – whose activity the Janus ruling verified is inherently political – to advocate on behalf of non-members, or to represent non-members, or to exclude non-members from participating in votes or discussions on policy, or to deny non-members the same negotiated rates of pay and benefits as members, or, possibly, all of the above.

Just filed this week in the US Supreme Court is the case Uradnik vs IFO, which worked its way through the lower courts in under a year. It is possible it will be heard in the 2019 session. This case calls for an immediate end to laws that force public-sector employees to accept a union’s exclusive representation.

Kathleen Uradnik, a professor of political science at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, alleges that her union (“IFO” or Inter Faculty Organization) “created a system that discriminates against non-union faculty members by barring them from serving on any faculty search, service, or governance committee, and even bars them from joining the Faculty Senate. This second-class treatment of non-union faculty members impairs the ability of non-members to obtain tenure, to advance in their careers, and to participate in the academic life and governance of their institutions.”

There is a strong possibility that within a few years, if not much sooner, this case will be heard and ruled on by the US Supreme Court in favor of the plaintiff. If so, the future of public sector unions will be altered in ways even more significant than Janus. Unions will be prohibited from discriminating in any way against non-members who are part of their bargaining unit. They also will be powerless to stop public employees from withdrawing completely from their bargaining unit to – gasp – represent themselves in salary and benefit negotiations, something that professionals in the private sector have always done.

The Impact of Non-Exclusive Representation

An impact of a favorable Uradnik vs IFO ruling that would have even greater consequences would be if it enabled the emergence of competing unions. What if two or more unions represented a bargaining group? What if a super-union emerged whose membership welcomed government workers from an entire state, or entire profession, or the entire nation. What if these super-unions embraced a political agenda that ran counter to the left-wing agenda that has dominated public sector unions for decades?

The possibilities are tantalizing.

What if faculty members in America’s colleges and universities had the option to join a conservative union with a national membership that advocated a return to pro-Western college instruction, an end to reverse discrimination, a restoration of academic merit as the sole criteria for admission and graduation, and the abolition of divisive courses of study that offer no useful skills? What if conservative faculty members who have been silent all these years had the power of a national union to protect them from the Left?

What if K-12 teachers across America had a national union to protect them when they objected to curricula designed to turn immigrant children against the people and traditions of their host culture? What if police and firefighters across America had a national union that advocated unequivocally for a merit-based system of immigration? What if civil engineers across America had a national union that was implacably opposed to the environmentalist extremism that has doubled the cost of infrastructure projects and quadrupled the time it takes to complete them?

Enforcing Janus will begin to undermine public sector union power, which is deployed almost exclusively in the service of the Left. Enforcing Uradnik may actually create a balance of power between public sector unions that lean Left vs Right, and that, in turn, would represent a seismic shift in the political landscape of America. At the least, it would neutralize the tremendous boost that public sector unions have given the political Left in America. At most, it might create a hitherto unthinkable consensus in America that public sector unions are indeed inherently political, and have far too much political influence, and must be subject to draconian restrictions including losing the right to collectively bargain, if not complete abolition.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Janus, Los Angeles, Union, UTLA

Supreme Court could free public employees from being forced to pay union dues

June 30, 2017 By Larry Sand 5 Comments

The Friedrichs lawsuit should have done the trick. The case — full name: Friedrichsv. California Teacher’s Association — which would have made belonging to a public-employee union optional as a condition of employment nationwide, was set to pass muster with the Supreme Court last year. But when Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, the almost certain fifth and deciding vote went with him, thus keeping half the country’s government workers forcibly yoked to unions.

But now a case similar to Friedrichs is upon us. On June 6, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation asked the Supreme Court to hear Janus v. AFSCME, a case involving plaintiff Mark Janus, a child-support specialist who works for the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services and is compelled to send part of his paycheck to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, even though he says that the union does not “represent his interests.” Right-to-work proponents are optimistic that the Court will hear the case and that Neil Gorsuch, Scalia’s replacement, will come down as the fifth vote on the side of employee freedom and overturn the 40-year-old precedent established in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court held that states may force public-sector workers to pay union dues, while carving out an exception for the funds that unions spend on political activity. Not surprisingly, the squawking from the union crowd has already begun. At Education Week, Mark Walsh refers to the litigants as “anti-union.”

The Janus case concerns only compulsory dues, or what the unions euphemistically refer to as “fair-share” payments. The Economic Policy Institute, an organization with strong ties to organized labor, claims that prohibiting fair-share payments could “profoundly affect the ability of millions of public-sector workers to improve their wages and working conditions and further the wage stagnation dragging down the economy.” But EPI is on thin ice here. First, the case will not affect unions’ ability to collectively bargain for their members. Second, between 1995 and 2015, the seven states with the highest private-sector job growth were all right-to-work, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics. Additionally, Mackinac Center director of labor policy F. Vincent Vernuccio and reporter Jason Hart point out that “from 2012, the year Michigan passed right-to-work, until mid-2015, incomes in Michigan rose over nine percent, faster than the national average.” Former research fellow in labor economics at the Heritage Foundation James Sherk explains that “studies that control for differences in costs of living find workers in states with voluntary dues have no lower — and possibly slightly higher — real wages than workers in states with compulsory dues.”

Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard Law School professor specializing in labor law, calls Janus part of “an aggressive litigation campaign aimed at undermining unions’ ability to operate by forcing them to represent people for free.” In fact, the only laws that compel a union to represent all workers are on the books at the behest of the unions. As teacher union watchdog Mike Antonucci writes, “The very first thing any new union wants is exclusivity. No other unions are allowed to negotiate on behalf of people in the bargaining unit. Unit members cannot hire their own agent, nor can they represent themselves.”

Even if the Court decides to hear the case, a decision in Janus is most likely a year off. But the unions are planning for the worst-case scenario. California Teachers Association Executive Director Joe Nuñez wrote in January that the CTA should be prepared for a 30 percent to 40 percent membership drop, but then hedged, saying that he doesn’t believe that the decline would be that dramatic. (Actually, CTA has been anticipating a post-Abood world for several years. In 2014, the union cooked up a PowerPoint presentation called “Not if, but when: Living in a world without Fair Share.”) New York City teachers’ union leader Michael Mulgrew says that a national right-to-work outcome is inevitable. “We are going to become a right-to-work country. We are preparing for what we will do when that happens on the state and city levels. It depends on the provision in the laws and what states can do within that law — some states sign up members every year, others sign once.”

But whatever the membership drop might be, it will be damaging to the unions and could have widespread ramifications. And perhaps no group will be more affected than the Democratic Party. Naomi Walker, an assistant to AFSCME president Lee Saunders and a former Obama administration appointee, said that Janus “could undermine political operations that assist the Democratic Party.” She added, “The progressive infrastructure in this country, from think tanks to advocacy organizations — which depends on the resources and engagement of workers and their unions — will crumble. We need the entire labor and progressive movements to stand with us and fight for us. We may not survive without it — and nor, we fear, will they.”

It’s worth noting that in Wisconsin and Michigan, two recent entries in the right-to-work column, teachers’ union participation is down considerably. Wisconsin’s NEA affiliate has lost almost 60 percent of its members and Michigan about 20 percent thus far. The loss of these unions’ political clout certainly was a factor in giving Donald Trump narrow victories in both states. Should the Court decide for Janus in Janus, neither the apocalypse nor utopia will be upon us, but much will change. Most notably, many government workers will have much freedom than they have now, and the Democratic Party won’t have the same bundles of cash flowing from union piggy banks.

Larry Sand, a retired teacher, is president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network and a contributor to City Journal’s book, The Beholden State: California’s Lost Promise and How to Recapture It.

This piece was originally published by City Journal Online

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Abood, Friedrichs, Larry Sand, Neil Gorsuch, Union

Union-backed organizations trying to dupe voters and taxpayers

April 7, 2015 By Jon Coupal 3 Comments

Because of Proposition 13, the unions representing California’s government employees — employees that are the highest paid in all 50 states according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — have a huge stake in who is elected to the state Legislature.

While most Californians are aware that Proposition 13 limits increases in property taxes — they can be increased by 2 percent annually — they are less familiar with the requirement that new or increased state taxes receive a two-thirds vote of each house of the Legislature. Proposition 13 authors Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann included this provision because they feared that if they were successful in saving taxpayers money, lawmakers, no doubt with union support, would turn around and attempt to increase the tax burden in other areas.

So the government employee unions are constantly working hard to increase their support in the legislature, with the goal of achieving a super-majority of compliant lawmakers to increase taxes and make even more money available for payroll. This explains why the government unions have been making all-out efforts in special elections that are often overlooked by the general public.

For example, government union leaders have ramped up their efforts to influence the outcome in the upcoming May 17th special election for a vacant senate seat in the Bay Area. Although the race is between two Democrats, they fear the election of Orinda Mayor Steve Glazer, a self-described fiscal conservative and social progressive. His experience in city government has taught him the importance of responsible budgeting, and this, to the unions, is intolerable. To assure his defeat and the election of union compliant Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, they are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of union dues to finance a mailing from a group calling itself “Working families Opposing Glazer for Senate.”

The problem is that the unions apparently do not want those who receive the mailing to know who is paying for it. State law requires that the top two contributors of more than $50,000 be listed on the mailer, but the names of the State Council of Service Employees, which gave $185,000, and the California School Employees Association, which gave $75,000 are nowhere to be found. Glazer has filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission, but more voters will see the misleading mailers than are likely to hear of a FPPC decision, and the damage is done.

Government employee unions being shy about public exposure is not unusual. Unions back a number of organizations that at first glance appear to be looking after taxpayers’ interests. In San Diego, they have set up the Middle Class Taxpayers Association that has opposed pension reform.

And, of course, there is the California Tax Reform Association, whose president, a former ’60s Berkeley radical, is dedicated to the overturning of Proposition 13’s taxpayer protections. The group’s funding and board of directors come primarily from the government employee unions.

So when a group whose name makes it sound like a pro-taxpayer organization, or that it is representing average working folks, pushes policies that would raise taxes and the cost of government, it would be wise to look carefully for the union label.

Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association — California’s largest grass-roots taxpayer organization dedicated to the protection of Proposition 13 and the advancement of taxpayers’s rights.

Originally published by the HJTA.org

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: elections, FPPC, HJTA, Jon Coupal, SEIU, Steve Glazer, Union

California Lawmakers Reject Bill to Allow Their Staff to Unionize at the State Capitol

Unions Attempting to Circumvent the Janus Ruling

Supreme Court could free public employees from being forced to pay union dues

Union-backed organizations trying to dupe voters and taxpayers

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