This month’s four-day teacher strike, which mercifully concluded this morning, should not have caught anyone off guard. The San Francisco Unified School District and its teachers had been at loggerheads since March of last year. On Oct. 10, the two sides formally declared an impasse and ceased negotiating. In November, teachers held “practice pickets” at more than 100 schools. In early December they voted to authorize a strike by a 99 percent clip and then, in January, did so again by a nearly 98 percent clip.
So, this was brewing. For many months. Yet, Mayor Daniel Lurie this week told reporters that it wasn’t until Feb. 2 that he first called the teachers union president, just eight days before her members walked off the job.
The district, also, was caught flat-footed by things it should have seen coming. It waited so long to resolve teacher concerns over non-monetary issues like sanctuary campuses and AI, that these issues ended up consuming valuable time during strike bargaining. And the district’s contingency plans for the strike seemed to lean heavily on the ability to run some manner of programming out of school sites during a work stoppage — as the Oakland Unified School District has done during its recent barrage of educator walkouts.
But this was rendered impossible in San Francisco when the principals and administrators last week voted to sympathy strike alongside the teachers, as did SEIU-covered custodians, clerks, secretaries and food service workers.
This, too, shouldn’t have come as a shock to the district. The United Administrators of San Francisco in mid-January purportedly informed the superintendent that such a move was likely. By late January, Mission Local reported that principals would vote on whether to strike in solidarity once teachers set a walkout date. The outcome of that vote was not in question and it should’ve been clear that school facilities would be shut.
And yet, on Feb. 3, a preliminary emergency resolution gave Superintendent Maria Su the authority to call for the “use of volunteers at any school facility during an emergency.” The resolution also would’ve allowed her to hire “substitute employees” at the princely sum of up to $600 a day. The sympathy strikes — which were forewarned — imploded this contingency.
The union is tubthumping this as a big win. It received fully covered family healthcare, which was the United Educators of San Francisco’s marquee demand. This ameliorates healthcare payments of up to $1,500 a month for teachers with families. But that led to a smaller wage bump for most teachers than the union was demanding — five percent. That’s less than the six percent that was on the table prior to the fully funded healthcare offer, but more than the four percent the district subsequently countered with.
The district’s monetary issues are real: Cheryl Stevens, the primary author of the state-mandated Feb. 4 “fact-finding report” — which largely backed the district’s fiscal claims — is respected as a true neutral by both labor and management figures. If, as the district is wont to shout from the rooftops, untenable payouts lead to layoffs and contractions a few years down the road, then nobody wins.
On Friday, after a grueling week, everybody is exhausted and relieved and only saying the nicest things. But it’s clear that the district’s lack of preparation and write-the-term-paper-in-the-hallway responses put it on the back foot from the get-go.
Earlier this month, when thousands of out-of-towners descended upon the Bay Area for the Bad Bunny concert and adjunct football game, scads of chronically online people posted the same revelation: San Francisco isn’t a dystopian shithole! It’s really quite beautiful!
It turns out there is a notable gap between the ramblings of angry people on the internet and real life. Those who substitute ramblings of angry people on the internet for real life are, in fact, often taken aback when confronted with real life. Something like this appears to have happened to the San Francisco Unified School District.
On the internet, angry people were grousing about greedy teachers and the teachers strike. There were completely untenable calls to open the schools during the multi-union strikes despite the fact this was as plausible as whatever Elon Musk is going on about with AI satellite factories on the moon.
If you visited the actual school picket sites, however — and Mission Local reporters criss-crossed the city all week covering protests at schools, large rallies and even giant human messages at Ocean Beach — they were high-energy, positive and well-attended, with many families and students present and drivers honking loudly in support.
Of course not every public school family supported an agonizing work-stoppage, but the people who were backing the teachers were a lot more active and visible than the people who weren’t. That could, no doubt, have change if this strike dragged on for aeons. Blessedly, it didn’t — and it’s hard to say the district anticipated families’ largely positive initial reaction.
But that’s what happens when you substitute the internet for real life and parents groups for parents.
The district should not have misread the solid initial support for its teachers. Take a minute and think: Can you name your teachers from kindergarten to seventh grade? I can’t tell you where I left my overdue library books but I can rattle that one off. I can name all of my kids’ teachers, too (I had three public school kids home this week, exhausting their supply of “Wings of Fire” books). Parents know and, generally, like their kids’ teachers. But can you name two people who work in the district office?
There are, of course, exceptions. Maybe you hated your teachers, maybe you still do. But, at least for the one week, most parents were ready to back educators— whom they know and whom they trust with their children every day — and reserve their animus for the SFUSD, which they only hear from when it sends out simultaneous texts, emails and robocalls, but, somehow, never seems to tell you the things you really need to know.
Here’s what parents do know about the district: It failed to pay its employees, driving them out of the district or to despair; it ran an abortive and chaotic school closure process; and it has generally made hiring teachers and deploying them promptly to school sites a process more lengthy and convoluted than an Icelandic saga.
So the district missed that. It missed months of opportunities to call for bargaining, even during the mediation period. It missed the significance of the union’s “practice pickets” in November — a move that should’ve raised red flags. It, critically, was caught off-guard by the sympathy strikes, which appear to have obliterated whatever contingency plans the district had in place with “substitute employees” and volunteers on school sites.
The teachers and district had been deadlocked for 11 months and have met sparsely until recently, so the last-minute, hair-on-fire nature of so much of February’s action and inaction has been bizarre. Mayor Lurie told assembled reporters that he only reached out to the union on the cusp of its strike. Better late than never — but his call for a 72-hour cooling off period on a Sunday afternoon for a strike set to commence Monday morning came off as facile.
Prior to the Thursday night breakthrough of a fully funded family healthcare offer, much of the progress made between the teachers and the district was focused on non-monetary issues — the district’s sanctuary policy, provisions for homeless students, and an AI policy. It was — and is — mind-boggling that these issues were left unresolved until after teachers walked out.
Su has stated that the district stood to lose between $7 million and $10 million for every day of a work stoppage. So it is astounding that the early part of this week was spent hemming and hawing about these low-hanging, non-monetary issues while teachers marched on picket lines. That the district then caved on them adds insult to injury — and gave the striking teachers succor.
Dealing with these issues ahead of time would’ve would’ve mollified the communities that served as part of the striking teachers’ coalition. But the opposite happened.
During the run-up to the strike and in its early days, it felt almost as if the district was going out of its way to antagonize a workforce that needed no additional aggravation. On the cusp of the walkout, teachers, principals and others were confused and irritated to receive emails from the SFUSD with Monday “redeployment assignments” to “Staff Centers” on the first day of the walkout. It was unclear who would choose to cross the picket to show up at a “Staff Center,” and what work was to be done there.
Well now we know: District employees at A.P. Giannini Middle School, one of eight “Staff Centers,” were filmed sitting around and watching the Winter Olympics on a classroom movie screen as union members picketed outside. Perhaps they should’ve been redeployed to Dave & Buster’s.
Through it all, organized labor was watching. Police and firefighters are, at present, hammering out their contracts. It remains to be seen how cleanly that process will go, even for some of the most popular and deferred-to city workers. Next year, a multitude of contracts come undone right as the devastating effects of the president’s draconian budget bill come due.
What we saw this week appears to be a coming attraction for next year, with the possibility of coordinated strikes on the statewide level. As this unfolds, there is no one in the mayor’s inner circle with a labor background or who even seems to be familiar with the ins and outs of public sector collective bargaining.
There is going to be a lot of bargaining in the coming months and a dearth of money. To crib the words from Genesis: There’s not much love to go round.