Wednesday marked three weeks since the labor agreement between United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and the Los Angeles School District (LAUSD) expired. The contract covers 35,000 educators, nurses and other support staff in the nation’s second-largest district, which serves 600,000 students.

The contract expired on June 30, and the only update on negotiations so far has been a memorandum of understanding (MOU) covering virtual academies, which was signed last week by UTLA. Educators, on the other hand, want substantial increases to protect their incomes from soaring inflation and to fight district and state officials’ plans to cut funding to schools, pack more children in COVID-infected classrooms and to divert more public funds to charters and other for-profit schemes.

As the World Socialist Website made clear, educators are waging a war on two fronts. Teachers face a Democratic-controlled political establishment that is determined to force them to work in dangerous conditions with ever-dwindling resources, even as this year’s budget includes a windfall of billions of dollars in additional funding. Teachers also face off against UTLA bureaucrats who pushed through rotten contract after rotten contract, including the one the union imposed after the betrayal of the mighty five-day strike in 2019.

In its attack on teachers, the UTLA waived warnings, firing its first salvo against teachers last week with the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) covering virtual academies. In its very first paragraph, the memorandum of understanding reverses the eight-hour day, making it the minimum for a teacher to be considered a full-time employee, rather than the maximum number of hours. that a teacher should have to work in a day. .

Article 1.0 states: “It is agreed that the professional workday of a regular full-time employee requires at least eight (8) hours of on-site and off-site work and that the variable nature of the professional tasks does not does not lend to a maximum total daily working time of a fixed or uniform duration.

The WSWS spoke to two teachers over the weekend about the new contract negotiations and the conditions they face in the classroom.

We asked Bill, a middle school teacher, what he thought about the contract expiring on June 30, and he said, “When I contacted UTLA through an online forum, I I was reprimanded. We should have had our demands in place last January. UTLA is not doing what it should be doing. We should have started earlier.

Cost of living in Los Angeles

“They say we need a substantial raise, but what does that mean? It should be 50 percent. Look at the cost of living in Los Angeles. It is the second highest in the country. The neighborhood is full of money. Their projected budget is 12 to 13 billion dollars per year.

UTLA would seek two 10% raises per year over the term of the three-year contract. Bill disparagingly called the amount “paltry”, adding: “Most of us have one or more postgraduate degrees, and we need better pay and working conditions.”

Asked about UTLA and the 2019 strike, Bill said, “I don’t know why we’re doing this again. We lost six days of work and then the supply did not increase. People remember it. When people go out, they expect the union to fight for them. Last time, five people crossed our picket line. Teachers who join the UTLA administration never return to class; they become bureaucrats. UTLA no longer represents teachers. They don’t even publish their newsletter anymore.

Regarding the past two years, Bill said students had been brought back into classrooms too early and he condemned the recent lifting of the mask mandate. “After avoiding it for two years, I finally caught COVID last May, even though I still wear two masks,” he told the WSWS.

We also spoke to Mary, a special education teacher at the middle school, who told us how overwhelming the work was and how it had worsened exponentially since the pandemic began.

“I am at the end of my third year of teaching, but I was TA [teaching assistant] for five years previously in the district. And I was in the 2019 strike,” she said.

“I was a one-to-one special education teaching assistant for students who had just arrived in the country but needed special services. Maybe they didn’t have legal status or the parents weren’t comfortable having their children assessed.

“In fact, they needed services that the school could not provide. Many of these students come from Central America. And you know, sometimes it took them months to get to the United States and everything they went through to the United States. Some of them also did not have access to education where they were before. Often parents are afraid. It’s a great thing to get community engagement. I worked in a low income area. We were simply not equipped with the services they needed.

Mary said that while her workload used to consist of two Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) per month, it is now up to five. This is in addition to his regular teaching duties.

“We had one counselor for 800 students. Just trying to coordinate everything, let alone children in special education, was like another task in itself. And it was just choppy, non-stop. I kept saying to myself, ‘I have to catch up; I have to catch up; I have to catch up. It just wasn’t doable. Not feasible.

Regarding COVID-19, Mary said: “I had COVID in January. It just hit me. It just knocked me out. The next day it was a bit difficult, then at the end of the day I had a fever, headaches, everything.

“On our site they wouldn’t tell us who had COVID, but then we demanded that we had to know. So they ended up telling only the teachers, but we couldn’t tell the students. When we first opened, the second or third week, we were all out because it was spreading. It was super hectic, super hectic.

“We didn’t have a nurse for a few months”

As for support staff, the issues were similar, Mary said. “We didn’t have a nurse for a few months, then we finally got one. I don’t know if they weren’t trained or not. I don’t know if they were new to the field, but they were outdated.

The word “overwhelmed” was the only constant in our discussion with Marie. In addition to the lack of resources, there has been a mass exodus of teachers from the profession due to the pandemic. Tens of thousands have left and there are currently over 50,000 teaching positions in the state of California. This led to the creation of a negative feedback loop. As teachers become overwhelmed and leave, the remaining teachers face a doubling or tripling of their workload, forcing more teachers to leave the profession.

Along with deteriorating conditions faced by teachers, so are students, who not only have to deal with poor conditions in classrooms, but also feel the effects of the economy on their parents. There are over 51,000 LAUSD students who are homeless and 7,000 who are in foster care. According LA school reportdue to the effects of the pandemic on workers, chronic absenteeism among these groups increased from 32% to 69% and from 34 to 58% respectively.

A balance sheet must be drawn up. The UTLA will not only do nothing to alleviate the appalling conditions faced by teachers and support staff, but they have been and will continue to actively support District initiatives to broaden and deepen forays into their working conditions. .

To fight for better conditions, teachers must take the lead in the struggle by creating rank-and-file committees independent of union bureaucracies and corporate-controlled Democrats and Republicans.

Bill said he supports the formation of rank-and-file committees to give teachers control over negotiations. “We didn’t even have a strike vote. We need this threat as a bargaining chip. People don’t want to go on strike. These two years have been difficult, but the teachers will do what they have to do, not only for themselves, but also for our students. We need more salaries, smaller classes and more nurses.

“The strike is socialist. We don’t just do it for ourselves. It’s a team effort,” Bill said.