Los Angeles Charter Teachers Say Their Administration Is Aggressively Trying To Bust Their Union
A formerly low-profile union organizing campaign by teachers at the largest charter school operation in Los Angeles is emerging into the public spotlight as the charter operator is ramping up its effort to defeat the organizing effort, teachers say.
The school operator, Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, has been so aggressive against the union that a local judge issued an injunction December 3 against the operator’s apparent labor law violations. But the injunction isn’t deterring Alliance’s broader efforts against the union, labor activists say, and the company is scheduled to go to court again next month in an unusual effort to overrule state labor law and employ slower and more cumbersome federal labor laws to defeat the union.
All of this is taking place in a highly charged political atmosphere surrounding the public schools system (formally known as the Los Angeles Unified School District), the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union and an anti-union charter school lobby backed by billionaires like Microsoft’s Bill Gates and local philanthropist Eli Broad (In These Times’ Mario Vasquezreported earlier this year on how this atmosphere was prompting fears of a teacher strike). The push to expand charter schools in LA is in full cry, union backers report, with the organizing drive at Alliance emerging as a rallying point for opposition.
“The campaign against us has been illegal, and incredibly demeaning and debilitating,” says Xodil Johansen, a teacher at one of Alliance’s 27 middle and high school campuses spread across L.A. An active union supporter, Johansen was among some 70 teachers who opened the campaign in March with a letter requesting that Alliance administrators remain neutral as the organizing drive got underway. The administrators never officially answered that request, she says, and instead have steadily intensified efforts against the union.
“It’s escalated more and more,” Johansen says. “I think it really crossed the line when you started to get grilled by administrators. It was much more personal than it should have been. As teachers, we are professionals and the decision to join a union should be a professional one. The intimation was that you would suffer personally, that your livelihood was on the line. … Alliance has done everything to make it more personal.”
Based on continued complaints by Alliance teachers and UTLA, the California Public Employment Relations Board, or PERB, (under California law, charter school employees are considered public sector workers and fall under PERB jurisdiction) went Los Angeles Charter Teachers Say Their Administration Is Aggressively Trying To Bust Their Union - Working In These Times: