SACRAMENTO, California — California’s teachers unions are flexing their muscle in a new way: banding together to leverage the threat of mass strikes for better pay and increased funding from the state.
Teachers in San Francisco have announced they’re walking off the job on Monday. Their counterparts in San Diego are set for a one-day work stoppage later in the month and the behemoth United Teachers Los Angeles is making noise it could be the next to strike. All told, more than two dozen unions representing about 77,000 teachers around the state say they are at an impasse in negotiations over new contracts.
The confluence of labor unrest in so many school districts is not happenstance, but the result of a strategy orchestrated by the California Teachers Association, the unions’ politically powerful state operation. Looking ahead to this day, the association coordinated with the local chapters, aligning their contracts to expire at the same time last summer, which has led to the chorus of strike threats…