Los Angeles Unified school principals — saying their workload is too heavy and the pressure to raise student achievement, manage complex budgets and keep campuses safe is too intense — have voted to join the Teamsters union in a rebuke to the leadership of Supt. Alberto Carvalho and the Board of Education.
In an election that concluded last week, 85% of voting members, who include principals and other mid-level administrators, chose to unionize. In essence, the leaders of 1,300 public schools in the nation’s second-largest school system — known for strict adherence to policies and for echoing the district’s messaging — have said their burden is unfair and their voices go unheard.
“What I hear from the field is people want out, people want to retire early, and they don’t feel supported,” said Maria Nichols, president of Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, the union that already represented school administrators and which conducted the election to affiliate with the Teamsters. “It’s task upon task upon task. They’re overworked and on overload.”
Having the muscle and experience of the Teamsters will make a difference, said Nichols: “People are asking for change, and we knew that if we didn’t do something transformational, we were going to get the same results as last year, which is nothing. Now we’re ready to be able to take the district to collective bargaining.”
Senior district officials, who are not involved in labor organizing, defended their actions, while trying not to stoke the anger of the newly fired-up union.
“Los Angeles Unified is committed to being the district of choice not only for families but also for employees,” according to a district statement. “We strive to provide our workforce with competitive salaries, unrivaled benefits, and professional growth and development opportunities. This was demonstrated in our last negotiations in which we implemented historic salary increases.”
Unions for school administrators are uncommon because most school districts are small, but they are not rare among larger entities. The American Federation of School Administrators has 150 locals across the country. Eight locals are part of the California Assn. of Urban School Administrators, including AALA.
The Associated Administrators of Los Angeles has been known for working closely with upper management. Former President Nery Paiz had expressed respect for Carvalho and advocated for his members through this collegial connection.
Although Paiz gradually became more vocal in expressing the unhappiness of his members, he was swept out of office in March, an unusual step for members of that group.
Principals interviewed by The Times requested anonymity out of a fear of retaliation. Principals have tenure protections as teachers but are at-will employees as principals.
One elementary school principal spoke of a string of central-office mandates that stripped principals of meaningful autonomy and also a system that left principals undertrained for essential tasks such as evaluating teachers.
“No one is honoring time limits, and the lead time to prepare faculty and staff,” said another principal. “It’s like we’re constantly in the 12th hour. They just want to see numbers, numbers, numbers, and they ignore the story behind the number.”
Carvalho has said it was necessary to centralize operations for the sake of efficiency and effectiveness. He points to recent rises in test scores as validation.
Principals say pressure is too great
A high school principal complained about shrinking school staffing and expanding central bureaucracy:
“Now we have offices over tutoring, innovation and education excellence,” the principal said. “Tutoring programs used to be embedded into the division of instruction. Now there is an entire office of six or seven people doing it. School budgets were reviewed by two people in the past. Now there are two additional layers that review budgets. I will get the same email from three different offices and they are walking all over each other.”
In contrast, the district leadership says it has saved millions of dollars by consolidating positions and closing vacancies. In a recent presentation, however, the district’s chief financial officer said that, for some time, staff positions districtwide have been rising even as student enrollment declines, creating long-term potential budget problems.
The principals interviewed also complained about the removal of school police from campus and the overall reduction of the school police force. The school board majority voted in June 2020 to slash school police funding by 35% and remove officers from campus. Formerly, a typical high school had one regular officer and two middle schools would share an officer.
The school board cut back on police in response to heightened student activism that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020. The students said the presence of police diminished the learning environment and especially made Black and Latino students feel like suspects.
One principal said district insiders told her that 14 guns have been seized on campuses since the start of the school year through November.
The school district declined to confirm or deny that figure, but has acknowledged a steep rise in such categories as fights, weapons seizures and use of illegal or controlled substances such as drugs.
In lieu of police officers, the district has expanded counseling and mental health supports, and administrators said they also favor such extra help for students and, if anything, need more of it.
60-hour workweeks
All of the principals complained about the workload and about undue pressure to meet performance targets.
In a recent member survey, “half of my members were working 50 hours a week,” Nichols said. “The other half were working 60-hour weeks. And in the past, if you work beyond your hours and you had professional development to attend to, you would have been paid overtime. That went away with the new district leadership. Carvalho got rid of that.”
Extra duty pay had been more routinely available for many administrators, but there also was abuse of overtime among some, which senior officials had been trying to clamp down on even prior to Carvalho’s arrival in February 2022.
Workers represented by AALA earn in the range of $80,000 annually to about $195,000, depending on the job and on the experience and training of the individual, per a recently posted salary table. Principals’ salaries range from about $113,000 to $173,500, according to the union.
Upon taking office as AALA president, Nichols pledged to be more assertive, and she urged members to bring in the Teamsters, who have 1.4 million members across North America. Their members include transit workers, police, mechanics, court employees, prison guards and cafeteria workers.
Last year, school administrators in the Richmond, Va., public schools joined the Teamsters. AALA will affiliate with Teamsters Local 2010, which represents 23,000 clerical, administrative and skilled trades workers throughout the University of California and California State University systems.
Union members will pay higher dues but will have access to Teamsters researchers, bargaining resources and legal defense.
“We are excited about becoming Teamsters because we now have leverage, power, knowledge and a partner with a proven track record in getting the results we need,” Nichols said.
The Teamsters will represent all AALA members, who include assistant principals and middle managers with a teaching credential in the regional and central offices as well as one unit of managers without a teaching credential. AALA has about 2,750 members.
Prior to the vote, under different contracts, the Teamsters already represented L.A. Unified school custodial supervisors — called plant managers — as well as cafeteria managers. Thus, it would be hard to keep campuses open if all the Teamsters-affiliated workers were to go on strike. In past strikes by other union-represented employees, administrators have been indispensable in keeping schools open, although campuses were closed during a three-day strike by other workers in 2023.
Reaching this point once seemed unlikely
Not only are principals part of management, but they’ve benefited from an informal policy under which the powerful teachers union would agitate for wage hikes — and other district employees would get the same raise without having to fight for it.
But that system has begun to break down.
Even though the most recent teacher raises were sizable — about 21% over three years — it was not enough to satisfy the separate union that represents the district’s lowest-paid employees, including teacher aides and cafeteria workers. Their union, Local 99 of Service Employees International Union, wanted a higher percentage raise than the teachers — and got it — after that three-day strike.
Meanwhile, senior officials including Carvalho indicated that the era of applying contract benefits won by the teachers union to employees outside that union was likely to end for budgetary reasons.
Even though L.A. Unified has avoided layoffs faced by some other school systems, many employees have had to accept transfer to lower-paid positions. As one example, Carvalho and the Board of Education authorized closing out the jobs of 400 assistant principals — all of them had been represented by AALA.
