Analysis and Strategy Proposal from the Rank and File Caucus

Where We’re At

We have entered a new phase of the struggle to positively transform public education. The wildcat strike on Friday, March 24th, organized by Oakland High School teachers and the Rank & File Caucus, involved educators and students from 15 schools. This was not an official union strike – it was organized by the members themselves. The action shows that our OEA union members are ready to organize a full-union strike as the next step in escalation.

On March 23, OEA leadership finally filed an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charge against OUSD’s illegal bad-faith bargaining. This move allows OEA to go on a legal strike. Organizing for a ULP strike would pressure OUSD to move closer to meeting OEA’s demands. Let’s keep organizing! 

Union power: transparency and rank-and-file input

The 3/24 wildcat action showed that at least 400 union members are ready to strike for a fair contract. Our task now is to spread that momentum to all our OEA and classified coworkers. Let’s start by widely distributing information about our demands and how the District can meet them. 

At March 27’s Special Rep Council, we learned that OEA has received extensive research on the OUSD budget. Unfortunately, OEA officers told Reps that our analysis of OUSD’s finances must remain confidential until “the right time,” because “we don’t want to limit what we’re asking for in bargaining based on our own financial accounting.”  When is the right time to share this critical information, if not when we’re trying to build support for a strike?!? This analysis must be made available to all members immediately.

Members have seen such bureaucratic sleight-of-hand before, and it was a major disadvantage. During our 2019 strike, key demands for salary, caseloads, and class size caps were abandoned or diluted by the secretive bargaining team (BT). Then our officers tried to justify the weak tentative agreement by presenting a CTA budget analysis claiming that OUSD couldn’t afford our demands. This analysis was presented after a week of striking! Members need access to this financial analysis long before striking so that we are the ones who hold the knowledge of what OUSD can afford. 

Financial transparency is also necessary to clarify our bargaining timeline. Previously, OEA officers and their appointed BT chairs have stated that OEA must settle by May to access the $60 million in special Covid funds. However, at a Bargaining Q&A on March 29, a BT member and our union’s CTA lawyer confirmed the deadline for such funds is not this school year, but is in fact the end of 2024. Knowledge is power in a political organization, and the uneven distribution of that knowledge is what’s keeping our union weak and top-down.

As we know, some of our union’s most ambitious demands, like significant class size reductions, wraparound services for students and families on campus (community schools), and environmental justice (no pollution on campus) will require deep budget restructuring, that is, OUSD needs to cut many high-paid administrators and consultants. But many of our current demands can be won right now, without a deep overhaul of OUSD’s budget. Ultimately, the movement for public education must also look beyond OUSD, and demand the redistribution of the vast corporate wealth in our local and state economy towards public schools and services. 

While fighting to force OUSD to properly allocate existing resources, we need to take collective action against the state and corporate entities that influence the District to impose austerity. That’s why so many OEA members expressed enthusiastic support for a plan to shut down the Port of Oakland during the 2019 strike (though it never came to fruition because members had no influence over strike planning and strategy), as well as the 2022 No School Closures one-day strike initiated by the Rank and File Caucus. To build towards such actions, we must commit to empowering through transparency and genuine involvement of the general membership.

Strike in the Spring, but don’t rule out the Fall

Why then is our union in this “compressed timeline” situation? OEA officers have postponed escalating action until the last two months of school. Our leadership should have started the bargaining process last school year. In the summer of 2022, they held three special Rep Councils, all of them to push through school board endorsements. Throughout the fall, members received several text messages and phone calls asking them to canvas for school board candidates, yet not a single one to do with bargaining. This is a mistake we cannot afford to make again.

We likely won’t be ready to strike until late April or early May. We are nearing the end of the school year, and it will be difficult to strike during graduation. OUSD has stalled in negotiations to push us into this corner, and our union has once again fallen into their trap.

We will very likely be presented with a tentative agreement (TA) before the end of the year, and it will probably be unacceptable (a raise far below 22.9%, no reductions to class sizes, etc). The district is betting on OEA not being able to sustain an open-ended strike.  There are a few possible paths our union could take:

1. OEA goes on a ULP strike this spring. A fixed 1-3 day  action might be effective, but only as a preparatory organizing drive so that we can go on an all-out strike come fall. In any case,  we must vote NO if we are presented with a weak TA, and use the energy of this limited strike this year to build public support for our demands, build solidarity with classified coworkers in SEIU and AFSCME, and prepare for an open-ended strike in the fall.  
2.  If OEA fails to authorize a strike, we can engage in more wildcat actions this spring, possibly rolling strikes across OUSD (strikes in different clusters each day).  Again, we vote NO on any weak TA and prepare for action in the fall.
3. Strike actions do not happen this school year, in which case it is almost inevitable that OUSD retains its unacceptable proposal. And then we most definitely vote NO and prepare to take action in the fall.

Regular members have the best ideas about what moves our union should make. We are the ones who understand what it’s like to be in the classroom every day, so we should be the ones to democratically decide our way forward with this contract. 

Democracy means wide membership participation, union meetings that allow members to influence union strategy, open discussion and debates, and frequent survey data that is available to all members.