Once again, a potential strike by workers at Seattle Public Schools could impact the first few days of the school year. This time, it’s the workers at IUOE Local 302 who are preparing to strike. Local 302 represents custodians, culinary workers, security teams, and school grounds crews. While a strike by these workers would not delay the start of school, a strike could result in impact to school meals, as well as to cleaning and maintenance at school buildings.
Coming on the heels of the 2022 strike by Seattle educators, which led to a weeklong delay to the start of the school year, it’s another example of how SPS is not very good at managing labor relations. Discussion at the August 30 board meeting further revealed deeper problems with SPS’s mismanagement of contract negotiations, as well as a stunning lack of oversight by a board using a new governance model known as Student Outcomes Focused Governance (SOFG) that increasingly makes it no more than a rubber stamp.
SPS argues this is just business as usual. In an email sent to families late last week, SPS Chief of Staff Bev Redmond claimed that “It is not unusual to go past the contract end date for these negotiations.” That’s not true when it comes to other school districts around the Puget Sound region. Compared with them, SPS is unusual for its persistent failure to settle labor contracts before the end of summer break. Nearby districts such as Bellevue and Highline are routinely able to reach such agreements in early summer.
What is not unusual is for SPS to drag out contract negotiations until a strike becomes inevitable. The district has a long history of failing to reach a contract agreement in time for the school year, especially with teachers. In fact, every negotiation since at least 2013 with educators represented by the Seattle Education Association has either resulted in a strike or very nearly led to a strike:
- 2013: SEA and SPS reached an agreement on Sunday, September 3, just three days before school was slated to begin on Wednesday, September 6. The Seattle Times described it as “contentious contract negotiations that raised the possibility of the first teachers strike in the city in decades.”
- 2015: Seattle educators went out on strike for the first time in 30 years, a strike that lasted for five days. Educators sought better pay, equity teams at each school, and longer recess times for students. The district instead threatened to sue to block the strike, but backed down in the face of public pressure.
- 2018: After authorizing a strike, SEA announced it had reached a tentative agreement with SPS on the Friday before school was slated to begin.
- 2022: Seattle educators again went out on strike, this time for a week, as SPS had refused to budge on wages, benefits, and providing minimum staffing ratios for special education services.
SPS’s approach to labor relations has also drawn criticism from state legislators. Rep. My-Linh Thai, a Democrat from Bellevue and a former Bellevue School Board director, pointed out in September 2022 how problematic SPS’s approach to negotiations had become:
“As a former Bellevue School District president, [Thai] said that there should be no misunderstanding between the union and the district about budget. In other words, if the teachers are truly asking for something beyond the district’s financial capacity, then the district is not being transparent about the budget.
‘I truly believe that when teachers go on strike, they have good reason to,’ Thai said.”
Given SPS’s need to get more funding from the state legislature, it’s a bad sign when state legislators are critical of SPS’s bargaining tactics.
One of the most consistent ways that SPS mishandles negotiations is its constant delays in providing proposals to its labor partners. For example, Local 302 pointed out that they did not receive an economic proposal (regarding wages and benefits) from SPS until August 23, just nine days before the contract expired. There’s no way to reach a reasonable settlement in such a short amount of time.
Looking back at the last ten years, it appears that SPS’s go-to tactic is to try and force workers to go on strike in hopes that the public will turn against them workers and push them to accept less than they’d been seeking. That tactic has never succeeded. Seattleites support workers and especially educators and other school staff. SPS will never convince the public to take their side against striking workers.
The School Board Must Step In to Fix a Broken System
Of course, it’s the school board that is ultimately responsible for the district’s operations. While SPS administrators are clearly unable to conduct effective labor negotiations, it’s up to the board to correct the district’s ineptitude and set a better course. Judging by the August 30 school board meeting, however, the board has been kept in the dark about the woeful state of bargaining at SPS.
In fact, a board policy states that SPS’s chief negotiator is to keep Board Directors informed about all labor negotiations — but they aren’t. This is just one of many policies that the board has failed to enforce over the years.
Prior to the board meeting, Director Lisa Rivera Smith asked administrators about the lack of updates on labor negotiations:
“According to Board Policy 5020, ‘The Board shall establish a strategy for collective bargaining negotiations with the properly designated bargaining units…’ I do not recall this work being done. Furthermore, BP5020 says, ‘The Superintendent is authorized to appoint a chief negotiator to represent the district. The chief negotiator shall advise and inform the Board regarding the progress of negotiations and shall negotiate within parameters established by the Board.’ Again, I do not recall being advised and/or receiving information and/or updates from the district’s chief negotiator regarding the progress of negotiations, prior to receiving this Intro/Action Board Action Report.”
The district’s written response was, as is typical, a vague non-answer:
“We recognize the provisions of Board Policy 5020 and, in accordance with our past practices, typically notify the board about any challenges during bargaining that might affect the district’s daily operations. We also note the application of this policy has varied among our labor partners. We will continue to strive to establish a more consistent approach to communicate with the board about negotiations with all our labor partners.”
At the board meeting itself, directors put a sharper point on this. Director Leslie Harris asked, “Please tell me why I have to find out about this in the grocery store,” before asking SPS’ Director of Labor Relations Tina Meade “why we [the school board] haven’t been kept apprised” of the course of negotiations with labor partners?”
Meade replied that she started in her current role last August and that she hadn’t been briefed that updating the board was part of her role. Hear for yourself in this audio clip from the meeting.
It’s stunning but unsurprising that SPS did not provide updates to the board, even though policy clearly requires it. SPS administrators do not believe they should be accountable to the school board or to the public, and routinely seek to limit their responsiveness and accountability to those bodies. The result is SPS mismanagement grows worse, with negative impacts on students and workers, as we’re once again witnessing with the Local 302 negotiations.
Despite this exchange and the larger problems with SPS contract negotiations, board members did not indicate there would be any consequences for administrators having violated board policy, nor did they suggest fixes to SPS’s process that would ensure better negotiations and fewer strikes.
Defenders of SOFG claim that the board should focus on shaping policy and ensuring it is correctly implemented. In practice under SOFG, the board may set policy but then doesn’t enforce it or hold administrators accountable when policies are broken or operations are mishandled. The result is that administrators learn there are zero consequences when the district just does what it wants. The lack of board action so far on SPS labor relations is just another indication that SOFG truly does turn the board into a powerless rubber stamp.
The school board’s unwillingness to address SPS’s broken approach to labor relations is even more surprising when you consider that board president Brandon Hersey himself works full-time for a labor union. Hersey is the Political Director for PROTEC 17, the union representing 9,000 public employees across the Pacific Northwest, including at the City of Seattle.
Hersey and PROTEC 17 are no strangers to difficult contract negotiations. PROTEC 17, along with other city unions, are locked in a prolonged bargaining with the City of Seattle that has not produced movement in nearly 11 months. It is reasonable to expect Hersey to take a leading role in improving SPS’s labor relations, rather than defer to the administration. So far, we haven’t seen any signs that he plans to do so. His silence at the August 30 board meeting on this issue was notable.
Debbie Carlsen, a candidate for the school board who we have endorsed, as well as by MLK Labor, offered an excellent and strong public comment at the August 30 board meeting urging SPS to fix its broken approach to labor relations:
We’d like to see the current school board take the lead in finally addressing the problems with SPS labor relations. As with so many other issues, however, it’s clear that change and improvement will only come by electing new board members, including Debbie Carlsen. Our students and our workers deserve better.