Editorial: Irrational Oakland teachers strike continues harming kids

As the Oakland school teachers’ strike enters its second week, the walkout has reached a point of irrationality, and the damage to the children continues to mount.

This is what happens when union activists sit on both sides of the bargaining table and serve as the state arbiters of the legality of public-employee strikes.

With the deck stacked, parents who care about the fiscal solvency of the financially beleaguered district and ensuring a solid education for their children don’t stand a chance.

The teachers walked out on May 4, just three weeks before the end of classroom instruction for the school year. The strike, the teachers’ third in five years, has left students, already emotionally and academically scarred by the pandemic, waiting at home while the grown-ups battle in the media and at the bargaining table.

In calling the strike, the Oakland Education Association bypassed the legally required procedures for first declaring an impasse and bringing in a mediator to try to resolve differences. And they got away with it because the current four-member California Public Employment Relations Board, stacked by governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom with labor representatives, refused the district’s plea for an injunction.

Perhaps the most appalling part of this fiasco is the substance of the contract disagreements between the district and the teachers. The district has offered the teachers a 10% raise retroactive to Nov. 1 plus a restructured salary schedule that provides 13%-22% raises starting in the upcoming school year.

Rather than celebrate a monumental — and deserved — compensation victory, the teachers are also demanding inclusion in the contract of so-called “common good” proposals, broad societal issues that include everything from homelessness to environmental justice.

Many of those objectives are laudable. And district officials are willing to discuss them separately. But they have no place in a binding labor contract. They are issues that go far beyond the scope of the school district’s responsibilities and financial means.

It would be fiscally reckless for any school board to agree to such demands. And especially the Oakland school board, which still has state-mandated fiscal oversight because of years of irresponsible budgeting and bailouts from Sacramento.

But that hasn’t stopped half of the school board from doing the union’s bidding by demanding inclusion of the “common good” measures in the contract. With a vacancy on the board, the current six trustees are evenly split on the issue.

Rather than settle their differences with their colleagues behind closed doors as they should, the union stalwarts on the board — Valarie Bachelor, Jennifer Brouhard and VanCedric Williams — called a press conference to lambaste their fellow trustees.

Bachelor warned that there could be more to come if the “nice route of having conversations and coffees with folks” doesn’t work. “I hope that we don’t have to escalate this,” Bachelor said, while refusing to clarify what that escalation might look like.

It’s the sort of militant threat that’s unfortunately all too common among public-employee labor leaders in the East Bay. And perhaps not surprising coming from Bachelor, who is also a union organizer for the California Federation of Teachers.

Bachelor has no business being on the school board. She should be on the other side of the bargaining table, and she is effectively behaving as if she is. But this is what happens when Oakland voters rely solely on union endorsements when casting their ballots.

Elections have consequences. Sadly, the students are now paying the price.