Tension mounting amid Fresno Unified teacher contract talks. Union denies strike plans
Fears of an imminent teacher strike vote are mounting among Fresno Unified administrators, while the teachers union president denied any such plans and called FUSD’s concerns “absurd.”
In an after-hours news release issued Thursday night, Fresno Unified officials said they believed the Fresno Teachers Association planned to conduct a strike authorization vote early next week — a claim the union president flatly denied.
In an interview Friday afternoon, Superintendent Bob Nelson said talk of an imminent strike vote came from union representatives at some individual school sites and “members of the senior leadership team” for FTA.
FTA President Manuel Bonilla fired back in an interview with The Bee’s Education Lab on Friday morning, saying Nelson’s allegations were “an outright lie” and that he’d personally told the superintendent — before the Ed Lab’s interview with Nelson — that the union wasn’t planning a vote.
“If we ever did have a strike authorization vote,” Bonilla said, “it would be a very public event in the sense that we would let people know way ahead of time.”
The last time the teachers union voted to strike was in 2017, although the strike didn’t move forward.
Bonilla characterized the district’s public claims as “an attempt to create fear and panic throughout our community.”
District spokesperson Nikki Henry shared a screenshot of a redacted email from a union site representative that said a “Strike Authorization (SAV) is coming.” The email doesn’t specify a date but also mentions the date of the next FTA member meeting, which is Tuesday.
Bonilla added that he couldn’t control what all individual teachers say but that Nelson should “know better” and communicate with the union’s senior leadership team on such issues.
“He has my cellphone number,” Bonilla said.
Regardless of whether the strike vote indeed was imminent, Nelson said it raises questions about how bargaining will work moving forward.
The district and union agreed in January to use the “Interest Based Bargaining” approach. Unlike the traditional method of passing detailed proposals back and forth, the strategy involves identifying mutual interests and collaborating on contract language.
“If there really is a strike vote authorization, then we need to be real about what the impact would be on interest based bargaining,” Nelson said. “Like, is that even real?”
The district claims the union’s 26-page document with specific bargaining proposals, which they exchanged in November, also resembled old-school bargaining more than the interest-based approach.
“Interest-based should start with a blank slate,” Nelson said.
“If each side brings their bargaining proposal” in more traditional bargaining, he added, “you’ve now defined what the outer limits of bargaining are going to be. Because what you’re going to do then is you’re just going to go back and forth between the two proposals and land on the least egregious example between those two extremes.”
Bonilla took issue with that claim as well.
“At the end of the day, we need to know what it is that people are thinking,” Bonilla said.
“What he’s saying is, ‘Oh, you’re supposed to come with these high-level interests,’” he added. “Well, we did come with that. But eventually, we need to figure out: what impact is it having on the ground?”
Nelson said he still believes interest-based bargaining is the best option but said he wants to know whether the union will adhere to that agreement.
“If we can preserve it, we want to try and do that,” he said. “But, you know, nobody wants to be wasting time with that. If it’s not going to be what we’re really going to do, let’s just declare that and then keep moving.”
What’s happened in this bargaining cycle so far?
The union first discussed a draft of their proposals publicly a year ago. That document made waves for its proposed multimillion-dollar investments for not only teachers but also students.
The union suggested investing $1 million in free laundry service for all students by 2026, for example, and another $1 million to fund free clothes and school supplies for students in need.
Other costly ideas, like resetting lifetime health benefits for teachers, sparked debate among trustees.
In November, when the union and district formally opened contract talks, many of FTA’s proposals remained intact word-for-word in a 26-page document.
The document included requests for as much as a 7.26% raise plus 100% district-paid healthcare, up from the current 95/5 employer- to employee-covered ratio. Despite raises in recent years, teacher pay in Fresno and across California still failed to keep up with rising inflation.
The district’s more high-level, three-page document stated their interest in updating contract language around several key issues, including class sizes, sick leave, and student supervision requirements.
The union took issue with some of those bullet points – especially one that suggested “including student academic growth” in employee evaluations. Some members spoke out against tying students’ test scores to performance reviews at a subsequent board meeting.
The district emphasized that the idea and others in their initial document were “interests,” not proposals, in line with the tenets of an interest-based bargaining approach.
Since then, hundreds of teachers have attended board meetings to speak out on other topics, including safety. Teachers at Fresno High and Wawona K-8 School, in particular, have voiced concerns about student violence on campus, too insisting that the district’s status quo isn’t working.
In March, the union celebrated a small win after the district said its middle schools would receive new laundry machines in an announcement that seemed to echo the union’s proposal to provide students with free laundry service. Trustee Andy Levine thanked the union for bringing the idea forward last April.
Bonilla provided the Ed Lab with a copy of a letter the union sent Nelson a letter late last month, expressing disappointment with what they described as the district’s lack of a coherent plan. The letter gave a May 5 deadline for the district to provide a “detailed response” to the union’s own plan.
The letter didn’t mention an April 25 strike authorization vote. It does note that the union’s goal is to reach a “tentative agreement” by May 23 and that if no agreement is signed by then, the union will have a membership vote to determine the next steps.
What’s ahead?
California has already seen a handful of high-profile strike authorization votes among K-12 education workers this year in Los Angeles and Oakland.
Even if a strike eventually happens, Nelson said, “walking away from the table is not an option.”
“We’re gonna keep trying to work at coming up with a solution that’s mutually agreeable to everybody,” he said. “Our teachers, they are the single most important factor in the success of our kids while they’re there at school, and they need to be adequately compensated, and they deserve to be adequately compensated.”
Bonilla also said the criticism from the district “doesn’t change anything” on FTA’s end moving forward.
“We’ll continue, obviously, to meet,” he said, “but I hope that they get serious about, you know, really addressing these issues.”
The next planned meeting between district and union leadership is scheduled for April 27, both parties confirmed. That session will not be livestreamed.
This story was originally published April 21, 2023 at 4:46 PM.
