The United Educators of San Francisco began an indefinite strike on Monday, marking the city’s first teachers’ strike since 1979. With 6,000 teachers on the picket line, they are demanding a 9 percent raise, better health care, and increased staffing for special education positions. Unions representing custodians, clerks, and principals in the district have also launched sympathy strikes, leading to the complete shutdown of schools in San Francisco. For almost a year, the union and the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) had been negotiating, but the district refused to meet the teachers’ demands.

In the last bargaining session, called hastily after teachers voted 97.6 percent in favor of striking, the teachers achieved their goal of designating the district’s schools as immigration sanctuaries in the contract language. This significant victory, fought for over months of negotiations, comes at a time when protecting schools and communities from ICE is a priority for teachers, workers, and activists across the country. Students themselves are increasingly participating in this movement. As with the ongoing fight against ICE in Minneapolis, unions that assert their power in response to Trump’s attacks show all of us the way forward in this struggle. Additionally, after much back and forth, SFUSD stated it has agreed to maintain support for unhoused students, as included in the last contract.

But the district’s bargaining team continued to deny teachers’ other central demands. In the strike update email that UESF sent on Sunday, the union wrote,

We have made it very clear that our demands are for fully funded family healthcare for our educators, improvements to special education, and salary increases that do not come at the cost of concessions or takeaways. We cannot accept salary increases that come with cuts to school sites, and we cannot accept special education solutions that only affect a small number of our students. We cannot accept healthcare proposals that come with heavy financial burdens for our members.

SFUSD cites a fiscal crisis as the reason for their lower offers, a claim supported by a third-party fiscal analysis that generally agrees the school district cannot afford the increases. But the union has pointed out that the district has access to a balance of $429 million that could be used to meet their demands. Moreover, in a city that was not long ago more densely populated with billionaires than anywhere else in the world, and that neighbors Silicon Valley — where a handful of households possess $683 billion of the area’s wealth — it is ludicrous and unacceptable that teachers can’t be paid above the living wage or work in adequately staffed classrooms.

Supporting Education Means Supporting Striking Teachers

Much like the striking nurses in New York City, San Francisco’s teachers have debunked the common anti-union talking point that public service workers are selfish, greedy, or careless for going on strike. Teachers’ working conditions are synonymous with students’ learning conditions. No student should walk into school fearing that ICE might abduct them or their family members, nor should any student leave school without a safe place to go home to. And no teacher should sacrifice their well-being to perform their incredibly important job.

This reality is especially pronounced in San Francisco, where wealth inequality has reached mind-boggling extremes since the tech boom. When the city’s economy declined after the pandemic, leading to fears of a “doom loop,” the working class of San Francisco suffered while Mark Zuckerberg and his peers retained their immense wealth.

While the Bay Area is often best known for its notorious tech royalty, it is also home to a diverse and powerful working class that has flexed its muscles in historic instances of class struggle for decades. Centered in San Francisco, the ILWU staged a massive strike for raises and union recognition in 1934. Decades later, this same union shut down ports along the West Coast in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Today, striking teachers are carrying on this powerful legacy. By demanding safer, higher-quality education for their students and better pay and benefits to support themselves and their families, they remind us that unions and workers have the power to win everything we deserve, not just a few bread-and-butter concessions here and there. Indeed, to get ICE out of our schools and cities, house everyone, and provide health care for all, we must support teachers from every state and industry and prepare to join the fight ourselves.

The post Solidarity with Striking Teachers in San Francisco! appeared first on Left Voice.

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