Go Big

At 5:50 a.m. on Friday, October 20, 2023, after a 13-hour bargaining session, the United Educators of San Francisco’s 70-member bargaining team reached a historic agreement with the San Francisco Unified School District’s management team. With the approval of 86 percent of voting members, we achieved our top priority: meaningful and equitable raises.

Thanks to the power of our 6,000 certificated and classified educators, which includes substitutes, the average raise over the two years of this contract for paraeducators is 39 percent—with a new starting wage of $30 per hour. The average raise over the two years of this contract for certificated educators is 19 percent—with an on-schedule raise of $9,000 in year one and a 5 percent raise in year two. Management pushed for a number of concessions along the way, such as adding a workday, cutting prep time, and expanding the number of meeting hours held each month, but our team held them off.

United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) members mobilized and organized to force this huge win at the bargaining table. After years of pandemic instability and decades of district mismanagement, San Francisco educators felt collectively frustrated and disrespected. Those feelings were channeled into the contract campaign and helped move management’s compensation package from its initial $35 million offer in the spring to the culminating $186 million package we signed in the fall.

The new contract stands as an achievement, but the lessons of the campaign were transformative. They guide us now in the early stages of a much longer campaign to build union power and win the schools our students deserve.

From Engagement to Bargainizing

Our team bargained for 20 sessions after contract hours on Mondays starting in March 2023, but our campaign actually began in September 2022 from the seeds planted even earlier in 2021. UESF adopted an internal goal to guide our organizing plan: in order to achieve the schools our students deserve, we will build high member participation and foster solidarity among all educators. Among the strategic objectives we identified to meet that goal was the need to make significant contract wins. With our contract set to expire in June 2023, we immediately began mapping out strategies to maximize member involvement in the campaign while building solidarity.

We often work in silos as educators—an isolating experience that too often only serves management. In elementary schools, certificated educators may only know other certificated staff and the classified educators they work with directly. In larger middle schools and high schools, educators are even more isolated from each other by grade levels and departments. To win a strong contract for the entire bargaining unit, we knew we would have to work together to close those divides and unify our members.

We launched a member-created bargaining survey in the fall of 2022. For six weeks in September and October, members accessed the bargaining survey through their sites’ elected union representatives, the Union Building Committee. Each site that reached 85 percent member submissions received a toolkit to select a member for the bargaining team. We originally projected that 20 to 30 schools would reach that mark based on previous assessments that showed a low number of elected or active Union Building Committees at our 120-plus worksites. We planned to appoint the remainder of the bargaining team to achieve a representative composite of our bargaining unit, thinking we’d have a team of about 40. However, our projections were happily proven wrong.

Remarkably, 65 schools reached the 85 percent target to qualify to select a bargaining team member. Fifty of those selected someone from their site to join the team, and UESF’s executive leadership appointed 20 additional members. On Saturday, November 12, 2022, we met for the first time with the majority of the 70-person bargaining team for an orientation.

We established the team with a handful of critical, seemingly simple principles:

• We practice bargainizing—a term we learned from United Teachers Los Angeles that means bargaining and organizing are deeply intertwined.
• We are all from different worksites and different classifications, but we represent and bargain for UESF as a whole.
• We have a high degree of internal democracy, using consensus primarily and voting only when needed. Once a decision is made by the team, the whole team defends that decision. We all commit to staying on message.
• We share responsibility. Members all have responsibilities to the team and may step in and step out as needed for work and personal lives.

Every member of the big bargaining team signed a bargaining agreement pledging to uphold these principles after completing the orientation. Then we launched into preparations.

Between November and February, the team went through intensive and intentional training. Of the 70 members who made up the team, only 10 had any experience bargaining with UESF, and most of those had gained that experience in 2022—a mere handful had bargained prior to the pandemic. Everyone joined a contract proposal working group and a responsibilities working group that included notetakers, morale boosters, observers, communicators, logistics coordinators, and contract action team* members.

One of the most impactful training sessions was a practice-bargain. Team members, new and veteran, were assigned roles to bargain against union leader siblings from the San Francisco Labor Council, former UESF president Susan Solomon, and union staff acting as management’s bargaining team. Everyone watched as their teammates bargained with “management,” and then each team member got a chance in a small group to bargain against a “manager.” This exercise built a strong foundation of bargaining knowledge and exposed the team to common management tactics, before ever being in a room with management.

On December 3, 2022, the team hosted a contract campaign kickoff, where the results of the bargaining survey were presented. The bargaining team members led small breakout sessions in which members discussed the survey results and gave input on identifying priorities. A volunteer group of the bargaining team then combined the survey results and the kickoff feedback to generate a platform of five demands that shaped the entire contract struggle: raises, improved working conditions, student supports, fully staffed schools, and protections from poor management decisions. We shared the bargaining platform with all site leaders, then sent them petition boards for their site members to sign, as an early test of our campaign structure. When the demand to bargain was read at a February board of education meeting, we held a rally and presented 3,800 member signatures to the board. That number was a significant milestone because it showed the site structures built through the bargaining survey were thriving and ready for escalating action.

Using the platform demands as a guide, we brainstormed proposal ideas, categorized them, assigned them to working groups, and began drafting proposals. We also analyzed the district finances, going back years for full context and studying the many salary schedules.

Our team discussed the financial research together, debating the many ways to achieve our members’ highest priority: raises. After thoroughly processing, the team agreed on an approach we called meaningful and equitable raises. We constructed compensation proposals that would be meaningful for all and would address the deep inequities we found in the salary schedules. We particularly targeted higher percentage raises for paraeducators and lower-paid teachers, knowing the results would also positively impact working conditions for everyone by mitigating one of the biggest causes of staff turnover.

On Monday, March 13, 2023, as the school day came to a close, a sea of red shirts with yellow lettering spelling out “Fighting for the Schools Our Students Deserve Bargaining Team” filled the district headquarters boardroom. Our team’s dinner and snacks for the night were laid out on two tables adjacent to the entryway, prepped for a long night. At 5:00 p.m., the district’s management team filed behind its set of plastic tables facing our big, 70-member UESF bargaining team. Behind our lead negotiator, affiliate support, and notetakers, every seat of the boardroom was filled by the silent, disciplined team representing every member of UESF. We set the tone from day one, and it was clear that management was intimidated.

Organizing, Leadership, and Solidarity

We structured our team and the plan for our contract campaign with our deep understanding that power at the bargaining table is built through organizing at worksites. Having a big bargaining team empowered new leaders to emerge and connect the table to the sites directly. We also had to focus on the structures at the sites and support the site leaders to fuel the campaign. We chose escalating tactics that would intentionally build the site structures and strengthen the members’ organizing muscles as we moved toward more powerful collective action—from site picture days with UESF T-shirts to the platform petition to site pickets and then larger citywide pickets targeting the district offices. In 2022, we assessed that around 35–40 percent of sites had an elected representative. By the end of the contract campaign, we had an elected representative at 95 percent of sites and leaders identified at 100 percent.

We grounded the contract campaign in organizing in big and small ways. For instance, bargaining team caucuses were primarily organizing spaces for deciding actions and training members. We didn’t caucus to discuss language or proposals without forethought. Systems were put in place to make sure every bargaining team member gave feedback and could approve or disapprove of proposals. This meant the bulk of our caucus time was dedicated to organizing, organizing, organizing.

Discussion, debate, and decision making as a big bargaining team was organized and structured so that participation could be maximized and decisions made while all voices were heard. The practice of debate, decision making, discipline, and shared responsibility contributed to bargaining team members’ development as authentic leaders in the campaign itself. We presented a united front to the membership and the public. There was no union officer or staff member making decisions and then informing the team. The team as a whole entity was responsible for leadership of the process and all decision making.

Our contract campaign was designed to expand internal solidarity to overcome silos and make connections across a diverse unit. Establishing a big bargaining team was an important piece in that effort. Solidarity was key to the contract struggle’s success—and what better place to build solidarity than in the room where the bargaining takes place? There was no way to have foreseen what exactly would be constructed through this process.

At the time we assembled the team, solidarity building was a goal that was given hope by a plan. But throughout the 10 months of bargaining, solidarity became a material factor in the success of the contract campaign. At a team meeting in January 2023, we spent hours discussing our approach to shaping the compensation package. Because we had studied salary schedules, everyone had a sense of the wide range of pay earned by our members: from $18 an hour to $120,000 a year. A high school educator noted his shock at the low wages of many of our paraeducators. A middle school educator remarked that she was particularly impacted by studying the wages of early educators, who work longer daily and more annually than most educators, yet are paid significantly less. An early education paraeducator challenged secondary educators on their demands for further increasing prep time when she worked two early ed jobs to make ends meet and received no prep time. These insights and discussions built a foundation of honesty, trust, and commitment among the team to fight for meaningful and equitable raises for all.

In the early hours of October 20, 2023, that solidarity and commitment was center stage. The district had been forced by the strength of our organizing—by the 3,800 educators who voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike vote—to seriously respond to our compensation proposals. In the middle of that night, they offered us compensation packages very close to our demands. But one key element of the paraeducator package was missing. The district had offered a raise of $10,000 per certificated educator, but did not meet our demands for paraeducators. In an act of true solidarity, our team put their money where their mouths were and decided to move $1,000 per certificated educator over to the classified column, ensuring the raises were genuinely meaningful and equitable for all. That moment embodied the solidarity built within the team and throughout the membership during the contract struggle. Those meaningful consequences set in motion powerful shifts in our union organizing that will be felt well beyond the final moments of the bargain itself.

Almost as soon as the contract was signed, our team was unpacking the lessons learned to improve our next contract fight set to take place in spring 2025. Through the 10 months of the bargain, we fully committed our efforts to setting the stage for the long game—a visionary campaign that would propel us into future fights. We know that decades of federal and state underfunding cannot be “won” back through an individual contract fight with one district. Our team bargainized so that this win would serve immediate needs while building our capacity to take the next fight to the true source of underfunding. UESF’s big bargaining team crafted this win knowing it is only the beginning of a campaign to build the union power we need to achieve the schools our students deserve for decades to come.

Cassondra Curiel is the president of the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) and a middle school English language arts teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). Nathalie Hrizi is the UESF vice-president of substitutes, a National Board–certified classroom teacher, and a teacher librarian in SFUSD dual immersion elementary and middle schools.

*UESF’s contract action team has historically been the organizing force of our contract campaigns, giving updates to the bargaining team about attendance at actions, progress on petitions, and plans for next actions. With our big bargaining team and move to bargainizing, these functions evolved over the 10 months of bargaining and became interwoven with the bargaining team’s focus. This eliminated the need for a separate group as we better planned and streamlined our organizing efforts. It’s everyone’s job to organize in bargaining. (return to article)

[photos: Courtesy of United Educators of San Francisco]