Archaeological evidence and 16th-century Spanish accounts show that the Aztecs of Central Mexico sacrificed children to appease the rain god Tlaloc. Appalled by the ritual, one of those Spaniards, the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún, reported that Aztec priests regarded the terrified children’s tears as a favorable omen, believing their abundant weeping foretold abundant rainfall and a good harvest.
Human technology and fashions change. But much of human character remains, including our apparent willingness to sacrifice young people to appease our angry gods.
Take the highly ritualized Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school district and the scene of what some might call “intergenerational theft.” Having just approved a massive pay hike for district employees, the district now admits that it can pay for it only by laying off thousands of its youngest employees.
Here’s the background. In June, after a year of negotiations, the district’s school board surrendered to its most powerful employee unions, approving a $1.2 billion pay hike. The school board immediately admitted it doesn’t have the cash to pay for the increase. The Los Angeles County Department of Education, which is ultimately responsible for the performance of the county’s 80 school districts, including LAUSD, gave district officials two options: come up with a financial plan or face a county or even a state takeover.
So far, the district has just one plan: close schools and lay off at least 6,000 employees covered by the district’s two largest unions that crafted the deal, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
In accordance with ancient custom, those layoffs will fall first upon the district’s youngest employees, a majority of them teachers.
This was no accident. Sacrificing their younger union members in order to boost the pay of the older members is a key part of the union playbook – and the predictable outcome of state law commonly known as “LIFO,” or “last in, first out.” It’s buried in California Education Code section 44955, a single phrase that lays out the order of layoffs in any financial crisis: “employees shall be terminated in the inverse of the order in which they were employed.”
Many younger teachers say they did not know about LIFO.
“We’re pretty shocked,” said a two-year Los Angeles teacher who spoke on condition of anonymity. She said the general feeling among young teachers is “betrayal.”
“We supported the bargaining team throughout this process – stood out in the rain to protest and rallied online support for the new contract,” she said. “No one, not even once, told me this could happen.”
But none of this surprises the union leaders who negotiated the deal with LAUSD over the course of a year. Veterans of collective bargaining, they know precisely how LIFO works. And because teacher pay is based almost exclusively on seniority rather than merit, union negotiators had the most to gain from a deal that would give them a massive pay bump paid for by the termination of their younger colleagues and by taxpayers.
UTLA negotiators had another weapon: they control the district officials sitting across the table. In California, government union leaders bankroll the campaigns of politicians who, once in office, return the favor. The union execs do not shrink from this legal corruption. They are proud of it. “Winning school board races is critical,” a recent United Teachers Los Angeles president bragged. “It’s how we elect our own bosses.”
That control became more explicit during negotiations when investigative reporter Jennifer Van Laar reported that LAUSD replaced Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, a union skeptic, with Andres Chait, whose immediate family included two senior UTLA officials. The district never disclosed or explained the conflict.
UTLA and SEIU negotiators said nothing about any of this. Instead, confronted by independent analysts who said their demands for higher pay and benefits would sink the district, union leaders countered with a conspiracy theory: there was plenty of money to pay for the increases, they claimed, because district officials were hiding $5 billion in a secret reserve fund. That claim was everywhere during the negotiations – on placards in mass rallies outside the district’s Orwellian downtown headquarters, communicated to teachers during school-site meetings, and on the lips of every union spokesperson who talked with reporters.
“There are students who are not receiving speech therapy, who need it, and a lot of students who are receiving just some of the services that they need to access their education,” one of those union leaders told the Los Angeles Times. “And that’s not right, especially when the district has billions in reserves.”
My California Policy Center colleague Marc Joffe easily found the reserve fund that union leaders said was secret, broke out his calculator and concluded that the cash was “already allocated to specific purposes: workforce stabilization funds, legally required reserves for economic uncertainty, carryovers tied to categorical programs, and newly set-aside amounts for tentative agreements with Teamsters, CSEA [California School Employees Association], and the police unions.”
Not only was there no “secret” fund, there was no cash to satisfy the unions’ demands. Given that, Joffe urged district officials “to spend prudently and for UTLA to rein in its unchecked demand for higher pay.” Alternatively, he said, “they could step on the gas and drive the district toward a financial cliff.”
They chose the latter, stepped on the gas and raced toward that fiscal cliff – the Thelma and Louise of union leaders and district officials now joined by Mayor Karen Bass.
THELMA, LOUISE AND KAREN BASS
In April, with the unions’ April strike deadline looming – and with district officials clinging stubbornly to mathematical reality and union leaders spinning conspiracy theories about secret reserve funds – Bass, a longtime ally of organized labor, declared she was stepping in to mediate.
In her own account of the proceedings, Bass said she intervened “because a strike would disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of kids and their parents who need childcare and need to go to work.” On April 14, she declared victory – a tentative agreement awaiting only the parties’ formal approval.
Bass helped broker the district’s financial surrender. She celebrated alongside UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz and SEIU Local 99 Executive Director Max Arias—even though the agreement would ultimately produce layoffs among the district’s youngest employees.
“Our teachers, cafeteria workers, administrators, special education assistants, custodians, bus drivers, and other dedicated workers care for our children every day, and they deserve a fair contract,” Bass cock-a-doodled.
Reality hit within hours. The Los Angeles County Department of Education demanded that the parties explain how the district would pay for the increase. Their note included a warning: Failure to satisfy the county’s skepticism could lead to a county takeover of the district.
It took more two months for the district and unions to finalize their unaffordable deal. On that same day, June 16, LAUSD also sent its Fiscal Stabilization Plan to the county. County officials were unimpressed. On July 2 they responded with a “Lack of Going Concern” memo: The board’s approval of the unions’ costly labor demands is evidence, the county said, of “mismanagement of the collective bargaining process.” The county took its first step toward a takeover, assigning a financial expert to monitor district finances.
Don’t conclude that the events leading to the collapse of LAUSD are rare – that LAUSD is especially stupid or that its unions are especially savage with regard to their younger colleagues. Even as the L.A. negotiations rolled forward, teacher strikes and threats of strikes were erupting all over the state. David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, a kind of state union representing most California teacher union locals, claimed to be the architect. “All these districts going out on strike?” Goldberg said. “It’s not a coincidence at all.”
In nearly a dozen California school districts, Goldberg deployed the same talking points: district officials were hiding millions, even billions in special reserve funds, he and local leaders claimed. If district officials refused to cave, he had the strike threat to persuade them. If they still balked, Goldberg warned them of justice at the ballot box.
In San Francisco, a huge pay hike was quickly followed by layoffs. Having surrendered to its teachers union, the nearby West Contra Costa school district faces its own county takeover, and is now penciling in layoffs for its youngest teachers and begging residents to raise taxes. In Oakland, the school board was impressively proactive, approving more than 400 layoffs while it negotiated a pay hike with its union. The layoffs were driven by a roughly $100 million deficit and the threat of state takeover.
No longer claiming that the district had Scrooge McDuck money hidden in secret funds, UTLA president Gloria Martinez is now calling for new taxes. Laughably, in a district in which employee pay and benefits account for 92 percent of all costs, Martinez claims, “Labor contracts are not the issue. For far too long, it has been expected that school districts balance their budgets on the backs of students and teachers, when in reality school funding is determined at the state level.” Martinez may wish to forget that her union was pulverized when it made this pitch to voters in 2019.
Martinez’s sudden concern for “students and teachers” rings hollow. She and her union leadership got what they wanted. The youngest teachers—and their students—will pay for it.
Will Swaim is CEO of the California Policy Center and cohost of National Review’s Radio Free California.