How LAUSD averted the strike

Good morning. It’s Wednesday, April 15, and you can expect perfectly fine weather (mid 70s). 

In today’s newsletter, how a family-run Studio City Thai restaurant makes it work, the race to fill Eric Swalwell’s House seat and an alleged beatdown at Chateau Marmont. But first, an inside look into the LAUSD negotiations.

It was nearing midnight at an office building in the heart of Koreatown. 

Hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles parents had gone to bed that Monday night — if they were sleeping at all — unsure if they’d be able to drop their children at school on Tuesday morning. The sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District, which covers some 710 square miles and predominantly serves low-income families, teetered on the brink of a strike, with potentially crippling ramifications across the region. The school day was set to begin in roughly eight hours. 

Inside the Koreatown high-rise, dozens of members of SEIU Local 99 — the labor union that represents LAUSD’s lowest-paid workers, including bus drivers, gardeners, custodians and cafeteria staff — packed into a conference room in their 18th-floor offices. Down the hall, senior leaders of the nation’s second-largest school district were huddled behind closed doors.

LAUSD’s two other primary unions, representing teachers and administrators, had reached tentative deals with the district Sunday night. But SEIU Local 99 remained in a stalemate; the others had agreed to strike in solidarity if their colleagues didn’t reach a deal.

But L.A. Mayor Karen Bass helped avert a strike at the 11th hour, stepping in as “the closer,” as Los Angeles County Federation of Labor leader Yvonne Wheeler put it at a celebratory news conference Tuesday morning.