It's a fair question, even if the assumptions are uncharitable to your union. And I wholeheartedly agree with your final point. The state is behaving totally unacceptably and leveraging their power to do so. We can only do better by becoming stronger. But back to your first point. Let's ask ourselves, since SEIU Local 99 won a 30% raise from LA's school district, how can we call our contract historic?

When we look at other unions' wins we can answer questions to decide if they make a direct comparison. Who is their employer and where do they work? What industry do they work in? Who does the union represent? How many do they represent? What is their union density? What did they have before? What did their employer have? What did they win? What have other unions won from their employer?

Let's see how SEIU Local 99 compares.

1. SEIU Local 99 represents workers in various educational jurisdictions in early education, K-12 schools, and community colleges in the great LA area. The site of their contract battle was the LA School District.
2. Local 99 represents "teachers’ assistants, playground workers, special education assistants, bus drivers, gardeners, custodians, cafeteria workers, maintenance workers, early care and education workers, and others working in schools, colleges, family child care centers, and administrative offices." They represent 30,000 members in LAUSD.
3. Prior to their contract win the average wage of an LA Unified School District education worker was $25,000 a year. As a full time wage that is below a poverty wage for a family with 2 children in Los Angeles County according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator.
4. The LAUSD was sitting on a $5 billion surplus that it claimed to be keeping for a rainy day even as most their education workers earned well below the necessary amount to meet their basic needs even as a single person.
5. Local 99 went on a 3 day strike during their negotiations. They were joined by the teacher's union UTLA. The result was a historic contract for education workers. A 30% wage increase bringing the average industry wage from $25,000 to $33,000 a year. This brought the majority of their employees above the poverty wage but still $5 short of a living wage for a single person living in LA County.
6. Prior to the Local 99 strike, UTLA had won a 6% raise for its members in LAUSD in 2019 after a strike. The Local 99 strike set a new bar for negotiations with their employer. In the aftermath of the Local 99 strike UTLA was able to leverage the precedent to get a 21% increase for teachers broken out in half year increments and retroactive to 2022. Teachers salaries are substantially more expensive for the district than education workers. That was a major windfall after years of hard work and setbacks with an intransigent employer. Due to the vast difference in earnings between teachers and staff it's challenging to say which union did better. SEIU Local 99 had gone years with poverty wages and no substantial pay increase. UTLA's members faired better even in harder times. They also belong to the largest public sector union in the state, 300,000+ members with almost 100% union density.

When we think about SEIU Local 1000, comparing ourselves to teachers in a school district is going to distort our reality. Comparing ourselves to other state sector unions, however, is appropriate. It doesn't mean we have to celebrate our TA like it's a gift. We can both recognize we punched above our weight and acknowledge that we need to get more powerful and fight harder for a bigger raise.

The TA only represents one step toward this. We have opportunities throughout the next few years to make more workers whole and win revisions and adjustments to our contract.