When Los Angeles teachers staged a strike in the spring of 1989, Joshua Pechthalt and Joel Jordan helped set up picket lines at schools and rallies in Exposition Park. During the nine-day walkout, the two teachers grew close to a young United Teachers Los Angeles organizer named Antonio Villaraigosa.
This week, Pechthalt and Jordan, now among the union's leaders, helped reach an agreement with their old friend, now L.A. mayor, that would give him some power over the Los Angeles Unified School District.
With the powerful California Teachers Assn. joining the talks, Villaraigosa and the teachers produced a deal that, if adopted by the Legislature, would give the union a long-sought goal: more control over curriculum.
"It's always easier to work out arrangements and have a dialogue with someone you know from a previous life," said UTLA President A.J. Duffy, who has also been friendly with the mayor for years.
The agreement has put a spotlight on UTLA, which represents 47,000 teachers, and the 335,000-member CTA. UTLA is an affiliate of both CTA and the California Federation of Teachers, an unusual arrangement because most local teachers unions affiliate with one or the other.
In addition to Villaraigosa's work as a UTLA organizer more than a decade ago, he had a consulting contract with CTA as recently as 2001. As he struggled this week to make a deal and avert a high-profile defeat of his school takeover plan, the mayor in one sense went home again.
"Both Joel and I spent a lot of time back in the day gabbing with Antonio," said Pechthalt, who recalled how Villaraigosa handled his grievance in the early 1990s after the teacher staged a mini-strike at Manual Arts High School. "The things we were advocating 20-some years ago, we're still organizing around."
The close relationship between the mayor and the teachers unions has quickly become a point of criticism.
"My shock and dismay is that L.A. Unified's teachers union, UTLA, joined hips with Antonio," school board member Julie Korenstein, who herself has received campaign donations from UTLA, said angrily at a news conference Wednesday. Asked if she had changed her mind Thursday, she said: "Actually I'm more angry. This is one of the biggest back-door deals we've seen."
As big institutions that represent dues-paying members of a popular profession, UTLA and CTA are powerful politically, but with different personalities.
