Seattle students deserve to start school on Sept. 2, but not if it means their teachers must accept another round of austerity imposed by a district that has drained its reserves and demanded sacrifice from the people closest to the children. The Seattle Education Association, representing some 6,000 teachers and other staff, voted 91% to authorize a strike if no agreement is reached before school starts. That supermajority is not a tantrum. It is the clearest signal in years that the people doing the work have had enough.
The union is asking for 1% to 3% raises for teachers and 3% to 5% for classified staff such as paraprofessionals, office staff, and others who keep schools running, on top of cost-of-living increases. The instinct is to call this greedy. The numbers say otherwise. Full-time Seattle Public Schools teachers make on average $117,000; classified staff earn $67,858. Those figures are not lavish compensation. Classified staff assist children with disabilities, translate for immigrant families, and keep classrooms running, and they are being asked to perform that essential labor for pay that lags well behind comparable work in the surrounding private economy. They are the ones the district cut first in Wednesday’s budget, and they are the ones least able to absorb the cut. These raises are not extravagant. They are, in many cases, simply keeping pace with what Seattle rents and groceries now cost. The union is also seeking smaller class sizes and more staffing for special education that disabled students are legally owed — two things that directly improve student learning and that Seattle families have asked for, repeatedly.
The district pleads poverty. It faces an $87 million shortfall and has spent recent years pillaging its reserve funds. On Wednesday the school board adopted a budget that cuts administrative staff and some school employees. That is not a corrective. That is a choice — a choice to protect nothing in particular while making the children of working families absorb a shortfall whose origins lie beyond the classroom. A district that has spent its reserves, that has cut administrative bloat, and that still cannot pay its front-line workers a wage that reflects the cost of living in this city has chosen its priorities, and those priorities are not the students. If the district is broke, the question is not whether teachers should give back more. The question is whose interests the budget is being built to serve.
Washington law does not give public employees a right to strike. State courts have declared such work stoppages illegal, and courts have sometimes enjoined them. There are no penalties set by statute — a tacit admission that the law is unenforceable because it is unjust. Unions have tested it, and unions have won, because the law itself is rigged against the people who educate our children. Stripping public-sector workers of the only leverage they have, while leaving the employer free to impose, is not labor peace. It is forced surrender.
Seattle teachers already proved the point in 2022, when they delayed school for five days with a strike. They won raises of 7% in the first year of the contract, then 4%, then 3% — a result the district could have granted without the disruption but refused to concede in advance. Those gains helped the district recruit and retain staff in a tightening labor market. Last year, custodians and other staff in Evergreen Public Schools struck for more than two weeks and secured raises of as much as 13.5% over three years. These outcomes suggest that when unions push, districts find the money. The lesson is not that unions are lawless. The lesson is that the law is on the wrong side.
Los Angeles tells the same story from the other direction. Teachers there won a raise of nearly 12% over two years in April and are now facing major layoffs. The pay increase did not cause the layoffs. The district’s structural choices did. A union that wins at the bargaining table cannot repair a system that is broken at the budgeting table. Punishing Seattle teachers for what Los Angeles administrators failed to do would only deepen the staffing crisis in Seattle’s classrooms. Seattle’s district is making the same choice now, and it expects teachers to fund the fix.
If Seattle teachers do strike, the disruption will fall on students and families. That is the nature of a labor action, and it is the lever workers have when the alternative is accepting conditions that harm the people they serve. The teachers would rather be in classrooms on Sept. 2. The district could make that possible by meeting demands that are modest, reasonable, and long overdue. If the strike comes, it will be the district, the school board, and the legislators who built this trap who have cheated Seattle’s students, families, and taxpayers — not the teachers. The teachers will simply have refused to be cheated. There is no honor in compliance with a law that protects no one.
