On the morning of Tuesday, April 29th, Oakland educators received an email from their union president stating that the Oakland Education Association (OEA) would engage in a one-day unfair labor practice (ULP) strike that Thursday, May 1st. Ultimately, the strike never happened. However, there was a lot of mixed messaging across the media, from the school district, and between union members and leadership. The San Francisco Chronicle and other news sources announced that the strike was happening for certain. The school district also sent messages to families, preparing them for striking teachers but assuring them that schools would still be open. Yet educators were receiving messages from union leadership that the strike could still be called off as late as Wednesday night if the school district came to the bargaining table and was more transparent with documents related to the district’s budget cuts for the 2025-2026 school year. How confusing!
Throughout this school year, the Oakland Education Association (OEA) has filed five unfair labor practice charges against the Oakland school district due to the district’s withholding of information and lack of compliance with the agreement around information requests, which mandates fulfilling requests within 15 days. Without the requested information, OEA’s contract bargaining team said they were unable to fully understand the district’s budget and bargain the impacts on behalf of members losing their jobs. With the school year coming to an end, educators still did not know exactly how many positions are being cut across the district or which funding sources have savings that could be used to restore positions at school sites.
The mere threat of a strike has been powerful and already caused the district to restore at least 62 substitute teacher positions for the next school year at high-need schools. Additionally, OEA has been bargaining for compensation for teachers who were cut from 11-month to 10-month positions and paid administrative leave for any unit member whose position is eliminated and is unable to find another.
The impacts of the budget cuts on educators, personnel, and students in the 2025-2026 school year cannot be underestimated. Understaffing means classrooms packed to the brim with students, creating a more challenging environment to teach and learn. Budget cuts also mean fewer supplies, leaving students with fewer materials. And inadequate staff means less support for students with high needs. This is why Oakland educators will most likely engage in an unlimited strike in the spring of 2026 if the district and the union do not come to an agreement on a new contract. It is wrong when people argue that a strike harms children and families—a one-day work stoppage could potentially reverse disastrous cuts that will have long-term harmful impacts on the community.
The intention of the planned strike on Thursday, May 1st was to show the district that the teachers’ union is a force to be reckoned with. If the district failed to be transparent with documents, the union president believed a work stoppage would remind the district of the importance of educators in the classroom. However, this would have been true if the union president had had a clear mandate to call the strike, but only 35% of the membership voted for it, with 19% voting against it and 46% not even casting a ballot. It was clear that Oakland educators were not very engaged in the fight for a better contract, which would have been key for a successful and powerful strike. Some educators might have respected the picket and stayed home, but if workers had not shown up on the picket lines or had crossed them, it could have sent the opposite message—that educators were not standing behind their union leadership, further weakening the union’s negotiating team at the bargaining table.
On Wednesday, union leadership called off the one-day unfair labor practice strike after reaching an impact bargaining agreement. This agreement is an addendum to the educators’ current contract, which is set to expire at the end of the 2025 school year. There were no concessions made in the negotiations; instead, there were several gains: 65 site-based substitute teacher positions were maintained at high-need schools, pay was restored for 11-month educators at hard-to-fill high schools, and key English teacher and social worker positions were protected.
Now, the impact bargaining agreement will move to the executive board and then to Oakland educators for a final vote, and it will most likely be approved. So the question that remains for educators and the wider community is: Was the threat of a strike necessary to win these gains? Could the bargaining team have engaged in more effective bargaining that would have been less confusing and disruptive to the lives of working people—district workers and students’ families? To prevent this from happening in the future, Oakland educators need to keep building their union from the bottom up, rather than relying on what appears to be a top-down controlled union. If educators are actively engaged in their union, they will feel less out of the loop during bargaining and be able to communicate more readily with their students’ families about potential strike updates. Ultimately, if educators lead their own workplace struggles, they can build a stronger, more powerful union.
