Yesterday morning, nearly three thousand public school educators in Oakland, California, went on strike. The strike by teachers and support staff represented by the Oakland Education Association (OEA) comes after the union reached an impasse in bargaining with the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), following seven months of contract negotiations. The walkout, which covers eighty schools serving thirty-four thousand students, is the union’s second in the last four years after a seven-day strike in 2019.

Teachers say that the district’s schools are suffering from a crisis of understaffing and retention due to low pay — despite Oakland’s higher cost of living, teachers are paid less than their counterparts in surrounding districts. OEA claims that the district is refusing to bargain in good faith over the union’s proposals to improve pay and staffing. Jacobin contributor Michael Sebastian spoke with two teachers about conditions in Oakland public schools, the state of contract negotiations, and why education workers decided to go on strike.