The State - News from Nov. 21, 1988

Accelerating the trend among teachers’ unions to win the bargaining support of non-professional public school workers, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) has reached a two-year mutual-assistance, no-raid agreement with the 95,000-member California School Employees Assn. The agreement ends months of courting by various California public employee unions of CSEA, which represents about 70% of the support workers in the state public school system. Under the agreement, the two unions will join forces in political action, research, training and organizing. In addition, the unions agreed that neither will try to organize workers in areas where the other has bargaining rights in the schools. CFT, with 30,000 members in the state, including about 22,000 teachers, is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, which has been struggling to maintain a foothold in California against the 165,000-member California Teachers Assn.