California School Employees Have Right to Strike, Court Holds

Takeaway: No doubt anticipating an appeal to the California Supreme Court, the state appeals court issued an exhaustively reasoned opinion illustrating the extent to which courts typically have deferred to enforcement agency interpretations — a practice that may come under scrutiny in both state and federal courts in today’s regulatory environment.

Fifty years after the California Legislature enacted the Educational Employment Relations Act (EERA), a state appeals court has decided for the first time that strikes are legal under the law and that public school employees may engage in unfair labor practice strikes.

The Oakland Education Association (OEA) is the exclusive representative of certain employees of the Oakland Unified School District, a public-school employer. Following a dispute over certain school closures approved by the district, OEA members conducted a one-day work stoppage and filed an unfair labor practice charge with the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), claiming the closures violated the EERA. The district filed a competing charge claiming that the OEA’s one-day strike itself was an unfair labor practice. The PERB held that the district violated the EERA and that the OEA did not. On the district’s appeal, the court upheld the PERB’s substantive rulings.

In 1975, the legislature enacted the EERA, which:  

• Gave public school employees the right to form, join, and participate in the activities of employee organizations of their own choosing.
• Limited representation to matters relating to wages, hours of employment, and other terms and conditions of employment.
  
• Obligated employers and unions to meet and negotiate in good faith.

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The EERA also created the PERB, an independent board, with broad powers and duties to administer the act, to assist in resolving impasses during negotiations, and to investigate unfair practice charges or alleged violations of the EERA.  

On the union’s charge, the PERB found that the district’s decision to waive the nine-month planning period established by resolution in 2019 was a change in policy, and that the district violated the EERA by refusing to bargain before making that decision.

On the district’s complaint, the PERB concluded that the OEA did not breach its duty to bargain in good faith. The district’s failure to provide adequate notice and opportunity to bargain before implementing its closure decisions relieved the union of any bargaining obligation, the PERB said. The union also did not breach its duty to bargain in good faith by engaging in a pre-impasse strike, according to the PERB.  

Courts generally defer to the PERB’s construction of labor law provisions within its jurisdiction because its findings involve particular expertise. Moreover, the PERB’s findings with respect to questions of fact are conclusive if supported by substantial evidence on the record considered as a whole.

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Applying that standard, the appeals court found that the PERB’s conclusion that unfair practice strikes are allowed under the EERA was not clearly erroneous. Public school employees may “engage in any unfair practice strike that does not imminently threaten public health or safety so long as no statute or constitutional provision prohibits them from doing so,” the court said. They “do not lose their common law right to engage in unfair practice strikes under EERA unless EERA actually prohibits them from engaging in that strike, which it does not.”

The court also rejected the district’s constitutional challenges to the union’s right to strike. Even if the district had standing to assert students’ right to a public education under the California Constitution, it failed to establish that an unfair practice strike always impairs that right. Moreover, as a political subdivision — not a constitutionally protected individual — the district had no standing to assert its own due process claim against the PERB. The district’s equal protection claim against the PERB also failed because the PERB’s decision — issued long after the one-day strike — could not have caused the strike nor any disparate impact on the student population resulting from it.  

The PERB also did not clearly err by allowing pre-impasse unfair practice strikes before it had fully adjudicated the underlying unfair practice charge, the court held. Although the PERB did err in affirming the exclusion of evidence of educational harm, the court found that error to be harmless because the evidence would not have made a difference. It had no bearing on the district’s remedy because the PERB dismissed the district’s complaint. It also had no bearing on the OEA’s liability because the harm caused by its one-day strike was no greater than that caused by any work stoppage.

Oakland Unified School District v. Public Employment Relations Board, Cal. Ct. App., A171007 (July 2, 2025).

Margaret M. Clark, J.D., SHRM-SCP, is a freelance writer based in Arlington, Va.