The UTLA Officers have adopted new procedures to strengthen the process for negotiating Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) and side letters — agreements reached with the employer outside of full contract bargaining. Often, these agreements are necessary to address issues that impact a subset of UTLA members or a specific issue that was not anticipated during full contract bargaining.  

The new procedures would: 

• seek to limit MOUs and side letters to time-sensitive issues that can’t wait to be addressed in full contract negotiations;
• create a Bargaining Team of affected members and require any agreement to be subject to approval by the UTLA Board of Directors and a vote of the impacted members;
• assign a staff co-lead as a partner in negotiations; and
• run positions and proposals by the UTLA executive director and, to the extent possible, the member bargaining team before being presented to LAUSD