Lurie Wades In As Teachers' Streak Roils San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO — Mayor Daniel Lurie is inserting himself in tense negotiations between the city’s teachers’ union and district officials amid a strike that will close public schools citywide for a fourth day today.

The mayor drafted former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to join him earlier this week in issuing a statement urging the teachers to postpone their strike, according to a Pelosi ally granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

While the union rejected their request, the mayor has had several follow-up phone calls with Pelosi in recent days to strategize how to end the city’s first school strike in almost 50 years, affecting nearly 50,000 students.

That outreach illustrates the significance of the strike to Lurie — which, if it drags on, could present one of the biggest tests of his young mayorship. Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who ran for office as a political outsider, has few longtime ties with labor and now most make inroads with one of the liberal city’s largest and most powerful unions.

“He’s bringing out the big guns,” said a Lurie adviser who was also granted anonymity to speak freely. “One of his superpowers is getting people into a room.”

Lurie has dispatched his top advisers to sit at the negotiating table full time, including Staci Slaughter, his chief of staff and former vice president of the San Francisco Giants, and Kunal Modi, a former McKinsey partner who now oversees the city’s homelessness and health services.

Lurie also recruited consultant Steve Kawa to help guide the negotiations, a power move given Kawa was previously chief of staff to former mayors Gavin Newsom and Ed Lee and a top aide to Willie Brown.

Lurie took the rare step Tuesday night of visiting the bargaining room himself and spoke with union and district leaders for about two hours. The mayor’s allies said he’s implored both sides with a simple message: Do not stop talking until a deal is done — even if it means staying at the bargaining table all night.

Keeping the union and district talking has been a central sticking point four days into a strike led by the United Educators of San Francisco.

District officials have repeatedly accused union representatives of walking away from negotiation sessions early. Their statewide union, the California Teachers Association, has mounted a coordinated campaign in school districts across the state to align their contract expiration dates in order to threaten a wave of mass strikes.

The Lurie adviser said the mayor has avoided wading into recriminations from either side, instead focusing on keeping the talks going for as long as possible.

He has experience in this arena. Last fall, the mayor and a few billionaires with ties to the city convinced Trump to back off his plan to “surge” federal immigration agents into San Francisco. In the weeks before Lurie took office in early 2025, he also brokered an end to the city’s longest hotel workers strike in recent history.

This reporting first appeared in California Playbook. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every weekday.