Los Angeles parents and teachers on the picket line
Like the 2006 strike of 30,000 NYC transit workers, and the 2012 strike of 30,000 Chicago teachers, the 2019 Los Angeles teacher strike made the lives of tens and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people better. A nurse and librarian in every school, enforceable class size caps, some regulation on the activities of charter schools, open consideration of gentrifying impact of public schools vs charters, even limits on police searches and other activities inside schools were achieved.
Jane McAlevey is author of No Shortcuts, Organizing For Power in the New Gilded Age. Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), which represents 30,000 Los Angeles teachers.
On the organizing side, this was achieved by building up the union's ability to work with local communities outside the workplace. UTLA leaders planned for a likely strike as much as four years out. They persuaded supermajorities of their members to approve a dues increase, which they used to field organizing and research departments and implement repeated stress testing of the quality of their organizing.
On the policy side, opposition to school privatization was muted under the reign of the First Black President, as he and most of the black elite were leading advocates of privatization.
Jane McAlevey observes, not for the first time, that if the organizing resources labor has devoted to the not very effective campaign to organize fast food workers were devoted instead to organizing teachers, health care workers beginning with nurses, and Amazon, organized labor would have numbers at least comparable to those it achieved in the 1950s.
The settler colony known as the United States inflicts violence upon Black people as a function of its existence. But the murder of a mother and her infant daughter by Missouri police officersâŚ
The domestic expression of imperialism has once again been made clear with the installation of a new cobalt refinery in an Oklahoma town. Through the extraction of raw materials from the global southâŚ
Nonprofit organizations of all orientations are under attack, with threats of withholding funding, for their association with Palestine solidarity activities. Climate justice organizations haveâŚ
Harry Haywoodâs work is a guiding light to help Black people analyze our position in the U.S. and rethink how we might engage in electoral politics. Are we building power toward revolution or are weâŚ
The Black Alliance for Peace and U.S. Out of Africa Network provided this report following their participation in the âConference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahelâ.
