The Brief

Last summer, after nearly two years of organizing, hundreds of untenured faculty at Loyola Marymount University celebrated the certification of their newly formed union.

In a message to the campus community, Thomas Poon, who served as LMU’s executive vice president and provost, wrote: “We honor the will of our [non-tenure track] faculty and the perspectives they expressed throughout the election campaign.” The university, he added, “will continue to engage the union in good faith and with transparency.”

Poon is now president of LMU and, earlier this month, he changed his tune.

Poon announced Sept. 12 that the university’s board of directors decided to invoke a religious exemption to the National Labor Relations Board's jurisdiction. That board guides unionization efforts and protects the rights of private sector employees. In practice, Poon added, LMU’s exemption means the school will no longer recognize unions or participate in collective bargaining.

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Colleges like the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University are trying different tactics to push back against new labor unions. What does it mean for unions at universities — and beyond— in the long term?

How union organizing is being upended by private universities in Southern California

Colleges like the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University are trying different tactics to push back against new labor unions. What does it mean for unions at universities — and beyond— in the long term?

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For the untenured faculty eager to negotiate their first contract, the announcement came as a blow. Multiple members described feeling blindsided and betrayed.

“I thought the fact that the union election had been certified and that the university had already been bargaining with us [meant] we had protections,” said Arik Greenberg, an assistant professor in theological studies.

At USC, untenured faculty also face resistance as they work to establish a union of their own. There, administrators say the faculty can’t unionize because they’re all “managerial employees and/or supervisors.” The university has also aligned itself with companies like Amazon and SpaceX, which claim that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional.

Experts say the universities’ anti-union tactics aren’t wholly original. But, taken together, the pushback marks an era of more aggressive opposition to labor organizing at campuses in Southern California — one that could have implications for higher ed institutions nationwide.

Why are non-tenured faculty unionizing?

In the last 40 years, colleges across the U.S. have moved away from offering tenure-track positions, said William Herbert, executive director of Hunter College’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. Instead, new hires in academia increasingly sign on to short-term contracts. And, usually, this involves at-will employment — and lower pay.

The shift to non-tenured roles has also transformed campus labor relations, Herbert said. Among untenured faculty, there’s been a “massive increase in unionization,” particularly in the last decade.

At LMU and USC, the faculty who are fighting to get their units off the ground say their bargaining units are key to securing better working conditions in their precarious roles.

Why did LMU do an about-face?

Untenured faculty at LMU began building their unit, SEIU Local 721, in 2023. After the NLRB certified it, the bargaining team presented the university with nearly 40 proposals, spanning a range of labor issues.

“Money is a big part of it,” said Sam Goff, a lecturer in animation. “Obviously, we want to be making a living wage — but it's not the only thing. There's also job security, pathways to full-time employment, academic freedom. There's structure put around how we are evaluated, and when we have those evaluation processes take place.”

But in the months following their union’s certification, Goff and other bargaining team members said there was little progress.

“We were requesting bargaining dates as soon as we had that election certified in June of 2024,” said assistant professor Greenberg. The university’s representatives, he said, “dragged their feet.”

The bargaining team members said they and the university managed to advance on “a couple” proposals before the university invoked the religious exemption — but none of them had to do with compensation.

“We kept asking them: ‘When are we going to get a counter on the economic proposals?’ And they kept pushing that timeline down the road,” Goff said.

In the video to the campus community, Poon provided more details to explain the university’s about-face toward the union.

“When LMU began bargaining in 2024,” he said, “the higher education landscape looked very different. Since then, higher education is facing seismic pressures, from the looming demographic cliff to shifting federal policies, creating a far more challenging environment than just a year ago.” After “carefully reviewing” the untenured faculty’s proposals, he added, the university determined they “proved financially unsustainable.”

Union members insist that their economic proposals were not outlandish, but simply rooted in the cost of living in L.A. County. They also said they never expected the university to accept their initial proposals — they expected to negotiate.

“I counsel them strongly: Please get back to the bargaining table. Save yourselves millions and millions of dollars of woe that you're going to wind up spending, either on attorneys' fees or on PR, just to try to silence us,” Greenberg said.

How does a religious exemption work?

Herbert, of Hunter College, said LMU is not the first university to invoke a religious exemption. A 1979 Supreme Court decision has been the basis for litigation by religiously affiliated institutions seeking to thwart faculty unions. In that case, the Supreme Court held that the NLRB should decline jurisdiction over questions of representation concerning parochial school faculty, to avoid potential First Amendment issues.

Still, Herbert underscored, “the fact that [a university] may or may not be subject to the National Labor Relations Act does not preclude [it] from agreeing to continue to negotiate” with a union. LMU’s peer Catholic Jesuit institutions, including Georgetown University and Fordham University, have active collective bargaining units.

By starting negotiations with the untenured faculty union last year, LMU “essentially said the NLRA had jurisdiction,” said Leticia Saucedo, a law professor at UC Davis.

“I think part of what's going on here is that [LMU] is reading the tea leaves and making a calculated decision about how [it] would fare under a National Labor Relations Board that is governed under the Trump administration,” she added.

After LMU announced it would no longer recognize SEIU Local 721, members staged a rally on campus. Then, they launched a strike authorization vote to pressure the school to return to the bargaining table. The vote closes on Sept. 30.

Students and other campus employees came out in support of LMU's untenured faculty in mid-September.

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Courtesy Emily Dorrel

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SEIU Local 721

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In an email, LMU spokesperson Griff McNerney said the university is “disappointed” by the strike authorization vote because it “risks disrupting the continuity of instruction and the student experience.” McNerney also said the untenured faculty’s union “has no standing,” since “the university lawfully invoked its religious exemption on September 12.”

“Since then,” he added, “LMU has reinstated merit pay retroactively, begun reviewing contracts for greater stability, and expanded professional development opportunities.”

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) represents about 2 million workers in North America, including at least 83 faculty units. McNerney said the union is “an outside, dues-funded organization that has acted more like a third-party bully than a partner advancing faculty or student interests.”

Greenberg, who sought out the SEIU — and who has been trying to organize untenured faculty at LMU for over a decade — strongly disagreed with McNerney’s characterization. So did Goff.

“We are SEIU,” she said. “And what’s wrong with paying dues?”

In his email, McNerney noted that LMU benchmarks pay “at the 75th percentile of the market.”

“That 75th percentile means nothing to me when my colleagues can't pay to sustain their lives,” said Goff. An LMU alumna, she’s still paying off her student loans. “If I can’t earn a living wage,” she asked, “what is the value of an LMU degree?”

What’s the status of unions at USC?

At USC, untenured faculty filed a petition for an election in December 2024. If a majority of votes are cast in favor of their union, United Faculty UAW, the NLRB will certify the group. The proposed bargaining unit is composed of about 2,500 educators from various schools — everything from engineering to music. (The school of cinematic arts has its own union.)

Sanjay Madhav, a USC graduate who is now an associate professor in the school of engineering, said he and his colleagues aim to secure salaries that keep pace with inflation and the cost of living. They also want to protect their retirement contributions and keep their health insurance premiums affordable. The cost of parking and tuition coverage for the faculty’s dependents are also top of mind.

Madhav also noted that, in recent months, the university has laid off over 600 employees.

“With the current structure,” he said, “the administration makes these top-down decisions, and we, as individuals, have no way to have input on that.”

“By forming a union, we'd have a seat at the table. We would actually be able to work with the university to figure out what's an equitable way to handle the budget cuts,” Madhav added. “The current model asks that we, as faculty, trust that the same administration that got us into the budget crisis also knows the best way to get us out.”

When the untenured faculty submitted their petition to the NLRB last December, the university could have agreed to an election, said Kate Levin, an associate professor of writing. Instead, USC issued a legal challenge.

Chief among its arguments is that the petition “should be dismissed because the proposed unit is comprised entirely of faculty who are managerial employees and/or supervisors.” The university also says the proposed unit is “not appropriate” because it’s made up of faculty “who have distinct areas of scholarship, job functions, and work.”

On top of its unionization battle, untenured faculty at USC have seen hundreds of colleagues laid off in recent months.

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Courtesy Kate Levin

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Like Amazon, SpaceX and other companies, USC’s legal counsel challenges the constitutionality of the NLRB, arguing that its structure violates the nation’s separation of powers and gives it unchecked power to enforce labor law.

If USC succeeds, it “will preclude non-tenured faculty from being able to vote on whether or not they want representation,” Herbert said.

But even if USC ultimately doesn’t prevail with this line of argument, delaying the vote could have adverse effects on the union, he said. If the unionization process gets dragged out, support for the effort could waver and ultimately result in a negative vote. This tactic, Herbert said, “is very real in the private sector.”

Are non-tenured faculty ‘managers’?

With regard to USC’s claim that United Faculty UAW’s proposed unit is “comprised entirely” of managers and supervisors, Herbert and UC Davis’s Saucedo also noted that this type of opposition isn’t novel. In 1980, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that faculty at Yeshiva University were managerial personnel and not entitled to the rights under the NLRA due to their role in making decisions through shared governance.

The issue at USC, Herbert said, is whether their untenured faculty have “played a significant role in the governance of the university, like the tenure-track faculty” at Yeshiva.

In the past, Saucedo added, the NLRB has made determinations about these types of cases by examining the faculty’s “participation in things like decision-making around academic programs, enrollment, finances and personnel policies.”

Thousands of USC employees signed a letter, urging the school to let untenured faculty vote if the NLRB allows them to proceed.

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Courtesy Kate Levin

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In an email, USC spokesperson Lauren Bartlett said "USC has a long history of good relations with the unions that represent our staff. But because of the role that our [non-tenure track] faculty play in shared governance, they are not eligible to unionize under existing law. This in no way diminishes our appreciation of the critical role that all USC faculty play in advancing our mission of academic excellence.”

What would it mean to lose the NLRB?

Attacks against the NLRB have become commonplace in the business world — but, among higher ed institutions, they’re still rare, Saucedo said.

If cases like SpaceX v. NLRB make it to the Supreme Court and succeed, she added, those decisions could affect “the whole structure of the National Labor Relations Board and the authority of the National Labor Relations Act.” Congress could have “to go back to the drawing board” and create a new agency, she said, which could make it harder for workers to unionize and take collective action in pursuit of better working conditions.

Members of USC’s United Faculty UAW expect a favorable NLRB ruling, one that will allow them to vote and, eventually, certify their union. Earlier this month, they teamed up with other campus workers to stage a rally on campus. They also delivered a letter signed by over 1,100 campus employees, calling on university leaders to respect the outcome.

“Do not issue any further appeals or legal delays — just let the democratic process proceed,” Levin said. “And when we win that election, meet us at the bargaining table and bargain in good faith.”

For Herbert, the conflicts at LMU and USC go beyond legal questions. “Are we a society that supports workplace and political democracy,” he said, “or are we a place where we think that those questions should be decided by people who have greater power than those who don't?”

Listen 17:35

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Spotify

Colleges like the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University are trying different tactics to push back against new labor unions. What does it mean for unions at universities — and beyond— in the long term?

How union organizing is being upended by private universities in Southern California

Colleges like the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University are trying different tactics to push back against new labor unions. What does it mean for unions at universities — and beyond— in the long term?

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A new trail across the beloved natural area of Elephant Hill in Northeast Los Angeles is officially opening this weekend.

The route is years in the making, and it's a big milestone in the decades-long conservation efforts to preserve this local jewel in the community of El Sereno.

The hiking trail connects one side of Elephant Hill to the other — from the corner of Pullman Street and Harriman Avenue all the way across to Lathrop Street.

It's 0.75 miles in total, but packs a punch.

"It's a pretty straight shot, but because of the terrain — the trail is kind of twisty and curvy. There's switchbacks — and great views," Elva Yañez, board president of the nonprofit Save Elephant Hill, said.

People have always been able to access the 110-acre green space, but Yañez said the new trail provides a safe and easy way to navigate the steep hillsides.

The El Sereno nonprofit has been working for two decades to preserve the land. Illegal dumping and off-roading have damaged the open space over the years. And the majority of the 110 acres are privately owned by an estimated 200 individual owners.

Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) joined the efforts in 2018, spurred by a $700,000 grant from Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, in part, to build the trail. The local agency received some $2 million in grants from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to add to the 10 acres of Elephant Hill it manages and conserves. This year, MCRA acquired an additional 12 parcels — or about 2.4 acres.

And the spiffy new footpath — with trail signage, information kiosks and landscape boulders — is not just a long-sought-for victory but a beginning in a sense.

"We know that it means a lot to the community," Sarah Kevorkian, who oversees the trail project for MRCA, said. "We're wrapping up the trail, but it really feels like the beginning of all that is to come."

A hint of that vision already exists — for hikers traversing the new route, courtesy of Test Plot, the L.A.-based nonprofit that works to revitalize depleted lands.

"They're able to see at the end of the trail, at the 'test plot' — exactly what a restored Elephant Hill would look like," Yañez said.

Here's a preview:

The Venice Boardwalk after sunset has generally been a no-go zone for tourists and locals alike, as the beachside bars and restaurants close on the early side and safety is often an issue. Now, a group of artists is out to bring some vibrancy to the creative neighborhood with a series of new installations that will include live evening performances – and even a “Venice Opera House.”

“Let's play with light and let's play with sound and give people a reason to come to the Boardwalk after sundown,” said artist and entrepreneur Stefan Ashkenazy, who is curating the project and owns the buildings housing them. “I mean, let's just be open 24 hours a day.”

The concept doesn’t have an official name yet, but he’s been calling it “See World.”

Artist James Ostrer's space looks out from a bed through the fence to the ocean at Venice Beach.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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William Attaway, a longtime Venice artist, created a gallery space filled with various paintings and sculptures.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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The pair of modern buildings on the Venice Boardwalk at Thornton Ave. – with their big balconies, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and seven open garage-style retail spaces – have sat mostly empty since Snapchat vacated their beachside offices in 2019. Ashkenazy recently bought the building and recruited artists to fill those front-facing spaces with creative work until a full-time tenant comes in.

Over the past several weeks the installations have been created in real-time, in public.

All of the projects are loosely along the theme of “home,” with each artist claiming a “room” in the two buildings that stretch across a full block on the Boardwalk. Several local Venice artists are featured, including William Attaway, whose intricate mosaic work is recognizable on the Venice public restrooms along the beach. Attaway’s space features a floating larger-than-life-sized statue and various works in a mini-gallery. In the next room is Robin Murez’s pieces, featuring carved wooden seats from her beloved neighborhood Venice Flying Carousel.

Ashkenazy is no stranger to wild (and wildly successful) art ideas. He’s the owner of the Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood, a longtime haven for visiting artists, and the founder of the decade-old Bombay Beach Biennale, where artists install all kinds of work in an annual event near the Salton Sea. Many of the artists from that community are featured at the Venice project.

A "Venice Opera House" will host pop-up music events throughout the summer.

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Laura Hertfeldz

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LAist

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny's paintings on the wall of his Venice space.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny and London-based artist James Ostrer have brought some of their work in the Bombay Beach Biennale to the Venice project. Their windows on the Boardwalk both speak to a child-like sense of wonder and creativity.

“I think it's just kind of exploring and playing a little bit, to have the freedom to be able to do that,” Haberny says of his imagined child’s bedroom space, which includes a fort made out of puffy cheese balls. “It's a big space, too.
It's beautiful.”

Ostrer is experimenting with a performance art idea where he sits in bed amongst a room full of his own artwork, which he describes as “happy art with an edge.” Looking out at the ocean from the bed, he’s invited passersby to sit and have chats with him about his work or anything else they want to talk about.

“It’s a very intimate space, so you have a different kind of conversation,” he said. “I use art to channel human creativity, and [talk about] dark things.”

While there are open fences that block off the spaces, they aren’t sealed up at night. Both Ashkenazy and the team of artists seemed open to the idea that anything could happen and that the installations are a conversation with the public – and with that comes some risk.

Greg Haberny (right) works with his assistants on an installation featuring kid-inspired graffiti art and a "cheesy puff" fort.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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“I don't really know if I [would] say worried, but I guess it's just the cost of doing business,” Haberny said. “I don't really make things to get damaged or broken, sure. But I have done [things like] burned all my paintings and then made paint out of ash.”

While he’s felt safe – and even slept overnight in the installation – Ostrer has been collaborating with a local female artist who performs in a pig mask in front of his installation some nights. Watching her perform, he said, has taught him about the vulnerability of women in public spaces like the Boardwalk. “I've started to, on a very fractional level, have seen how scary that is. Because I've sat in the bed behind her performing at the front here… the way in which men are approaching her and shrieking at her … it's shocking.”

Ashkenazy says he will keep the artists in the space, potentially rotating new ones in, until a fulltime tenant takes over.

“This is an experiment … and after acquiring the building, the intention wasn't, ‘let's open a bunch of public art spaces,’ he said. “It is kind of …what the building wanted and listening to what the Boardwalk needed. Let's play, let's have the artists that we love and appreciate have a space to play and engage and give the locals and the visitors to the Boardwalk something to experience.”

A coalition of residents from across the San Gabriel Valley are mobilizing over a battery storage project and possibly more industrial development in the City of Industry they say could pollute communities next door.

A protest is scheduled today in neighboring Rowland Heights, targeting a 400-megawatt battery energy storage facility sited on about 9 acres that was approved by the City of Industry leaders in January.

Such Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS, are used to keep the power grid stable, especially as output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind fluctuate. But fires involving lithium batteries at some sites have heightened environmental and public health fears.

Because of the City of Industry’s unusual, sprawling shape stretching along the 60 Freeway, it borders on more than a dozen communities, meaning what happens there can have far-reaching impact.

“Pollution does not end right at the border,” said Andrew Yip, an organizer with No Data Centers SGV Coalition. “Pollution travels.”

Some local activists with the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association have challenged the approval of the battery facility under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Beyond environmental concerns, locals have also been frustrated with how decisions are made by officials in the City of Industry, a municipality that’s almost entirely zoned for industrial use and has less than 300 residents.

Organizers say they’ve struggled to get direct responses from city officials whom they say have replaced regular meetings with special meetings, which under state law require less advance notice.

A city spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment.

The so-called Marici Energy Storage System Facility would be run by Aypa Power. The fact that the battery storage developer is owned by the private equity giant Blackstone, a major investor in AI and data centers, has only fueled concerns that a battery storage facility would lay the groundwork for data center development.

A request for comment from Aypa was not returned.

Today’s protest is taking place at Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights across the street from the Puente Hills Mall, a largely vacant “dead” mall, which activists fear could be redeveloped into a data center and bring higher utility costs and greater air and noise pollution.

Yip pointed out that industrial developments make a lot of money for the City of Industry.

“But none of these surrounding communities receive any of those benefits,” Yip said. “Yet we have to put up with all the harmful effects and impacts from this city that does all this development without really reaching out.”

It’s about the size of a park bench and made of steel and wood. The bench’s arm rests are formed by the letters “L” and “A” in a design that’s unmistakable to any sports fan. But the welder-artist who created it says it’s not a Dodgers bench.

“This is about civic pride, L.A. pride. I made a design statement saying that it has nothing affiliated with the Dodgers,” said Steve Campos.

Campos grew up near Dodger Stadium, raised by parents who were die-hard Dodgers fans. So much, that they named him after Steve Garvey but that legacy doesn’t keep him from confronting how the Dodgers benefitted from the mass displacement of working-class people from Chavez Ravine after World War Two. That’s why he calls it an L.A. Bench, and not a Dodgers Bench.

The logo may be synonymous with the city's beloved baseball team, but the design of the interlocking letters was used by the L.A. Angels minor league baseball team before the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958.

“The monogram was here before the Dodgers,” Campos said.

A second-generation welder

Welding is the Campos family business. His father created gates and security bars for windows and doors for L.A. clients. That was the foundation for the work Campos has done for two decades since graduating from Lincoln High School, L.A. Trade Tech College, and enrolling in a summer program at Art Center in Pasadena.

The inspiration for the L.A. Bench came last year while he was playing around in his shop creating versions of the L.A. logo. A friend he hangs with at Echo Park Lake asked Campos to make him a piece of furniture.

“I was trying to figure out what my friend Curly wanted. He liked Dodgers and drinking and getting into fights, so I was like, 'Let me make something with the LA monogram,'” he said.

Welder-artist Steve Campos created whimsical steel sculptures with the LA logo.

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Courtesy Steve Campos

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It didn’t design itself. He said he had to lengthen the legs on the “A” and lean the back of the “L” in order to make the bench functional. In the process, he’s made a piece of furniture with a ubiquitous logo that he’s embedded with his own L.A. pride, as well as city history past and present.

LA civic pride travels to Japan

Campos vacationed in Japan the last week of April and took advantage of the trip to reach out to people who may be interested in the L.A. Bench. He was caught off guard by people’s reaction when he showed them pictures of it.

“They look at it and they go, 'Oh, Ohtani bench,'” he said.

For them, it’s still a bench embedded with pride, he said, but centered around Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, an icon in his native Japan.

Campos has made four L.A. benches and is selling them fully assembled, he said, for $2,500 each — taking into account his labor and how costly the raw materials have become. For now, he’s offering the metal parts as a package for $500, which requires the buyer to purchase the wood for the seat and the back — an easy process, he said.

While he has no plans to mass produce the L.A. Bench, he does have one goal in mind that shows how hard it is for him to separate L.A. civic pride and the Dodgers.

“I would love to get a couple of them installed at Dodger Stadium,” he said.