The Brief

This has been a summer of strikes in Los Angeles, with hotel workers, actors, and script writers all walking off the job. And that's not it — UPS workers, including tens of thousands in Southern California, ratified a new contract this month after voting to authorize a strike. Earlier in the year, LAUSD support staff struck for higher pay, closing schools for three days. Teachers joined them on the picket line in solidarity.

To understand this strike wave, LAist spoke with UCLA lecturer and historian Caroline Luce about L.A'.s labor history and what comes next.

This conversation with LAist 89.3's Nick Roman has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Labor upsurge

LAist: How does this year compare with years past?

Caroline Luce: It is certainly a labor upsurge that we haven't seen in recent memory, that's for sure. I don't know that I can find a historical analog in terms of the number of workers out on strike or threatening to strike. But we certainly have seen a wave of organizing in past years.

SAG-AFTRA member James Mathis III picketed outside of the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank on July 21, 2023.

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Robert Garrova / LAist

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I'm thinking, in the early 20th century, of the free speech fights around anti-picketing ordinances that were passed in the L.A. City Council. In the 1930s, the explosion of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) rolling through L.A.'s war production facilities. And even in the 70s and 80s, a time of plant closures and shutdowns, a wave of working-class community organizing and forceful pushback to try to retain and keep those good jobs.

But this summer, one of the things I think is most magical is to see all these workers seeing their fates tied together. Strikes tend to work kind of industry by industry, which is to say there'll be a really major upsurge, say in Hollywood, but other workers are mostly supporting. What we're seeing this summer is workers who are identifying their shared experiences and connecting their struggles and uniting in ways that are really, really magical and wonderful to see.

L.A.'s anti-union history

LAist: When you go back in the history of Los Angeles, it was a very anti-union town, at least among the folks on the top and even in the media at the time.

CL: Yes. L.A. had a self-fashioned reputation that was much promoted by business leaders in the city as the "Citadel of the Open Shop." (That's) what they called it. An anti-union town that was friendly for business, where there was an abundance of cheap available labor. And as I alluded to before, they passed laws to ensure that was the case, including an anti-picketing ordinance in 1911 that made it illegal to have a loud or unusual or loud voice in public. So the repression of the labor movement was very real, but that doesn't mean that workers weren't constantly in the past 100 years of L.A'.s history, fighting for improved working conditions in their workplaces. They were just facing brutal repression when they did.

A small building across the street from the Douglas Aircraft Company factory, at 2700 Ocean Park Blvd., Santa Monica, circa 1937.

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Herman J Schultheis Collection

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One of the key moments that starts to shift things is when war production facilities and heavy mass industry comes to L.A. I'm thinking specifically of aerospace, rubber, and auto manufacturing, and steel. Oil comes first, then rubber, then cars, then all the things you need to make cars in terms of steel, and then aerospace follows.

That really starts to happen in the 1930s, and it gets an economic boost from the federal government when they passed the National Defense Authorization Act in 1940. That bill guaranteed profits for war production facilities so long as they allowed unionization in their plants. And what that meant is that these massive new facilities were brought very quickly into the labor movement. This was led by the C.I.O., the Congress of Industrial Relations, who ran massive organizing drives. The UAW in the auto plants, the Rubber Workers Union in the rubber plants, United Steel Workers in the steel plants.

Morphing into a union town

And in the span of just about five years, L.A. goes from a town that has very, very low union density to a city where nearly one out of every three workers was in a union. So that is really the base of the labor movement in L. A. as we think about it. And it has endured to a certain extent even as those industrial unions declined.

The wave of plant shutdowns meant that strongholds of union density in L.A. faded starting in the late 70s and early 1980s. Between 1976 and 1982, there were six major plants that were shut down resulting in the loss of something like 50,000 jobs and the base of those union support.

But what was interesting is alongside that wave of shutdowns and in fact, inspired in part by the community activism that emerged to stop them, what we see is new unions pushing hard in the service sector, integrating immigrant workers into their unions, letting women lead their unions.

About 300 people picketed at AT&T's Los Angeles Service Center in October, 1988, to protest layoffs by the utility.

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Michael Haering

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And so the resurgence of the labor movement that we see in the 1990s is really led by a whole different kind of workforce. Mostly those who are in service sector jobs, hotel workers and janitors being the two most famous in this ascendance. But in Hollywood, the guilds also enter a new phase of union dominance as we shift into a service sector economy.

What's next for the labor movement?

LAist: So you have the changing service worker unionization effort, and this strong push, especially this summer from the actors and the script writers. Where does all this go from here?

CL: Well, one of the things that endures, even as these service sector unions are becoming increasingly militant, increasingly dense, and increasingly unionized industries, is that this sort of differentiation remains. Which is to say the service sector unions are moving in one direction, whereas building trades, more traditional unionized sectors are kind of separate and doing their own thing.

And one of the magical things I see happening this summer is that workers across sectors are starting to form those bonds of solidarity. I'm thinking about the Teamsters showing up for the hotel workers and going out on the picket line with the writers and the actors. I'm thinking about nurses getting together with the same hospitality workers and writers and teachers. I'm thinking about the tremendous unity that was shown between the school employees and the teachers of UTLA and SEIU Local 99, who stood together and won significant increases for those school workers and are now showing up on the picket lines of the hotel workers and the writers and actors.

Lindsey Normington, a Star Garden Topless Dive Bar dancer, performs in solidarity with striking WGA (Writers Guild of America) employees on the picket line, on June 15, 2023 in Burbank, California. Dancers at the North Hollywood bar have become the only unionized group of strippers in the country.

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Mario Tama

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That kind of unity and that kind of cross-sector organizing seems really new and very exciting to me, and could result in some really interesting new coalitions that might emerge to take on other issues. We know housing has been so central — the high cost of housing — to so many of these labor strikes this summer. Not to mention the graduate student strike of last fall and a wave of organizing in the last year or two.

So to see those unions come together suggests that there may be space to tackle these bigger, more existential issues. Climate change would certainly be wonderful. But the high cost of housing may be something where these coalitions can fight for renter protections or local zoning ordinances that might mitigate some of that housing stress.

So we'll have to see. They've gotta win contracts first, right? And the studios have shown an absolute refusal to negotiate in good faith. But what's next for the labor movement, to me, could be a really exciting horizon of other issues that impact workers across these sectors and ways that those coalitions could be used to fight back.

Newfound solidarity

LAist: That kind of solidarity, why is it happening now when it didn't happen before?

CL: I'm a historian, so I don't know if I have a lot of prognostications about why that's happening now versus before, but I do think that there's something to be said for the impact of the pandemic and the multiple overlapping crises that we saw brought to bear in that moment. Certainly the uprisings around George Floyd's murder created some of this momentum.

Young workers who are coming into the workforce and not seeing a lot of prospects for their own futures. Workers of color who are insisting on racial justice and equity being part of how their union does their business.

I think today workers confront so many existential crises that they just have had enough and it's time to fight back. So the "why now" is tough. I'm a historian. I can think in the past. But I certainly think all of us are feeling this increased sense of if we don't fight now, what future do we have?

Geffen Playhouse Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the movie Moonlight, but don't expect to see him at this year's Oscars ceremony.

"I tend to stay away from the awards show," McCraney said. " I think I might have PTSD."

McCraney is referring to the viral moment from the 2017 Oscars ceremony, where La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner instead of Moonlight.

McCraney isn't new to theater. In fact, you could consider it his original home before his play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue launched him into the Hollywood spotlight. But when the Geffen Playhouse asked him to be their artistic director two years ago, it called him back to the stage in a different way. Tapping a screenwriter for the position was a first for the theater, but McCraney said the roles actually overlap in more ways than one.

 "The job of the screenwriter most times is to make sure that everybody is understanding where the story is going and what the 'action' of the piece is," McCraney said. "So it's not that much different than being an artistic director.  My job here is to set the artistic goal for the organization. [To] point out its virtues and pitfalls, the dangers and the obstacles, and then move collectively as a single storyteller towards that goal."

McCraney said one of the great things about living in Los Angeles is its nuanced racial and ethnic communities, and he rides his bike around the city to better experience them.

"The landscape is constantly shifting and changing," McCraney said. "For example, Westwood has drastically changed over the past 15 years and will change irrevocably with the coming of the new train station down on Wilshire. It will change again with LA28 happening."

Just like Los Angeles, the Geffen Playhouse has had multiple transformations over its more than 30 year existence. Their world premier show, Silvia Silvia Silvia, is playing until March 8. Dragon Mama, starring Sarah Porkalob, begins March 4.

"Sarah is an incredible singer and writer and has created this incredible arc through a family that is both powerful and witty, but also deeply nuanced," McCraney said. "She's sharing that family with us, and family is our first community. They are the people we learn the most from. We learn unconditional love. We learn collective bargaining. Investigating family, investigating why we stay together and how we stay together through dire circumstances is a critical investigation for us right now."

When it comes to this year's Oscars ceremony, McCraney said he's rooting for all the nominees.

"It's been an incredible season," he said. "But Sinners is an incredible film that I've seen three or four times, so I'm really excited to see how it does."

The Long Beach Community College District has agreed to pay $18 million to more than 1,450 part-time professors to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleged they were forced to work unpaid hours outside the classroom, grading papers and tests, meeting with students, preparing lessons and other duties.

The settlement, which the district board quietly approved last month, still needs the judge overseeing the case to sign off. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for July 1 in Los Angeles County Superior Court. It’s likely that Judge Stuart Rice will approve the deal. Last year, he ruled that the part-timers, commonly called adjuncts, were entitled to the pay they sought, writing he found “a myriad of problems” with the district’s claims that its practices did not violate state law.

The case has made “a major impact throughout the state already,” as some districts have begun negotiating contract terms to give adjuncts what they’ve long sought — pay for time they spend prepping and grading, not just for class time, said the plaintiffs’ lawyer Eileen B. Goldsmith, in an interview. (EdSource published an investigative series in the issue, Gig By Gig At California’s Community Colleges, in 2022.)

The Long Beach district recently set aside $20 million for the settlement and associated costs, its spokesperson, Stacey Toda, told the Long Beach Post in an email. “Resolving this matter allows the District to avoid prolonged litigation and manage risk responsibly, consistent with standard practices across public higher education,” Toda wrote.

The settlement “is a big deal, it is tremendous,” said John Martin, chair of the California Part-Time Faculty Association, and a community college adjunct professor in Shasta and Butte counties.

Martin, a long-time advocate for better pay for adjuncts, is also the plaintiff in similar ongoing lawsuits, including one against the state Community College system.

In legal papers filed in the Superior Court, Goldsmith wrote that the proposed settlement, if approved, will result in 1,456 class members receiving more than “$11,000 — a very meaningful result for these class members, particularly given the novel issues in this litigation.”

The Long Beach Post contributed to this story.