The Brief

In recent months, Southern California has seen a surge of union activity.

Hollywood screenwriters with the Writers Guild of America went on strike in early May, joined by SAG-AFTRA actors two months later. Hotel workers went on strike in July and continue on the picket lines, most recently walking off the job and protesting this week. Last month, thousands of L.A. city workers walked off the job for a day, protesting at LAX and City Hall. And the union representing United Parcel Service drivers narrowly averted a strike recently after ratifying a new labor agreement.

Even in less-expected industries, from a North Hollywood strip club to a Pasadena children’s museum, local workers have been organizing and unionizing.

As this happens, Southern California has become a hotbed of union activity: According to Cornell University’s IRL Labor Action Tracker, since the beginning of this year, the region has led the nation in terms of labor actions.

“Los Angeles has emerged as a focal point of strikes and worker mobilization,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center.

There are reasons for this, Wong said. While union activity has been on the rise nationwide, he said, “I do think that in many ways, Los Angeles has emerged as a focal point because of the stark economic inequality that exists here in Los Angeles, bigger than any other major city in the country.”

Strikers were out in full force in front of Universal Studios this summer.

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That, and what he describes as an active labor movement that has successfully organized many workers of color, women, and younger workers — some of the same groups hardest hit by economic inequality in the city, including sky-high rents and a cost of living that for many has become untenable.

A 'sense of unfairness'

The uncertain post-pandemic economy has also played a role for these workers, Wong said.

“The pandemic has definitely heightened a sense of economic insecurity and also deep-seated discontent among workers who have seen record profits by corporations, rising costs of living,” he said. “So there is a fundamental sense of unfairness, in an economy that is not working for workers.”

Recently this has led to more workers, especially younger ones, looking to organize in what Wong describes as a “revitalization of the labor movement” after years of declining union membership.

One of those young workers is Lou Douglas, animal programs coordinator at the Kidspace Children’s Museum in Pasadena. This week, Kidspace became the first children’s museum in L.A. County to successfully unionize.

Undervalued, underpaid

“Especially as a non-profit children’s museum, non-profit work and child care work are two of the areas that tend to be really undervalued, and so the workers tend to be underpaid,” Douglas said, “We do this work because we love it, but you know, our passion isn’t going to put dinner on the table or pay our rent.”

Douglas, who is 24, said until recently he faced an hour-and-a-half commute by bus to Pasadena from his home in the more affordable neighborhood of Historic Filipinotown near downtown L.A. He only recently moved closer to work.

“We want to be able to have our workers be able to afford, you know, to live in the same place where they work,” he said.

About 60 Kidspace workers will now be part of Kidspace United, a member of AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) Cultural Workers United.

While there have been victories like these, many of those on the picket lines in L.A. remain in it for the long haul: There’s no agreement yet in sight for the hotel workers, represented by UNITE HERE Local 11.

And the WGA writer’s strike has by now entered its fifth month.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that he is directing state agencies to develop artificial intelligence safety recommendations, some of which were part of a bill he vetoed two years ago.

His change of tune on those measures, including requiring AI developers to include a “kill switch” to shut off certain programs in emergencies, comes in response to growing public alarm over the fast-developing technology’s potential “catastrophic” harms such as AI creating a bioweapon or bringing down the power grid.

Newsom is seeking recommendations from the Government Operations Agency and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services by Nov. 16, meaning they could form the basis of a special legislative session on the issue. He floated the possibility of calling one in Politico on Thursday.

Newsom has sought in recent weeks to respond to several incidents in which AI agents from leading developers OpenAI and Anthropic broke away from testing environments, gained access to the open internet and carried out cyberattacks on other websites and companies. Earlier this month, a researcher set off a panic when he resigned from Anthropic while warning the technology could “kill all humans;” the researcher’s former colleagues were quick to agree.

The hackings have captivated the public and seem to confirm AI researchers’ fears that the fast-developing technology is improving its own capabilities beyond human control. Several industry leaders last week endorsed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call for a slowdown in development.

Newsom’s Friday executive order directs the state agencies to recommend changes in state law to implement an external evaluation requirement, as well as requirements that AI companies’ safety frameworks required under the newest law be independently verified. He’s also seeking recommendations on how to require a kill switch, and how to expand the safety incidents companies must report to include “a range of loss-of-control incidents” such as the recent reported hackings.

Regulation is unlikely from the federal government; President Donald Trump remains all-in on speeding up AI development in the face of competition from China and said the calls for a slowdown are a “conspiracy.”

Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential contender, said Friday in a press release that should “alarm every American.”

“We’re going to speed up our work on substantial and responsible AI oversight before it's too late,” he said.

California under Newsom has enacted several first-in-the-nation laws to curb the potentially existential risks of AI. In 2025 he signed Senate Bill 53, which requires large AI model developers to publish frameworks on how they manage safety incidents and assess catastrophic risk — defined as incidents involving 50 or more deaths, chemical or biological weapons or more than $1 billion of theft or damage. They also must report critical safety incidents to the state. Illinois and New York have similar laws.

But the measure was a compromise — a requirement for transparency rather than regulatory control — after Newsom in 2024 vetoed Senate Bill 1047.

Both bills were authored by Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener, whose San Francisco district is home to the most prominent AI companies.

The vetoed measure would have required the largest AI developers to receive safety auditing from third-party, external monitors, develop a kill switch and be subject to clearer legal liability if their technology causes harm. The measure divided Silicon Valley and received fierce opposition from several, but not all, of the largest AI developers.

Newsom wrote then in a veto letter that while he agreed with the need to require safety protocols, the bill could restrict AI development at large companies “at the potential expense of curtailing the very innovation that fuels advancement in favor of the public good.”

“I agree with the author — we cannot afford to wait for a major catastrophe to occur before taking action to protect the public,” he added.

Since then, more in the industry have embraced third-party evaluations. This year, Newsom signed two laws to verify and set standards for those external monitors. But the new laws did not require companies to use them.

In a recent call for a slowdown in AI development that was endorsed by several other industry leaders, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also called for third-party monitoring; both that company and OpenAI say they will commit to the practice.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a series of measures that halt the rebuilding of the burned Lineage warehouse in Boyle Heights and that steer funding toward fire recovery efforts.

In a unanimous vote, the City Council barred the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) from issuing any rebuild permits until after the Los Angeles Fire Department completes its investigation.

The council also directed the Department of City Planning, the city attorney and the LADBS to present an interim control ordinance prohibiting permits or certificates of occupancy for large cold-storage warehousing and distribution near residential neighborhoods and sensitive areas like parks, schools, day care centers and libraries in Boyle Heights. 

The ordinance, if approved, would be in effect for 45 days, with an option to extend by 10 months and 15 days. It could be extended by an additional year, or until the “appropriate land use regulatory controls have been prepared,” according to a city staff report. 

“This Lineage fire exposed the cost of systems that have concentrated industrial risk in working-class communities of color for generations,” said Councilmember Ysabel Jurado during the council meeting. 

“A facility should not be able to request a like-for-like rebuild while the fire investigation remains active and the surrounding community is still living with the consequences,” she added. 

Jurado pushed forward the measures, noting that “recovery doesn’t finish when the site is cleaned up.”

“Our responsibility is also to demand accountability and strengthen protections so residents do not experience a disaster like this again,” she said. 

Jurado said the measures will ensure Boyle Heights residents “aren’t left to navigate recovery alone or bear the financial burden of an emergency they did not create.”

The council also directed city staff to explore the feasibility of establishing a fund of up to $10 million to support the affected Lineage community. 

It also called for the reallocation of up to $940,000 in Los Angeles County Fire Assistance Grant Funds to the Boyle Heights WorkSource Center for Lineage Fire Recovery to support impacted workers and businesses. 

Additionally, council members instructed the LADBS and the city attorney to provide recommendations for increasing penalties for notices of violations “on projects that impose a significant impact to the community,” as seen in the Lineage fire. Recommendations should include a fee and fine structure that ranges from $25,000 to $1 million per fine, according to a city staff report.

This week, Los Angeles' embattled homelessness agency made a major shift when it decided to no longer conduct the region's annual homeless count and give up management of over $200 million in annual federal funds aimed at addressing homelessness starting next month.

The day after the shift, federal prosecutors announced new fraud and bribery charges over homelessness funds that flowed through the agency. They allege a nonprofit founder siphoned $1 million in taxpayer funds into a high-end nightclub and a nearly $50,000 trip to Tahiti, among other claims. The founder's attorney has not responded to requests for comment.

It’s the latest fallout around the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA, which for years has seen outside audits and reviews find that it’s failed to adequately oversee taxpayer spending.

In response to one of those audits, L.A. County decided a year and a half ago to pull its roughly $300 million per year from LAHSA — moving it into a newly created county homelessness department.

Until this year, LAHSA was funded by three main sources: the county, the city and the federal government.

With LAHSA’s decision this week to bow out of federal funding, the city of L.A. is now left as its last remaining major funder.

The L.A City Council has debated withdrawing funds for years, but is still in the process of hiring a consultant to come up with a plan.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and her mayoral challenger, Councilmember Nithya Raman, both say they want the city to pull its funds and manage them directly. In recent weeks on the campaign trail, Raman has promised an exit within her first year as mayor if elected, while Bass this week said it would take “a couple of years.”

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass speaks at a press conference before LAHSA's annual homeless count on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025, in Los Angeles.

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In June and July, Bass’ office said she took steps toward exiting LAHSA, saying she directed city housing staff to come up with a plan for the city to leave the agency. Those staff told LAist they’re not aware of any such directive, and Bass’ office has not responded to follow-up questions.

No decisions yet from city

Three years ago, as the L.A. City Council’s homelessness committee was expressing frustration at years of inaccurate and incomplete performance data from LAHSA, a council member said the council had failed to examine alternatives that could take over management of the funding from the agency.

“ We have to have something in place. And I think what we failed as council is to start talking [through] the questions about what that would mean,” Councilmember John Lee said at the time.

“ We need to make sure that we take a look at those options. Otherwise, every year, we're going to be coming here … having the same exact conversations.”

The next year, county auditors found that LAHSA had failed to properly track and oversee the money it managed.

The City Council then voted in March 2025 to study letting the city contract directly with homeless service providers, bypassing LAHSA.

It was about a year before council members discussed next steps at a meeting.

This April, the council's Housing and Homelessness Committee — chaired at the time by Raman — recommended shifting city-funded programs away from LAHSA over the course of the current fiscal year. They recommended a July 1 deadline for a plan to be provided. That date came and went without the full council directing that a plan be created.

City Councilmember Nithya Raman speaks ahead of the annual homeless count on Jan. 20, 2026.

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The full council approved money for a consultant on Aug. 4, when it voted to allocate $450,000 to "rapidly hire" outside experts to study a transition plan.

That consultant hasn’t been hired yet. A competitive bidding process is underway, according to City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo.

"We are required to solicit bids for that work and are currently in the procurement process," Szablo said via email.

Mounting federal and legal pressure

The city's deliberations are unfolding against escalating scrutiny of LAHSA itself.

In June, the Trump administration suspended the agency from federal homelessness dollars, citing what it called a pattern of fraud, failure and flagrant mismanagement. Administration officials at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, pointed in part to the case of Abundant Blessings, a nonprofit whose director, Alex Soofer, was criminally charged in January with siphoning at least $10 million in homelessness funds that flowed through LAHSA.

An LAist investigation found LAHSA had approved at least $3.5 million in contracts to Soofer's nonprofit even after its own compliance team flagged the group as high-risk for failing to do its job. Soofer recently agreed to plead guilty to diverting $2 million and previously repaid LAHSA $1.25 million.

LAHSA sued to block the federal suspension of homelessness dollars, arguing HUD's evidence was thin and its process abrupt. In an August ruling, U.S. District Judge David Carter paused the suspension pending further hearings, writing that LAHSA "may be dysfunctional" but that federal officials had "abruptly" pulled funding from providers serving thousands of people.

This week, LAHSA gave up trying to continue its federal responsibilities, just before prosecutors announced the new charges against LAHSA vendors.

LAist reporter Aaron Schrank contributed reporting to this story.

“Was it like this during the Great Depression?”

It’s a question that prop house owner Pam Elyea says she’s asked herself in recent years, as the film and TV industry has weathered multiple hits — the pandemic, the dual industry strikes of 2023, the 2025 fires — and a loss of production jobs to other states and countries that began decades ago.

Elyea, along with her husband Jim, opened History for Hire, a prop house in North Hollywood, in 1985. Before the pandemic, they had a staff of 20 people, but now employ only nine full-time employees.

“As an employer and a business owner, the feeling you're always trying to overcome is that feeling of weariness,” Elyea says. “ That it was just dragging on and on, and there's really no big hope in sight.”

‘It got everybody excited’

Elyea says she was heartened by the boost to California’s film and TV tax incentive program in July of 2025 — from $330 million to $750 million: “It got everybody excited."

Elyea says she started to see positive effects sooner than she expected, about three months in, first with new TV productions that were tax credit recipients coming to History for Hire for props, and more recently feature films.

Members of the Set Decorators Society of America in Washington, D.C., lobbying for a federal film and TV tax incentive on September 16, 2026.

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She’s also now lobbying for a new federal film and TV tax incentive, which President Donald Trump recently said he’d support.

“Are we at where we were before? No,” she says. “But we certainly are so much better, and so it kind of gives you hope moving forward.”

‘Flickering back to life’

Elyea’s experience is reflective of some of the data on film and TV productions in Los Angeles over the last year.

On the LAist podcast Imperfect Paradise, entertainment journalist Dawn Chmielewski notes that Film LA, which tracks permitting for on-location shoots in and around Los Angeles, showed that when it comes to television production, there was a 51% increase in the second quarter over the first.

“Overall, the numbers are still down year over year,” Chmielewski says. “But it's showing that the industry is sort of flickering back to life.”

Another promising data point Chmielewski points out: ProdPro, which tracks productions around the world, “showed that both the number of films being shot and overall production spend are both up in California for the second quarter of this year.”

But there are also statistics that point to a less rosy picture.

Film LA research that shows the number of shoot days in Los Angeles has decreased by nearly 50 percent since 2017. And it’s estimated that since the peak of the streaming era in 2022, nearly 50 thousand production jobs have been lost in Los Angeles.

‘It feels incredibly uncertain’

Costumer Andrea Wheeler describes the current climate in the industry as one where “everybody is on eggshells,” with so many people she knows who’ve had to pivot to other careers that “you feel like you’re in a dying industry right now.”

Andrea Wheeler is a costumer who has worked on TV shows like "Lopez v. Lopez" and movies like Marvel's "Eternals."

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While Wheeler was recently able to find work on a show that moved from Vancouver to California because of the tax credit boost here, she says the pay and working conditions didn’t match up to the kind of work she was able to find in the past.

From around 2016 to 2019, she says, “if you were in a job that was really atrocious, just like really bad working conditions ... You could just leave and find another job the next day. There was a lot of security there, [but] not now.”

Chineza Ezinkwo is a production coordinator based in Los Angeles. She most recently worked on "Tyrant," a Charlize Theron film that shot in LA.

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Chineza Ezinkwo, a production coordinator who’s worked in the film and TV industry in Los Angeles since 2011, echoes Wheeler.

“ Yes, there's more work happening, but also it's hard to find,” Ezinkwo says. “You can't really plan to build a life in the way that you felt like you used to even a few years ago.”

Still, she says there is also a bit of a renewed sense of optimism in the industry right now.

“It feels incredibly uncertain, but I will say there's more hope these past two years than there was certainly [in] the past three or four years.”