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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
