Laying the Groundwork

In 2014, coming out of years of organizing and connecting with Chicago’s Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, the Union Power caucus won all citywide officer positions and a majority of the Board of Directors in United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), the city’s public-school educators union. From 2014–16, we built the union’s capacities to carry out supermajority organizing, escalating actions, and structure tests. We did this through both a contract campaign and a memberwide vote to raise dues, amend the union’s constitution for long-term financial sustainability, and complete UTLA’s merger of the local chapters of the two national teachers’ union federations, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). In 2016, we built more structures by cofounding the Reclaim Our Schools LA labor/community coalition and the California Alliance for Community Schools (CACS) partnership across large educator union locals. We deepened a partnership with the long-standing state labor/community coalition, California Calls. We plowed resources into organizing.

In 2017, we headed into the most important test to that point of the union transformation: a contract campaign in which we expected to strike, for the first time in thirty years, in order to win demands on class sizes, caseloads, salaries, and health care, along with “common good” demands to benefit students and the broader communities they’re a part of. Our adversaries were both the rising authoritarian right, exemplified by Trump’s 2016 win, and corporate Democrat privatizers who held majority influence in the Los Angeles Unified School Board (LAUSD) and state government.

We started 2017 with actions on Inauguration Day at hundreds of schools, with educators carrying picket signs in the shape of shields: “Shield Against Racism,” “Shield Against Homophobia,” “Shield Against Sexism,” “Shield Against Anti-Immigrant Attacks,” and more. What we went on to build — in 2017–2018 to prepare for our strike, in the 2019 strike itself, and in the continued transformation since July 2020 under Cecily Myart-Cruz’s presidency — has been critical.

As a result, we shifted the political terrain against the privatizers. We successfully pushed back against the Right’s attempts to convince UTLA members to drop their union memberships in protest of our organizing for racial justice and for public health during the pandemic. UTLA’s work in the 2017–19 contract campaign can inform us on the first two of the tactical strands above.

Working With Members and Community to Cohere Around Demands

In many states and sectors, labor has the advantage of regular negotiation cycles. Because negotiations relate to workers’ most intimate work and life needs, these are ready-made vehicles to build supermajority consensus behind big demands. Using a Bargaining for the Common Good approach that brings social and racial justice proposals to the table as well, negotiations are also vehicles for building consensus with the community behind broader demands.

When the Union Power leadership entered office in UTLA in 2014, we led a deep bargaining survey process with members, in which elected worksite leaders organized chapter meetings in their buildings to collectively identify priorities. Hundreds of buildings and thousands of workers participated. The union has evolved this practice since, now engaging a supermajority of members in every survey and platform development process before bargaining.

In 2017, we did another bargaining survey with members. Having launched Reclaim Our Schools LA in 2016 — anchored by Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), LA Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), Students Deserve, and UTLA — we held a series of community forums to develop Bargaining for the Common Good demands. The union has now also evolved this into a regular practice before bargaining begins in every cycle.

Our 2017 bargaining package ultimately included key “no” items  — no tiering of health care, a moratorium on corporate charter schools to stop and reverse school privatization, cessation of racist student searches, and more. We combined these with “yes” items that reflected our vision — salary increases, class size caps, caseload ratios, more social-emotional staffing, district endorsement of a progressive taxation measure, investment in Community Schools, green space at schools, a district immigrant defense fund, district support for building affordable housing, expanded ethnic studies, and more. Our package was concrete, challenged authoritarianism, and illustrated an alternative to neoliberal policies.

Before 2014, LA was the epicenter of the US privatization movement, with the highest number nationally of privately run, publicly funded schools that had no obligation to serve all students. With this, and the impact of austerity, between 2008 and 2014, UTLA membership declined by over ten thousand members. By 2014, the employer had the initiative in bargaining, with privatizers splitting UTLA from significant sectors of the community. Even with the momentum we had created in the initial years of the transformation, as we headed into 2017 bargaining we knew we needed a broad front of community and political organizations to win, some united behind all of the demands in our package, others around a majority.

The Reclaim anchors supported the whole package and organized dozens of organizations that may not have agreed with all demands but had substantial unity and committed to support the strike. We worked with organizations like UNITE-LA to build business support — not around all demands but around a substantial number. The LA County Federation of Labor, itself with divisions on privatization, voted to support the strike. Elected officials too signed on to support our demands.

We worked with others to cohere organizations around our demands at state and national levels. We formally launched CACS in 2016 and, by 2017, had been brainstorming bargaining demands across locals. CACS was key to moving demands on school funding, privatization, racial justice, and Community Schools within the state and national unions, and building support for our and Oakland’s 2019 strikes. The community/labor coalition, California Calls, had built a progressive taxation referendum, Schools and Communities First, which we embedded within our bargaining proposals by calling upon LAUSD and local and state elected officials to formally endorse it. Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS) organized national calls and newspaper advertisements in support of our demands.

There were forces within our broad front that had not broken with all neoliberal positions — for example, some still bucked against comprehensive regulation of charter schools and uncritically accepted LAUSD’s austerity narrative. However, UTLA, Reclaim, CACS, California Calls, and AROS were the influential leading sector within the front, helping to bring other organizations along and painting a picture of a non-neoliberal future.

Preparing as Many People as Possible to Create Major, Nonviolent Disruption

Heading into 2017, UTLA had not gone on strike for twenty-eight years. Prior to our 2015–16 campaign to raise dues and amend the constitution, the union had been on the edge of bankruptcy. The union had not had the capacity to successfully strike due to low member participation and lack of supermajority member structures.

In our 2014–15 contract campaign and the dues/constitution campaign, we implemented supermajority organizing and made progress on strengthening organizational structures, from an elected chapter chair at every worksite, to rank-and-file area steering committees that led regional organizing, to a board of directors synthesizing organizing citywide, to an increasingly organizing-oriented staff.

In 2017 and 2018, we knew our four tactical goals: demystifying striking; getting a supermajority of members committed to striking; consolidating, expanding, and deepening our organizing structures; and using worksite and coalition organizing to ensure that the majority of the city would support the strike.

We took multiple steps to demystify striking. In 2013 and 2014, Union Power campaigned for office on strike readiness. We campaigned the way we intended to govern: through mass engagement including thousands of phone calls and site visits, dialogue about a clear platform, and asking leaders for endorsements. Striking became a live issue among members.

During the election campaign and once in leadership, we aligned with those nationally who wanted to revive the strike. At the 2014 AFT Convention, we and the Chicago Teachers Union were on a nationally publicized panel discussing the need for strike-readiness.

For our 2014 UTLA Leadership Conference, also covered in the media, we moved hotel locations at the last minute to give further leverage to the pickets of UNITE HERE workers there who were escalating toward a possible strike. In 2018, our UTLA Board voted to go out on solidarity strike with SEIU Local 99, which represented cafeteria workers, custodians, teacher aides, bus drivers, and other workers. Though Local 99 did not strike, the partnership helped workers win a great agreement. In 2018, we supported the educator walkouts in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, and elsewhere by giving advice on strategy and promoting the actions on social media. We brought an Arizona striker to speak at a UTLA mass rally.

We shifted the way we talked about striking in worksite visits and all-member communications. We described striking as our natural, ultimate leverage, and building strike-readiness as normal operating procedure. Without it, we leave power on the table. We made graphics for flyers, social media, and trainings showing an escalating action continuum, with striking as the ultimate escalation.

We gave members practice withholding labor in front of the boss. While UTLA had called for faculty meeting boycotts prior to 2014, they were low participation and not measured carefully. In April 2015, as part of a seven-month contract escalation, we systematically organized boycotts. We did a deep training with all elected chapter chairs, provided lists for them to work to get to a supermajority of members at their sites to participate, and gave the guidance that, during the boycotts, members would meet in the parking lot to take attendance, create solidarity, and discuss next steps.

The boycotts were a supermajority success. The district threatened discipline but did not follow through. The few principals who attempted discipline were stopped.

Escalating Actions and Building Structures

In preparing mass nonviolent disruption, in our case a strike, we knew that the second component was getting a supermajority of workers committed to act. From 2017 to the strike in January 2019, we built eight all-union escalating actions across 35,000 workers, from school site picketing, to parent leafleting, to a health care ratification vote, to regional rallies, to citywide rallies, to a strike authorization vote. Many of these were methodically planned structure tests, in which we carefully measured participation across the entire city, helping us test our organizing and messaging reach, notice strong regions, take note of sites that needed more support, and test site, cluster, steering, officer, and staff leaders.

Our highest numbers were 83 percent participation and 98 percent yes on the August 2018 strike authorization vote, and 75 percent signing the fall 2018 “I Will Strike” petition. We reached this breadth and depth by overlapping supermajority organizing with a fight for issues that workers cared about.

Escalating actions were key, giving workers entry points over time, allowing leaders to practice organizing, and, as the fight sharpened and participation increased, building workers’ confidence. We used hard-copy public petitions in the structure tests, requiring signatures from workers to be delivered in person in order to be counted as yes. This was crucial in helping identify “undecideds” and in building support, as people feel more committed when they physically sign.

Member organizers created momentum at sites as they publicly posted who had signed. Probationary employees gained confidence to sign when they saw a supermajority on board. People using their influence to bring others onto the petition were identified as organic leaders.

The third element of getting a supermajority committed to nonviolent disruptive action was consolidating, expanding, and deepening organizing structures. Through the contract and dues/constitution campaigns of 2014–16, we had substantially built the structures of an elected chapter chair in each of our 925 buildings and our rank-and-file area steering committees. Through annual summer leadership conferences, January all-city chapter chair meetings, and monthly area meetings, we invested in training chapter chairs in the essential mechanics of organizing. We had special area steering committee trainings on tracking organizing data, using structure tests to identify strong and weak spots, and supporting chapter chairs. In 2017 and 2018, we consolidated and deepened these structures. Member leaders got more practice, and workers interested in organizing started running for chapter chair and area steering committees.

In 2017, we introduced a new structure, doubling down on our democratic breadth and depth. We brought partners from the Chicago Teachers Union to our 2017 Leadership Conference to introduce Contract Action Teams (CATs). We followed CTU’s presentation with trainings on leader identification and six-step structured organizing conversations. With CATs, each chapter chair identified organic leaders on their campus to be in charge of regular back-and-forth communication with ten workers each, making a leader-to-worker ratio of one to ten. We helped chapter chairs prepare for organizing conversations to recruit these leaders. CATs have been a critical part of UTLA’s structure since.

Finally, we needed to ensure that the majority of the city would support the strike, with tens of thousands of Angelenos participating. We took two approaches. Reclaim Our Schools LA and a group of UTLA leaders worked with labor and community organizations across every region of Los Angeles. Over two hundred organizations pledged support for the strike, with many adopting specific school picket lines. While this approach was critical, particularly in shaping LA elected leaders’ views, it did not get to scale across parents and youth at 925 worksites.

So we added a structure-based approach. We built trainings for all 925 chapter chairs on flyering parents at schools, building lists of parent supporters, facilitating meetings with parents and youth on the possibility of a strike, and organizing community walks to have conversations with and give signs to churches, organizations, and businesses. Members led this work over months at worksites, creating regular structured communication with families and scaling us up.

By the strike, Loyola Marymount University polling showed over 75 percent of LA residents supporting UTLA, and daytime rallies often had 80,000 attendees, showing that over half were not UTLA members.

How Preparing to Strike Can Help Fight Fascism

Every union is not as uniquely situated as education unions. Education unions are in every neighborhood, work intimately with families, and are in the public sector. Yet labor can learn from education workers’ models and adapt lessons to other contexts.

To reach the breadth of educator unions, this may require coordination across unions in different sectors. This adaptation can be fused with the core lessons from UTLA and other education unions: consolidating members, other workers, and community behind clear demands; bringing broadly felt common-good demands into negotiations and campaigns; demystifying striking and work actions; preparing for mass, nonviolent action through supermajority organizing and structure tests; adapting tactics to get to scale; and using backward planning and escalating actions to create compression points that have broad impact across worksites, negotiations, and electoral politics. In this moment, these approaches must be fused with explicitly anti-fascist political education with workers.

It is urgent we prevent the consolidation of right-wing authoritarianism. Labor coalitions across sectors, working tightly with community, can help build the broad front we need, while also creating the antineoliberal leading sector within the front. This core can lead not only in negotiations-related work but also mass direct action and electoral campaigns, ensuring that our work is engaging millions with whom we do not usually communicate. We must draw ideas from past efforts in labor and community organizing, many of which include through lines on these essential tasks. We have no time to lose.