Alex Caputo-Pearl was a teacher in South Los Angeles for twenty-two years before being elected United Teachers Los Angeles President (2014–2020) and UTLA National Education Association vice president (2020–2023). He currently works as a UTLA member in the LA Community Schools Initiative and serves on the UTLA bargaining team.
Former United Teachers Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl lays out a “block and build” strategy for labor to defeat the rising right-wing attacks on workers and democracy in the coming Donald Trump administration.
United Teachers Los Angeles’s transformation into a strike-ready, progressive union offers lessons for how today’s labor upsurge can produce durable, transformative union power, writes former UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl.
The Los Angeles teachers’ union was profoundly influenced by Jane McAlevey, writes former president Alex Caputo-Pearl. If the loving and assertive push was her trademark, then thinking audaciously big was its complement.
The Los Angeles teachers strike showed that bottom-up organizing can overcome extraordinary odds. We can do the same throughout the health and education sectors — and at Amazon.
The United Teachers of Los Angeles are on the precipice of a historic strike against corporate education reform.