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 NEA VP (2020–2023). He recently finished a year as a practitioner in residence at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and currently works as a UTLA member with Los Angeles Unified School District Community Schools. He is a Labor Movement Fellow with the UCLA Labor Studies program.
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.