Earlier this month, teachers at all six Citizens of the World charter schools in Los Angeles voted overwhelmingly to unionize with United Teachers Los Angeles. Jacobin spoke to two teachers about the organizing drive.
The Hillside Villa Tenants Association has successfully forced a municipal government to approve the public purchase of a building to preserve affordability. The victory, a historic first in the US, creates a blueprint that can be followed across the nation.
Los Angeles educators voted last week to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. Arlene Inouye of United Teachers Los Angeles speaks to us about the significance of their endorsement and why Sanders is the best candidate for the working class.
On the literary destruction of Los Angeles and the nervous breakdown of American exceptionalism.
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.
Eminent domain has long been used to displace working-class people of color in Los Angeles, as in many cities. In a twist, a group of LA tenants is campaigning to use eminent domain to save themselves from eviction.
Democrats are endorsing striking teachers. That doesn’t mean the party’s abandoning its education agenda, but it does mean that the working class is making itself harder to ignore.
The assault on and arrest of California labor leader David Huerta during the brutal immigration crackdown in Los Angeles this weekend is part of a broader attack on unionized workers by Donald Trump’s deportation machine. Unions are mobilizing in response.
From the Black Panthers to the Communist Party, radical Los Angeles in the ’60s was a seething cauldron of unrest, united by the brutal, lawless repression of the LAPD. In a rollicking new book, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener tell the story of a decade of explosions.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has billions stored away, which it refuses to spend to solve the worsening crises facing local public schools. While the district’s penny-pinching serves those at the top, students and teachers are paying the price.
Poet Langston Hughes was invited to speak at Occidental College on this day in 1948, then uninvited when red-baiters released a report calling him a “subversive.” His story shows how the postwar Red Scare targeted radicals, particularly black leftists.
It's official: Los Angeles teachers just announced they are going to strike on January 10. They’re challenging not just public education privatizers, but the Democratic Party establishment.
The Los Angeles teachers' strike isn't all about wages. At its core, the strike is a fight against a hostile takeover of public schools by the superrich.
Los Angeles has one of the worst housing crises in the nation. Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez thinks renters need to stand up for themselves — which is why he’s knocking doors to directly organize people who’ve received eviction notices.
Luxury housing sits empty all over Los Angeles while average city residents displaced by the recent fires are struggling to find new homes in an incredibly tight housing market. There’s an easy solution: give the empty houses to the displaced.
The question is never if resistance will appear, but when. For this generation, Ferguson answered that question.
The highly acclaimed new book Ghettoside tries to explain inner-city violence while papering over structural oppression.
Bosses have long known the power of solidarity strikes — and thus try to make such strikes illegal. But United Teachers Los Angeles president Cecily Myart-Cruz explains in Jacobin that her union and SEIU Local 99 recently pulled such a strike off and won.
The Los Angeles teachers' strike is a model for a popular, militant working-class movement advancing a broad vision of education justice. That model can be replicated everywhere.
United Teachers of Los Angeles won a strong health and safety agreement ahead of returning to classrooms later this month. They won it the old-fashioned way: organizing rank-and-file teachers to demand an agreement that benefits teachers, parents, and students.