Labor of Love | 4

There has been a surge in union organizing across the nation, including Los Angeles.

In this chapter, we look at the role of labor in modern LA. Angela speaks with WGA strike captain, Helen Shang, Roxana Tynan, Executive Director of LAANE, USC Professor of Sociology and Ethnic studies, Manuel Pastor, California State Senator Maria Elena Durazo, and Kent Wong Project Director of Labor and Community Partnerships at UCLA. Together they unpack how labor unions advance a more equitable economy and, in turn, a functioning democracy.

[Archival] LA is a union town! On strike! Shut it down!...

At the beginning of May 2023, after many unproductive months negotiating a new contract with the body that represents Hollywood studios and streaming services, the Writers Guild of America announced that it would go on strike.

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Speaker 1: We just want reasonable wages, our fair share of the revenues that we helped create so that we can take care of our families.

Speaker 2: We want to send a message to the corporations and employers that labor stands together, that LA is a union town, and that when you take on one of us, you take on all of us.

It had been 15 years since the WGA’s last strike.

Speaker 3: At the end of the day, the strike is for people of the future. It's for the kids that are in college right now studying to do what we do. Getting their masters, their doctorate. This is trying to be a gig industry. It is not. It is a career.

Speaker 4: We made it crystal clear to the companies that the current situation is untenable. That they had broken a model that had lasted for decades and they needed to fix it, or else there would be this great consequence. And here we are.

Then, in July, the labor organization representing actors, SAG-AFTRA, also went on strike.

[SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher]: We're standing in front of this beautiful studio that I have worked at many times, but this growing greed of the conglomerates that keep cannibalizing other businesses to become more and more powerful…

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It was the first time in 63 years that both the actors and writers’ guilds were on strike at the same time. And these weren’t the only labor actions hitting Los Angeles last year. LA Unified School District staff walked out for three days, and the teachers union pledged their solidarity with the work stoppage. 11,000 city employees, including sanitation workers, mechanics, and airport personnel walked off their jobs and picketed all over town.
And thousands of hotel workers took part in rolling walkouts at dozens of area hotels.

The message was clear: As economic inequality skyrockets and technology threatens jobs, labor movements are resurging across the country. And nowhere has seen more momentum than Los Angeles.

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I’m Angela Glover Blackwell, and this is Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life. In this episode, there’s a new spirit of labor activism in the air. What does this mean for a multiracial democracy? We’ll also explore why a “just economy,” where people receive fair wages, ample benefits, and comprehensive job protections, is key to building a good life for all. This is Chapter 4: Labor of Love.

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Act I

The specific demands of the striking unions in LA last year varied. At their core, however, all these actions were about the same thing: creating an economy that works for people. All people. Whether you’re Black, White, Brown, or Asian. Whether you’re a recent immigrant or Native American. Whether you’re a low-wage hotel housekeeper or have what may seem like a glamorous job as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Helen Shang: This is art, but it's also an industry. You know, you just have to tell yourself, I am following my dream and I am lucky to be doing this. But it's also a job, and so you should be paid fairly for your work.

Meet Helen Shang. She’s a television and feature film writer who’s been living and working in Los Angeles for years. Helen is one of the thousands of writers who went on strike for almost five months.

Helen Shang: We have traditionally been sort of an apprenticeship industry, where you start out as a junior assistant or junior writer and as you work in writers rooms, you move your way up and gain, like, institutional knowledge from the people around you. But the way that things have been going, with making writers rooms smaller in size and shorter in time has kind of broken that pathway. And it’s making it harder and harder for people to get in, especially, you know, underrepresented people.

Helen, whose credits include, 13 Reasons Why and Hawaii 5-0, became a volunteer strike captain, helping with logistics and disseminating information.

Helen Shang: I know a lot of people saw pictures of picket lines and were saying, “Oh, these people are smiling and laughing. They must not be serious about this.” But when I went to the picket lines, everything felt better because we were with the community of people that we loved and respected, like these were our fellow writers. But then, when you're done with it, like, you go home and you sit in a dark room just being like, “What is going to happen?” And part of the reason why I did want to come out to the picket lines more, was that there was nothing you could do. Like you could either just sit there and be upset, or like actually go out there. In my experience, that made things feel a little better.

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And the strike eventually paid off. In October 2023, the Writers Guild ratified a new contract that, among other things, ensured funding for a showrunner training program and regulations around the use of artificial intelligence. SAG ratified their own agreement that December.

Other unions that went on strike in LA last year also found some success. The LA Unified School District workers won pay raises and retroactive pay for teacher’s aides, bus drivers, and other notoriously underpaid workers. But all this labor activity in LA is impacting more than better contracts for union employees.

Kent Wong: I do think the seeds of resistance that we are seeing today bode well for the establishment of democratic institutions that can advance an agenda of social, economic and racial justice.

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That’s Kent Wong. We heard from him in chapter two. As the former head of the UCLA Labor Center he is the foremost historian of labor movements in the city. Today, he believes that Los Angeles is the “center for the labor movement nationally.”

Kent Wong: What we see with the hotel workers strike here in Los Angeles, with the writers strike, with the screen actors strike, with the United Auto Workers strike nationally, what we see in the last year between 48,000 graduate student workers at the University of California launching the longest and largest strike in higher education history. The strike of the teachers with the classified workers at the LA Unified School District, 200 Starbucks stores unionizing across the country. Fast food workers, warehouse workers, Amazon workers, Uber and Lyft drivers organizing. I do think that these are signs of growing participatory, multiracial democracy.

Act II

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Roxana Tynan: For me, the thing that is closest to my heart is the idea that democracy is something we have to practice every day.

Roxana Tynan is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy or LAANE. It’s an organizing and advocacy group whose goal is to build an economy that works for everyone.

Roxana Tynan: The mission of LAANE was really to build power for workers, both by organizing them into unions, but also by raising standards for low wage workers that build a healthier community. And having a union means you've got democracy on the job. And you have a chance to practice democracy all the time. You elect your leaders. When a union's doing its job, it is training shop stewards to be daily implementing and enforcing the contract that they've negotiated with their employer, and that daily engagement with power, the exercise of power, of democratic power, is incredibly powerful.

For Roxana, there’s a direct link between unions, democracy, and a just economy.

Roxana Tynan: In my view, a healthy economy grows from the ground up, not from the top down. And so if folks at the bottom aren't earning enough to support their families then, you know, we are not going to have a healthy economy. And so that idea of an economy that works for everybody really grounds us.

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The idea that in order for the economy to operate successfully, we need a ground up approach is one that strikes a chord with me. It’s so opposite from the current system at play in this country.
Democracy literally means the people power. Demos: people. krah-tos: power. But having been built on the theft of land and enslavement, this country’s democracy was designed to serve the interests of a wealthy few and outweigh the interests of the majority.
Even as the nation evolved, as generations demanded justice, true democracy has never been realized. Neither has a fair and just economy. Today, we have unparalleled concentrations of wealth and power. We’re not even talking about plain old billionaires anymore, but about people with personal fortunes exceeding $100 billion, higher than the GDP of some nations.
Meanwhile, the middle class — a hallmark of a healthy democracy – has been hollowed out.
We must fix this, so that democracy can serve the broad interests of human flourishing instead of the narrow interests of maximum profits and greed. And labor organizations are a key part of that fix.

The new labor organizing happening in places like LA can reclaim the economy to build a better democracy.

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Manuel Pastor: When we say “the economy,” it makes it sound like it's something out there, God, nature of the market, that just kind of happens and that there's not much we can do about it.

So instead of saying "the economy" my friend Manuel Pastor encourages us to say "our economy."

Manuel Pastor: When we say “our economy,” we begin to understand that it's a set of rules we put out there about property rights, about minimum wages, about excess compensation, about allowing redlining to persist or be challenged – it's our economy and we are in it. Think about when some economists say that raising the minimum wage is bad for the economy. It's not bad for our economy because our economy has brothers, sisters, cousins who are working at the minimum wage and who deserve a better life and to be able to spend more time with their children, helping them with their education, to spend more time at play.

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In taking ownership of our economy, the focus shifts to “we the people” rather than some abstract entity known as “the economy.”
In LA, a multiracial coalition of labor and community has joined together, forcing greater fairness and inclusion.
The new labor organizing that’s happening is also fighting to reposition the historical relationship between work and life. A good life includes a mutual connection between what we do and how we live. So that these fundamental parts of who we are can coexist rather than be at odds.
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Here’s Roxana again.

Roxana Tynan: I think too, the leaders, both of the labor movement and our community organizations recognized that, you know, I'm not just a worker who shows up at my job and goes home. I live in a community. I care that the air is clean. I care that my kids go to a decent school. I care about housing. I mean, I think we had a set of leaders who had a pretty progressive and more holistic vision about where do we want to move this city to? It's not — you know, having a bigger and more powerful labor movement is a key part of moving the politics of the city. But that's not the end in and of itself. The end is, great and healthy communities and families that are thriving.

That vision of a worker, who’s part of a flourishing healthy community has always been present in the idea of this country. But since the early days of the U.S., that reality has mostly been reserved for white folks.

John Kim: If you think about the critical industries that LA is built upon and how business interests have designed the city, the whole concept of LA and its multiple suburbs was so that we could bring in labor for these different industries. First through aerospace, then manufacturing, oil extraction. And oftentimes when it was white migrants that came to L.A., they would subsidize with public school and public education, housing.

That’s John Kim, president and CEO of Catalyst California, a nonprofit that promotes ways that public funding, services, and opportunities can be redistributed to be more equitable.

John Kim: But as soon as it became people of color that were coming in to fill these jobs, that went out the door. And what were created were these various racial enclaves where on one hand they were convenient to pave freeways through, or concrete rivers through. But on the other hand, there wasn't the subsequent investments in terms of housing and education and safety, which is why we see all of the issues we see now.

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These issues that we see on the streets in terms of the homeless and housing crisis, the crisis that we're seeing in public safety, the crisis that we're seeing around mental health. These are all things that were designed to just simply extract, at the time, the labor of people of color from generations ago.

We know how to design our country for human flourishing and how to invest in a robust future, because we’ve done it before.

The middle of the 20th century saw an enormous expansion of government policies for prosperity. From New Deal investments in public infrastructure and the arts, legislation protecting workers and union organizing, guaranteed pensions in the form of Social Security, to the housing, small business, and education funding of the GI Bill.

The massive growth of government-funded policies and programs, along with strong unions, built a potent, stable middle class in the twentieth century. They gave the children of that middle class a sense of almost limitless possibility. And the investments in people and infrastructure made the nation’s democracy a beacon around the globe.

But, the nation was overwhelmingly white then – almost 90 percent. The benefits of government investments were largely denied to people of color. So was membership in many unions. Now, people of color are the majority in cities like Los Angeles, and soon will be the majority in the U.S. population overall.

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These demographic shifts open the door to do big, bold innovative things again, to create pathways to the middle class and ensure a prosperous national future. And this time, we must act in radically inclusive ways.

Manuel Pastor: Radically inclusive, it's not just a kind of kumbaya come together, it's diagnostic.

Economist Manuel Pastor.

Manuel Pastor: It's to say that we are looking for the places where we are broken because we know that if we heal the places where we are broken, we will be strong as a whole. And so, it becomes a guidepost for people like me who are analysts, who are researchers, to say, and this is a term I've been using quite a bit, Not just people left behind, but people kept behind. You know, left behind sounds like an accident. You know, you were running a little too fast, somebody kind of fell down because they hit a rock. That's something that happened by accident. If we look at our communities, they're not disadvantaged. They're structurally disempowered and disenfranchised. And so, we need to be taking a look at those structures, changing those structures, and I think radically inclusive helps us point the way.

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Act III
We cannot build a thriving multiracial democracy and a just economy if we keep running away from the conversation about race. In fact, talking honestly about race is the only way democracy can succeed in a multiracial society.
The aversion to dealing with race head-on has plagued the nation since the beginning. And we are still in the middle of that racial angst. The labor movement has not been immune to this hard history. As a matter of fact, for decades, organized labor excluded people of color and women, leaving women of color most vulnerable to economic exploitation.

We have to own our history, no matter how hard and shameful. LA is in the middle of this struggle. And Roxana Tynan makes it clear, if we don’t talk about race the coalitions cannot hold.

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Roxana Tynan: While the boss often uses race as a wedge and a way to divide and conquer when it comes to organizing efforts, starting with a policy fight meant that it was perhaps a little easier to pull everybody together around a shared vision.

Before LAANE, Roxana worked as an organizer for the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Roxana Tynan: Within the union, for example, in the hotel workers union, there was definitely some work to be done with some of the older Black and white workers to sort of adjust to the new reality that all union meetings were going to be in Spanish and English, that, sort of immigrant rights was going to be a central part of the fight. So, throughout the 90s, I think if the labor movement had some, some challenges, it continued to navigate in terms of multiracial organizing, it was about that sense that our labor movement was about immigrant rights. And ensuring that the labor movement was also viewed as a critical source of power and good organizing, particularly for Black workers, too.

One thing I try to do is debunk the myths that white people will be harmed by a just economy, that stretches democracy to serve all, especially those who have been kept behind. Racial inclusion and shared prosperity will not take something away from white people.

But these myths fuelling racial and ethnic divisions persist. There's a reason why cynical politicians fall back on them: it maintains a status quo that concentrates power and wealth in the hands of a few.

Roxana, a white woman, is keenly aware of how race has been used to divide people even against their best interests.

Roxana Tynan: I think the folks I'm most concerned with are less the white folks in charge and more white working-class folks. Those who just feel really alienated and let down by what our economy does for working people across the board. And that it's easy for white supremacists to step in and say, “The problem is not corporate America or your elected representatives, the problem is people of color stealing stuff from you or taking something from you,” right? That it's a zero-sum game. Instead of “There is plenty of money. It's just all up here and we need to bring it down here.”

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And that goes for political power as well. So I think how we, you know, where unions have succeeded, is when they're talking to their members, then you really change how white people think about, broadly speaking, a progressive, multiracial agenda. When unions don't talk to their members, then, you know, bad stuff happens.

This was crystalized for her as a young organizer living and working in Las Vegas

Roxana Tynan: There were two women who really led work at this one hotel downtown who were like the union leaders. One of them was white. She was a waitress, and one of them was Black, and she was a bus person. And when I knew them, they were clearly friendly, you know, they were working together to really improve their own quality of life and that of their coworkers. What I didn't know is that when the union had first started doing really deep internal organizing, the white worker who came from the South and who had male family members who were in the Klan, um, was a straight up racist and had to be barred from union meetings because of her racism. But she did have a lot of sway in the hotel. And so the woman who led the bus people was like, look, we gotta figure this out. If we're going to win, we gotta get her. And they did a lot of work. And before she really addressed more deeply her own racism, the first thing that she understood and that led her down a good path was, “I cannot get a good contract, if I'm not sharing power and building power with this other woman.”

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And that was a real lesson for me about how those kinds of shifts happen in struggle and in the midst of a campaign, and that that's, a really profound way to make that kind of change is in the context of identifying, you know, we all need to get to this place, and we're going to have to deal, as white folks in particular, we are going to have to deal with the crap we carry if we want to get to that place.

It took a lot of work to get unions to invest in organizing workers of color and immigrants. Maria Elena Durazo, who co-founded LAANE, was the child of migrant farm workers. She grew up following the crops throughout California and Oregon. She’s now a California State Senator, but her roots are in labor. She came to LA in the 1970s and worked for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, organizing immigrant workers.

Senator Durazo: Nobody else in the labor movement was doing that. No one. Everyone else in the labor movement saw immigrants as being counter to the goals of the labor movement. They saw immigrants as counter to organizing. They saw immigrants as damaging to the labor movement. And so the only union that was doing that was the ladies garment workers. I was so attracted to the union for that reason.

At the time, the private sector wasn’t very friendly to unions.

Senator Durazo: There were, and there had been, I believe, for a while, a strong public-sector union presence. But the private sector was woefully, unorganized. And, of course, it's in the private sector where there was the most, exploitation, the worst working conditions. And it was both African American, but primarily immigrant workers in those industries.

Durazo found that the garment industry workers were willing to fight.

Senator Durazo: So we did a series of just strike after strike after strike, and very courageous workers, you know, with all the threats, with all the firings that they went through, the disciplines that they went through, they just showed enormous courage, which just reinforced in me that this other stuff that was being said about immigrants “unwilling and so afraid of organizing” was all untrue.

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In 1989 Senator Durazo was elected president of The Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union. At the time, the organization had some 12,000 members, the majority of whom were Latine. But for years the leadership held meetings only in English.

Senator Durazo: That was my first, toughest fight because there were entrenched white men who were in charge of the union, and we decided that we were going to challenge that. I decided I was willing to do it. As afraid as I was, doesn’t matter. We took that to the workers, to the members. And that was their first fight is to fight for their union, fight for a union that would fight for them, fight for a union that would respect them and make them a part of the decision making of the union, a democratic union. We could not take on this hotel industry if we were not organized internally within the union. And so that was, that was the toughest part because most of the members had given up hope. They say, oh, you're just like everybody else. You're coming along and you're promising this. I said, the only thing I'm promising is that you will fight together, and that we're going to make a change. You know they saw, even though they pushed back on me, they knew instinctively that they wanted a better life. As immigrants in particular, they didn't come to this country to be exploited. They didn't come to this country, you know, to earn poverty wages. They came here because there was, they felt there was an opportunity to do better in their lives. So we challenged them on those beliefs that they had and the values that they had. And if they wanted to do better for their kids, then they had to take risks. They took a risk crossing the border. Why would they not take a risk in, fighting for a better life, better wages, health care?

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So much of the work that Senator Durazo has done illustrates the building blocks of coalition work, and the extraordinary way that labor and communities have come together in Los Angeles.

In the 90s, the Hotel and Restaurant Workers union waged some big campaigns that challenged union members to find common ground across differences, both inside the union and with residents of surrounding communities.

One was a multi-year fight with the University of Southern California, and involved a non-unionized hotel.

Senator Durazo: Through those campaigns, we had all of the elements of a very comprehensive campaign. First, the workers had to be willing to take actions. Workers had to be willing to organize door by door by door. The workers had had to be willing, to build a coalition. They had to be willing to talk to ministers and priests. They had to be willing to talk to community-based organizations. They had to be willing to talk to people of all nationalities. They had to be willing to talk to the LGBTQ community. I mean, we established that alone we did not have the power. Even with all the courage, we did not have the power unless we had a real coalition of support throughout Los Angeles.

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Act IV

Manuel Pastor: When you begin to realize that undocumented workers are actually willing to organize.

Manuel Pastor again.

Manuel Pastor: When you begin to realize that Black workers, even after decades of exclusion, believe that labor unions can advance their interests. When you begin to see who the next workforce is, not just that it's more diverse, but that it's more committed to diversity, I think you begin to say, “Well, it's not just that this is the new labor force, but this is the new mode of power for building a strong labor movement.”

Kent Wong agrees.

Kent Wong: The labor movement that has emerged, has done so through building creative organizing strategies that have successfully brought the new working class into the Los Angeles labor movement, principally immigrants from Latin America and from Asia and from Black workers.

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In 1990, Kent saw how a cross-racial labor organizing strategy could lead to success during the Justice for Janitors campaign in LA.

The movement was a direct response to the economic boom of the 1980s, which saw a sharp increase in the number of office buildings. Janitorial workers were expected to work more, and for less money in order to keep their jobs.

Kent Wong: This signaled a turning point in the successful organizing of janitors in Los Angeles. And this very union, the Justice for Janitors Union, then went on and successfully organized security officers to build unity between the predominantly Latino janitorial workforce and the predominantly African-American security officers and successfully reorganized the janitorial industry and successfully organized the security officers.

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These days, the newest members of the workforce, Gen Z, are redefining work and reimagining what a just economy looks like.

Spend just a few minutes on social media, and you can easily find evidence of their mindset.

TMJ4 News reporter, Jenna Rae: A Forbes report shows Gen Z Graduates are prioritizing different needs when job searching. They want hybrid or remote work, are looking for stronger mental health resources in the workplace, diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace, as well as an opportunity for career growth.

Anti Work Girl Boss, Gabrielle Judge: I just didn't go in above and beyond because there wasn't any talks of any guaranteed pay raises, any clear career path, any job structure. And so I was like, “Cool, then what am I staying loyal to?”

Corporate Baddie, DeAndre Brown: Recently I quit my job, and it was brought to my attention once I put in my two weeks that a lot of people were working in the back end, trying to get rid of me because of the content that I post on social media in regards to Gen Z in the workforce. This showed me that instead of my company realizing that I was a valuable asset and they can utilize my insight in order to make changes within the workforce, they saw me as a threat!

Elise Joshi: The labor movement's had one of its most successful years in a really long time. And at Gen-Z for Change, we've been strategizing nonstop on how to use our platform, our digital tools, and our network to make a difference on the ground that goes beyond, you know, likes and views.

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Roxana Tynan: I think we really are at a critical turning point. This generation in their 20s is unwilling to accept the status quo on the job and expects and is demanding to be treated with respect on the job. And fundamentally, having a union is about dignity and respect on the job. And that certainly shows up in how much you get paid, but it shows up in a lot of ways.

Act V - CONCLUSION

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We would serve ourselves well to listen to the demands of Gen Z — the most multiracial cohort the nation has seen. They have been offered so little in terms of economic access and opportunity. As those rendered extremely vulnerable by our economy, when they advocate for what they need, they are also telling us what the nation needs to be successful.

Also, I believe part of the wisdom of the Gen Z critique is an acute appreciation of how one values time. Time spent at work, and time spent on the rest of one’s life. What Gen Z is asking for reflects a profound consciousness of the idea of a good life, not just a good job, and how a good life is possible only with a just economy.

But a just economy – our economy – won’t just happen. It’s going to take organizing. Labor organizing that reflects the needs of the people who make up our economy: the workers. All workers, not only those who belong to a union, but those who are most vulnerable in our current economy: low-wage workers, immigrant workers, gig workers, young people, people of color.

A just economy is essential to a thriving multiracial democracy. Labor needs community and community needs labor. The good news is that, in LA, labor organizers and the multiracial communities that make up the labor force are finding each other. And, they are reinforcing each other's demands – helping to build a society that values a good life for all.

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In our next chapter, Shift Happens, we expand the idea of governance to truly include: of the people, by the people, for the people.

Senator Durazo: I felt like there was another place that I could participate in to make sure that our history, our voices, our experiences, were taken to a different place, which was in the political scene.

Mayor Bass: We've reached a level in our struggle that we can run and win. We run for president, run for governor, but we never even fathomed the idea of winning. It was just to make a point.

Until next time, I urge all of you to make sure you are registered, and have a plan to vote. A thriving, multiracial democracy depends on participation. And voting is extremely important.

Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life is a podcast created by PolicyLink in partnership with Pineapple Street Studios.

We are grateful for the PolicyLink funders whose support allows us to produce this show.

For a transcript of the episodes and for more resources visit PolicyLink.org.

The team at PolicyLink is Perfecta Oxholm, Fran Smith, Glenda Johnson, Josh Kirchenbaum, Ferchil Ramos, Vanice Dunn, Montana Rane, and Loren Madden With additional support by Dr. David Kyuman Kim. Special thanks to PolicyLink CEO Michael McAfee.

This episode was produced by Yinka Rickford-Anguin with support from producers Alexis Moore and Natalie Peart.

Kamilah Kashanie is our Managing Producer.

Our Editor is Darby Maloney.

Fact checking by Will Tavlin.

Our Senior Audio Engineer and Mixer is Pedro Alvira.

Our Assistant Audio Engineers are Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks, who also provided scoring assistance.

Theme song by Donwill.

And our Music is from Epidemic Sound.

Special thanks to Leila Day, Grace Cohen-Chen, Gabe Kawugule.
Our Head of Sound & Engineering is Raj Makhija.

Je-Anne Berry is our Executive Producer.

I'm your host, Angela Glover Blackwell.

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