How Los Angeles Teachers Organized and What They Won
“It’s really hard to overstate the incredible feeling of empowerment, solidarity, and joy that you saw in school site picket lines and at the massive rallies that we held every single day.”
Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest school district, was rocked by a six-day strike of over 34,000 educators who galvanized popular support and won major victories for public education. Jesse Hagopian interviewed Gillian Russom, a history teacher at Roosevelt High School and member of the United Teachers of Los Angeles Board of Directors, about how the strike was organized, the significant gains it made for students, and implications for the ongoing uprising of teachers around the country.
Jesse Hagopian: I want to begin by asking you about the groundwork that made the strike possible. You have been working for years to strengthen the union. Talk about the Union Power caucus you are a part of, and the vision you all had that culminated in this six-day victorious strike.
Gillian Russom: There’s been a long history around the country of progressive caucuses fighting for unions to be more active, and to have a broader vision and a broader set of alliances in our struggles. The Chicago 2012 strike and the work of CORE—Caucus of Rank and File Educators—leading up to that strike really helped to educate so many of us around the country and clarified our direction. I’ve been a teacher and union activist in Los Angeles for eighteen years and I studied what worked in Chicago and joined together with others to help bring those lessons here to LA.
In 2013, we pushed for a referendum within our union calling for a campaign for the “Schools LA Students Deserve.” This was modeled off of the Chicago teachers who based their strike around their own “schools our students deserve,” aiming to draw in parents, students, and the community.
Our agenda for union transformation basically came down to transforming the union from a top-down service model to an organizing model. We were crafting our agenda of union demands in conversation with community allies so that it would be an agenda that would draw the active participation of people beyond our own union membership. Up until 2014, we still had a model of one union rep for every school, including massive high schools of like 100 teachers.
Q: Only one per school?
Russom: Yes, but then we took the model of Chicago’s contract action teams, where you have leadership that can actually have one-on-one conversations CONTINUE READING: How Los Angeles Teachers Organized and What They Won - Progressive.org
