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.
When authoritarianism rears its head, the labor movement needs to be at the center of opposing it. And right now, unions need to be at the center of the burgeoning movement against Donald Trump’s attacks on civil liberties and workers’ rights.
In preparing to strike, United Teachers Los Angeles learned how to build broad backing for common-good goals and prepare for nonviolent action to achieve them — lessons that can be used in the fight against rising authoritarianism.
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.