Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  That weekend, the district gave in, agreeing to a contract that would lower class sizes, put a nurse in every school, reduce standardized testing by 50 percent, hire more counselors, invest in more green space on campus, cut back on random searches, cap charter schools, and give the teachers a 6 percent raise.

  On the phone that night, Jimenez told me, “It’s way more than I could have ever imagined.” The district had threatened to take the union to court over its demands, arguing that things like green space and policing were outside the realm of what the union could ask for. But the teachers had known that they had the support of the community, the students, and their parents, and had held firm. The contract also included a commitment to creating more community schools like the one Jimenez had helped build, as well as a fund for defending immigrant students—things that had been priorities not just for her, but for the student activists with whom she had crafted demands.

  “We went out on this idea that we’re not going out for ourselves, we’re going out for our students,” she said, but nevertheless, it was important to remember the teachers’ own needs too. “Seventy percent of us teachers are women. We’re asked to do feminized labor even more than we have to. I think it’s worth acknowledging how much work and care go into being a teacher.” To have a nurse in every school, a counselor, meant that some of that work could be shared.

  “It’s not the end,” she continued. “We now have a sturdy ground to stand on with what we’ve learned from this, what we’ve learned about organizing, to build coalitions, to work with students and parents in a meaningful way. Whatever we imagined was possible, it’s now bigger. Now our imagination can run wild, and that’s what we need to really build justice in our communities.”

  Getting to that point of victory in the massive strike (Los Angeles is the United States’ second-largest school district; only New York City has more teachers and more students) had taken years of preparation. For Jimenez, the struggle had begun with the budget battles of her early years teaching. “When the budget cuts hit, we were really looking to the union to help and a lot of people’s opinions were that it didn’t do enough to protect all of these young teachers of color. So there were a lot of young teachers of color who were organizing on their own.”

  Some of those teachers went on to found a caucus within the union called Progressive Educators for Action. It was made up of teachers, like Jimenez, who wanted the union to be more active on issues of racial justice in the schools, whether on policing or immigration issues or in the fight for more ethnic studies courses and other relevant curricula. They also built a coalition outside of the union, the Coalition for Educational Justice, that began to bring teachers together with parents and students who wanted to change conditions in the schools. The coalition’s grassroots organizing expanded, challenging so-called school reconstitutions at supposedly failing schools in low-income areas. In bringing teachers together with parents and students, they began to challenge the narrative that blamed teachers’ lack of care for the problems in public schools.

  After the CTU strike in 2012, the Los Angeles teachers began to think more seriously about what it would look like to take power in the union, and built a new caucus, called Union Power, around the demands they had been shaping alongside parents and students. When Union Power won control of UTLA in 2014’s union election, it kept its promises to build an organizing department, a political department, a research department, and a parent/community division—the teachers even voted to increase their own dues to do so. They built into the union, Jimenez said, a shift in how they thought about organizing. The new union was all about rank-and-file teachers like her stepping up to take on new roles, and so she became part of what was initially called the Parent Community Organizing Committee. She then helped build a bigger coalition called Reclaim Our Schools LA with other community organizations, including the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE).

  Jimenez and her counterparts in the groups she began working with thought it was important to recognize that the union must use the power it had at the bargaining table to bring demands originating with the students and the parents before the district. This kind of bargaining for the common good expands on the strategy of the old radical unions, blending community work with the power of collective bargaining. Jimenez’s work within the union has been “to think strategically about how to use this body, this space, to push out a different narrative about what it means to have a labor-community alliance, and what it is capable of doing.” That means monthly sessions where members of the union and the different groups meet up to talk about plans and desires. It means communicating back to members the decisions that were made and making sure the union and the groups trust one another to fight for their demands on all fronts—during bargaining, during the legislative sessions (both at the state level and locally), and by pressuring the school board and other local officials.

  On the fourth night of the strike, Jimenez and many other members of the coalition went to the Pacific Palisades home of Austin Beutner, the LA schools superintendent, bearing electric candles, protest signs, and a song: “The community is calling.” When, predictably, Beutner failed to answer his door—or rather, the buzzer outside of the gate to his driveway—parent activists and students held a speak-out in his driveway.

  “I found out that we had our nurse one day a week and I went to war!” one mother declared. “I have one biological child at that school and 588 adopted children at that school.” Student Cheyenne McLaren spoke of her anger and frustration with the unequal conditions in the schools. She was a member of a group called Students Deserve—led by students, with parents and teachers like Jimenez as allies—that was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement to fight racism in the schools. It was from them that the demand to end random searches came, and also the desire for more community schools. “We really have been inspired by Black Lives Matter and their framework of divesting and investing. Divesting from policing and from other things that police our schools and students and communities and investing in things that see our students as fully human and provide them what they need to really thrive,” Jimenez said.

  It was the fact that the community was with the teachers that led the district to give in rather than to dig in, hoping to break the union in a protracted strike. The UTLA strike was the first big battle of the post-Janus age, and as Jimenez pointed out, the administrators failed in all their attempts to divide and conquer—they were unable to divide the teachers with a two-tier health-care plan, unable to divide the public school teachers from charter school teachers, and unable to divide the teachers from their students.

  Since the strike, Jimenez had felt the difference in the classroom. Her students were curious about the work that went into the strike, and began to apply its lessons to the history they had previously learned. It gave her an opportunity to try teaching history in a new way. “We were studying about strikes and the history of strikes right before we went on strike and then, when we came back, I had them do a little exercise where they were the historians, and they were writing a history of the strike that they just witnessed. They were really into it.” Studying the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, her students asked her, “How did they get so many people? I don’t get it—my mom doesn’t even let me go out to the corner, how did these young people get involved?” That question is an invitation, she said, to ask them what has changed since then.

  The students connect those historical struggles to the movements they see and participate in now. “The other day we were talking about the courage of Emmett Till’s family to speak up and stand up for things even though they thought they might be killed. They asked me, ‘Have you ever done anything where you felt scared? Where you felt like you were in danger?’ I say, ‘Yes, it is scary every day. But it is also scary not to do anything and not to fight to change things.’ It was one of those moments, just a reminder that they see me as somebody who is obviously doing this work.”

>   Those connections were especially valuable to her students in the middle of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, during the coronavirus pandemic, and in the upswell of protest after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020. For her, all of these issues were intertwined, and they all underlined the question of sanctuary at school.

  When the schools shut down to prevent further spread of COVID-19, Jimenez’s school managed to distribute a number of laptops to students, but, she noted, it was still incredibly difficult to translate classroom teaching to virtual learning. Any experimental projects were suddenly out the window. “It just kind of turned everything upside down,” she said. And for teachers like her who were parents as well, there was an added layer of stress.

  The power built with the strike meant that UTLA was able to quickly mobilize and get a side letter added to its contract that, Jimenez said, “really spoke to the needs of students and teachers, especially those of us who are multitasking at home with kids and family.” Jimenez was working on special projects that spring, supporting interdisciplinary work, and helped other teachers pivot to using the pandemic as a teaching device, to combine social studies and history and science by teaching both the biology and history of pandemics.

  But even so, the changes were difficult for teachers and students alike. “Many of our students are just struggling not just to log on, but to have enough food and have enough money,” she said. “I work with a lot of newcomer students and a few have just stopped attending to online learning—they’ve started working. . . There really isn’t another option because their family members or whoever was taking care of them lost their job or lost hours. The choice was, ‘Am I going to do this online schoolwork or am I going to get to making some money?’”

  Students Deserve had put forth demands around the coronavirus pandemic, ranging from universal passage (to eliminate the pressure of getting grades in a global crisis) to rent cancellation to the freeing of prisoners to stop the spread of the virus. And teachers, Jimenez said, had taken those demands into the classroom. “They’re going through it one by one with students: ‘Where is this demand coming from?’ and looking at statistics around the virus in prisons, looking at how Black people are dying more, looking at other moments in history where questions of race and class were driving the way people were impacted.”

  This organizing between teachers and students, she said, had opened up space “to reimagine what is possible in terms of schooling.” Because of the pandemic, all state-required tests were canceled. “Nobody misses them!” she laughed. But the questions were becoming sharper as the teachers and students looked toward the potential reopening of schools. “What do we want to be in place before we reopen? And, if we don’t have those things, what are we willing to do?” The union eventually won an agreement with the district to maintain distance learning in the fall, rather than forcing teachers and students back into the classroom at risk of spreading the virus.48

  It all made her think back to her first days as an educator, having to fight for the public schools’ budget. “We were just not in the place—our union wasn’t and the world wasn’t and all unions were not in a place to fight back in the way that we are now,” she said. But now, with a strong union and a strong coalition in the city, the teachers were preparing to use their power once again.

  One point in that fight was likely to be over the police budget. Even before the protests began in May 2020, Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and other organizations had been pushing for a People’s Budget that would cut police funding—54 percent of the city’s discretionary budget had been set to go to the police department—and reinvest in public services. UTLA also backed a successful push to cut the budget for the school police—a separate department—by $25 million, or 35 percent.49

  Jimenez took on some new roles after the strike. She’s expanded on her work organizing with parents and students and her work in the community school, finding new ways to ensure that the demands of the entire community are met. She’s now on the Community Schools Steering Committee, for example, a body that includes district staff, and even students, working to bring the promised thirty new community schools to fruition. She was also elected area chair for the union in the North Area, a position in which she was learning more about the union structures in order to keep building its strength.

  Through all this work in the union and the community, it could be hard to remember to think about herself. But the strike had taught her something important, something that hit her on the very first morning on the picket line. “We get told so often that we are greedy and we only care about the money,” she said. “But we are living in a really expensive city and it is getting more expensive all the time. It is not easy.” On the line the first day, as police arrived to keep an eye on the strikers, the feeling brought tears to her eyes. Watching her colleagues in the rain, struggling but keeping their spirits up, dancing to “Proud Mary” from a portable speaker, drove it home for her.

  She continued, welling up again. “I had this moment this week where it was like, ‘Oh, I am also doing this for myself as a worker, as a working-class person, as a single mom. This is actually not that easy for me. I am not getting paid. I am actually also sacrificing.’ It is okay to say, ‘This is also for me.’”

  CHAPTER 4

  SERVICE WITH A SMILE

  Retail

  ANN MARIE REINHART DIDN’T INTEND TO SPEND HALF HER LIFE WORKING in retail. It just sort of happened that way.

  “I have always worked. I have worked two and three jobs,” she explained. She had left her position in medical billing right before her first child was born, and hadn’t quite figured out what was next. A few months after her son’s birth, she stopped by a Toys “R” Us store and saw a “Now Hiring” sign. They hired her on the spot for the holidays. That was 1988.

  “I had no aspirations of being a permanent cashier or working in retail. It was definitely not on my bucket list,” she said with a laugh. “The make-up of a part-timer today is either you are a mom, you are a student, or you are working a second job.” But she liked the idea of getting back to work, in part because she didn’t want to buy her husband a Christmas present with his money. “I always had my own money,” she said.

  Reinhart is from Long Island, and you can hear it in her voice even though she’s been in North Carolina for years now; she is warm and motherly but with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes when she’s telling a funny story. She’d assumed her stint at Toys “R” Us would be over after the holidays, but instead the store started training her in customer service and how to keep track of the money. The pay wasn’t great, and retail could be stressful, but the company always gave her some flexibility in her schedule so she had time to be with her family. “Those will be my dying words, ‘They always worked with me,’” she laughed. “That was when it was more of the company that Charles Lazarus created, that family type of atmosphere.”

  The flexibility allowed her to stay through her second pregnancy, when she briefly considered leaving for good. When both of her children were in school, she gave in to her managers and coworkers and took the full-time position her managers offered her, moving into a supervisor’s role. It came along with a new benefit: health insurance. Her husband worked in a small business with his brother, and insurance had been costing them thousands each year. The insurance from her job—and the continued flexibility—made it worth her while to stay. “Back then, Toys ‘R’ Us was very good to all of us. I was a Cub Scout leader. I was a mom on the football team. It let me be the mom that I wanted to be.”

  That’s not to say it was a perfect job, not at all. The company might have allowed her time off for some of her kids’ activities, but she still worked long hours. “I think that nobody realizes all the sacrifices that are made by the people that work in retail. They sacrifice their families,” she said. “Almost the entire month of December, I didn’t see my husband. He got up early for work. I would come home and he
would be sleeping. Then, he would leave for work and I would be sleeping.” Her husband once suggested it was time for her to find a “real” job, which frustrated her. “I was like, ‘You think I am not busting my ass every day at work? This is a real job.’”

  And then, of course, there were the customers. Some of them were lovely, but others could be unbelievably nasty. Sometimes the customers abused her—“I have been called every name in the book”—and other times she had to intervene as a supervisor when they bullied her colleagues. Reinhart brushed her brown bob off her forehead to show me the scar from a Green Power Ranger toy that a customer had thrown in her face. The customer, she said, had brought the same toy back over and over again, taking advantage of the company’s return policy. “Finally, my boss was like, ‘Listen, she can’t come in here every week with this. She is showing no receipt, no box. We aren’t doing this anymore for her.’” So Reinhart had to tell the woman they wouldn’t take the toy back. “I am a good schmoozer, that is why it took me by surprise. She took it and she threw it at me!” She recalled touching her forehead and feeling blood.

  Another incident that stuck with her had happened to one of her colleagues, and she’d had to intervene. A woman came in wanting to return something—again, clearly used—and the employee at the customer service counter politely told her that the store could not accept the item back. The customer, as Reinhart watched, “started berating her and insulting her.” The customer turned to her daughter, “who was maybe seven or eight,” and said, “This is why you get an education, so you don’t end up like her,” Reinhart recalled. “I turned around and said, ‘What did you just say?’” The worker was in tears, and Reinhart told the customer to leave. “It was just an ‘A-ha!’ moment for me, like, everyone does view people who work in retail as worthless.”