The summer of 2023 was Los Angeles’s “hot labor summer.” Rolling strikes by hotel and airport workers disrupted conventions and airport concessions in the city’s busy tourist season. The Hollywood writers’ strike expanded as film and television actors also left the job in July. Less noticed, at the same time, other workers in Los Angeles were organizing for worker ownership—pushing back against inequity, gentrification, and the gig economy by collectively creating their own jobs and meeting community needs.
Those workers are concentrated in a wide range of service industries where wage theft has proven to be a reliable business model and enforcement of labor rights is rare. And often, immigrant workers and workers of color are most directly impacted. Their movement toward a solidarity economy is where L.A. Co-op Lab comes in.
Formed in 2015, L.A. Co-op Lab was created to explore and invent ways to build Los Angeles’s capacity for worker ownership as a pathway toward a more equitable and democratic economy. When we began, worker co-ops in Los Angeles were unheard of; now, they are increasingly common.
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