Labor/Community Strategy Center

The Labor/Community Strategy Center is a multiracial, intergenerational "think-tank/act-tank," based in Los Angeles County working to impact local, national and international public policy and grassroots organizations and movements from a regional base of 10 million people.

For 25 years the Center has built successful campaigns and developed publications and popular education workshops on environmental justice, civil rights, public health, mass transit, workers and immigrants' rights, climate change and the growing criminalization of communities of color. The broader context of all of our campaigns is to expand the social welfare state and environmental justice rights and protections for our communities and stop the expansion of the police and prison state becoming more palpable each day. Our transformative organizing model addresses the totality of urban life.  We’ve developed Fight for the Soul of the Cities as frame and program to take on the polluting, policing and privatizing corporate agenda in Los Angeles. 

The Center is known for building "big picture campaigns" rooted in counter-hegemonic demand development—bringing the most radical and structural demands on the system, engaging in long-term campaigns, and "fighting to win."  The Center's victories include:

• Forcing General Motors to keep the GM Van Nuys assembly plant open for a full decade after it planned to close it, saving the jobs of 5,000 auto workers.
  
  
• Billions for Buses in which the Bus Riders Union through civil rights cases, grassroots organizing, a "no seat no fare" campaign, and federal court orders won 2,500 new compressed natural gas buses, dramatic reductions in fares, 1 million hours of new service and yes, $2.7 billion for Black, Latino, elderly, disabled bus riders.
  
  
• Our Community Rights Campaign, fighting the School to Prison Pipeline and the Mass Incarceration of Black and Latino communities has reversed L.A.'s "daytime curfew law." We stopped the LA School Police Dept and LAPD from issuing 40,000 "truancy tickets" for low-income students and are challenging the "stop and frisk" policy in the schools, on the streets, and on the buses and trains of L.A.