It was 4:30 AM, but the hit sound of this hot summer echoed through the streets near City Hall:

On strike! Shut it down! LA is a union town!

Members of Service Employees International Union Local 721, which represents

about

more than 7,000 city workers went on a one-day strike on Tuesday to highlight what they say are stalled contract negotiations and unfair labor practices. It was the first strike in more than 40 years involving city workers.

Winchell’s coffee and donuts were on a table as about 15 people marched and sang in a small circle in front of the City Hall steps. Few got to the energy boost: Their fuel in those early hours was the excitement of joining the stream of labor strikes that have hit Los Angeles over the past 12 months and that don’t seem to be drying up anytime soon.

In December, UCLA graduate student workers joined a five-week UC-wide strike that was the largest of its kind and led to a historic contract. In March, the Los Angeles Unified School District closed for three days as teachers left their jobs along with their blue-collar workers, who were represented by SEIU Local 99 and attempted to negotiate a new contract. The Writers Guild of America is 100 days

starting today, according to Meg James’ story about to be published

in the strike, while SAG-AFTRA members stopped showing up for work in July, the first time in 63 years that the two Hollywood unions have gone on strike together.

Unite Here Local 11, representing hotel and hospitality workers, has been organizing rolling strikes across Southern California since the July 4 weekend. Kaiser Permanente workers moved across California last month. UPS just dodged a strike. Starbucks baristas continue to unite across the Southland.

LA has seen labor action before the Justice for Janitor campaigns of the 1990s, the grocery store strikes of the early 2000s, the last WGA campaign that helped align city politics. Union members are so ubiquitous in the city that their Unite Here red, SEIU purple, SAG-AFTRA black T-shirt colors are as much a part of the city palette as Dodger blue and USC cardinal and gold.

singular or plural for the team names?

.

But what happens now

feels

different. There is a level of support from unions in radically different workplaces along with knowledge of

looking for each other

respective battle, which I have never seen, or honestly ever thought possible.

In a famously broken city, it’s a lesson anyone can learn. You don’t have to like the labor movement to see them as the canary in the coal mine of LA’s economic health. If union membership isn’t enough to guarantee a well-paying job, then what is? And if you don’t care about someone else’s struggles, how good can you really be an Angeleno?

Vice President of United Teachers Los Angeles

Julie van Winkle

and a colleague got cheers as they joined the SEIU picket line Tuesday morning. LA is at a critical point

van

Winkle said. “We need a big drastic change, and we can only do that on the street and demand it together.”

“We are all united and will not take it anymore,” said SEIU 721 Vice President

Simboa Wright

, which has been collecting waste water for 20 years. When I asked where he lives, Wright laughed and said “Inland Empire, because I can’t afford to live here!”

Mary Coreas

worked as a city custodian for 21 years. Life in the city “has gotten worse, because our salaries don’t really go up, but the cost of everything does. The bosses made promises and they didn’t keep them. Well, we have to make them keep.”

Even longtime union leaders prone to superlatives about solidarity as they work behind closed doors to quash inter-union beef are surprised.

Unite Here Local 11 Co-Chairman Ada Briceo asked other unions to support her when she spoke in San Francisco about the struggles of hotel workers at the University of California Board of Regents meeting last month. Representatives from the United Farm Workers and the National Union of Healthcare Workers showed up to address the regents. Outside, there was a loud rally with hundreds of members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the United Auto Workers. Briceo described the moment as “mind-boggling”.

“In my 32 years [of organizing]”I didn’t see this,” she said. “We started something that the rest of the country can follow.”

Yvonne Wheeler, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, led some of the predawn chants in front of City Hall. She called the joint UTLA-SEIU strike in the spring what “brought us right now” of cross-industry unity. This spring, Wheeler called a special meeting of the Labor Fed to urge unions not to support alone

each other each other

but learn about

each other.each other.

“When they saw the similarity of the issues they all face, they realized that people had to stand together,” Wheeler said. “Your battle is their battle. And an injury to one is an injury to all.”

This so-called “hot summer of work” is especially noteworthy because it takes place during the centenary of what my fellow Times columnist Patt Morrison has described as LA’s Big Bang, when Los Angeles leaders effectively announced to the world that the city had arrived .

In 1923, the Hollywood sign went up, along with the Memorial Coliseum, the headquarters of the Automobile Club of California’s Spanish Colonial Revival near USC, the Biltmore Hotel, and El Cholo Café. The previous year saw the debut of the Rose Bowl and the Hollywood Bowl. Today they are all beloved landmarks, but they opened up as bourgeois temples to the LA who wanted to sell boosters, a paradise where the problems of poverty, diversity and density in big cities were far away.

Part of that sales pitch was also a proud hostility to workers seeking better wages and the right to organize. 1923 was also the year that famed author Upton Sinclair was arrested in San Pedro for reciting the US Constitution to show his support for striking longshoremen, which led authorities to arrest hundreds of hundreds. This scorched earth policy prevailed for decades in a city whose fathers have long touted its major industries Hollywood, oil, oranges, housing, aerospace, technology with the paternalistic view that the bosses and little money knew better than the mob about how to develop LA.

That kind of thinking led to today’s segregated, stratified megalopolis, which seems perpetually on the verge of collapse. All these strikes are not

mere

Individual effort but a collective rallying cry: we are a city of blue-collar and white-collar workers, unions and not, immigrants and natives and no one’s future is secure unless everyone can earn a fair wage.

If LA can see itself this way, a more just city is possible that the titans of a century ago never imagined.

I left the SEIU mini-rally as the sun started to rise. The crowd in front of City Hall now numbered about 100 and was growing by the minute. The strikers would return to work the following day.

After more than half an hour of marching, Assemblyman Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles) stood atop the steps, picket board in one hand and coffee cup in the other.

“LA can show the world that you can take care of the people that keep the city going in all parts of it,” he said, singing softly to the boisterous crowd. Volunteers were lined up on a podium for a lunch meeting. A flatbed truck was shown

three

10 foot high letters that spell “Union Strong”.

“It’s not a down moment,” Bryan concluded. “It’s a moment of hope.”