The Union is the Asset...But Whose?
A teachers’ union, an outside strategy, and the paper trail
On Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown, a ten-story brick tower rises above the surrounding streetscape with the letters UTLA across the top, visible from blocks away. The building is called UTLA Plaza. The United Teachers Los Angeles union owns and occupies it. Its 35,000 dues-paying members across the Los Angeles Unified School District funded the purchase of this property.
On October 25, 2025, a strategic document on the Democratic Socialists of America blog disclosed that the tenth floor also hosts the DSA-LA chapter’s leadership meetings.¹ The UTLA membership was not consulted about the arrangement and learned of it, if at all, through the publication.
“Laying the Groundwork for a Class Alignment Labor Strategy”, written by Daniel C. of Louisville DSA, Lyra S. of Chicago DSA, and Sumter A. of Atlanta DSA, is scheduled for presentation at a convening in early 2026 for a membership vote. Whether or not the proposal is adopted, the document is a roadmap for how an outside political organization proposes to redirect unions’ mission to its program without informing those unions’ members.
The authors identify UTLA, UNITE-HERE Local 11, and the Chicago Teachers Union as among the “already-aligned unions,”2 which, they propose, should serve as the foundation of a coordinated nationwide strategy to convert additional unions. It cites Vladimir Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? as theoretical scaffolding and the Congress of Industrial Organizations of the 1930s as a historical precedent.
The long-term goal, they say, is to create “a social and legal environment where allied democratic, militant, and left-wing unions can officially affiliate with DSA, as the militant shop-floor element of a socialist party.”3
UTLA presents itself as a democratic, member-led union committed to “social justice unionism”, according to its public communications and caucus materials. Its current leadership comes from a UTLA reform caucus called Union Power, which swept the citywide officer positions in the 2014 officer election and has held them ever since.4
Alex Caputo-Pearl served as president through 2020, after which Cecily Myart-Cruz succeeded him. DSA’s national organization featured Myart-Cruz as a keynote speaker at its 2019 convention in Atlanta.5 During the 2023 contract fight, Jackie Goldberg chaired the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education and is identified in DSA-LA’s published materials as a “DSA-LA member.”6 Another LAUSD school board member, Rocío Rivas, was elected in a campaign that, according to DSA-LA’s own published account, was “hand in glove” with the teachers’ union.7
By the time the 2023 contract was ratified, three of the most consequential positions affecting the school district’s labor relations—the union presidency, the school board chair, and a key board seat—were held by figures publicly affiliated with a single outside political organization, all elected through overlapping campaigns for which that organization’s chapter openly claimed credit.
A supporter might point out that UTLA’s members chose to be led by Union Power, returned it to office, and ratified the 2023 contract by clear margins. That is true, but it misses the point. Electing officers does not constitute informed consent to structural alignment with an outside political organization. Members voted for a social-justice-unionism platform, not on whether their union would serve as proof of concept for a national strategy described on a caucus blog in Louisville, Chicago, and Atlanta. Endorsing leaders is one thing; disclosing how those leaders were being catalogued, by whom, and for what purpose is another. The Groundwork document is the first place where that disclosure appears in writing.
The doctrine the membership endorsed made the catalog possible. Social justice unionism holds that workers’ welfare is inseparable from the broader community’s welfare and that union activity properly extends beyond wages, hours, and working conditions. The doctrine has genuine intellectual roots and has produced real organizing gains. But it also broadens the range of matters the union can credibly address and, with that, the range of programs from outside the bargaining unit that can be presented to the membership as aligned with the union’s own work.
Once every social question is understood as a labor question, the union’s lack of procedural resistance to an outside organization’s program becomes unremarkable rather than inconceivable. Cleverly, this doctrinal expansion allowed the Groundwork catalog to take shape without the membership understanding that it was being imposed.
For years, DSA-LA documented the relationship in its own publications. Its coverage of the 2019 UTLA strike named specific rank-and-file strikers, identifying them as dual members of DSA-LA and UTLA.8 During the 2023 strike, the chapter also mobilized phone banks to turn out DSA members to UTLA picket lines.9 The California DSA site likewise describes “dual members of DSA-LA and United Teachers Los Angeles” who organized a joint UTLA turnout at Writers Guild of America picket lines in 2023.10 The same post names Rocío Rivas as a DSA member and credits DSA-LA’s work “hand in glove with UTLA” for her election to the school board. In other words, the relationship was disclosed incrementally in DSA-LA’s own coverage, but not to the broader, dues-paying UTLA membership in its entirety. The October 2025 Groundwork document completed that process: what had previously been scattered across chapter blog posts and campaign materials was now presented explicitly as the national template.
A union’s bargaining strength depends on maintaining an adversarial distance from the employer. But when overlapping affiliations are documented in an external strategy memo, the adversarial premise is undermined. At times, the same individuals are effectively on both sides of the bargaining table.
The alignment had been on the record for years. What changed on October 25, 2025, was that Groundwork committed it to writing as a program. In Groundwork’s account, the Los Angeles case is presented not as an embarrassment, an accident, or a coincidence of individual political commitments, but as a deliverable. The building, the overlapping elected positions, and the joint candidate endorsements are offered as evidence that the Class Alignment Strategy works. UTLA is framed not as an ally, but as an asset.
The strategy’s proposals follow directly from this logic. It calls for DSA members in a given union, together with DSA staffers there, to form what it describes as a “section” within the union.11 The term is significant. In the 20th Marxist lexicon, a section was a subunit of a larger political body, accountable to that body’s program. The Groundwork document adopts both the term and the discipline it implies. These sections, the authors say, would be aligned with chapter and national priorities through a new body called Socialists in Labor committees, modeled on the existing Socialists in Office committees that coordinate DSA-backed elected officials.
Harmonization from above is upward accountability by another name. DSA also proposes chapter-level Labor Circles to organize members by employment sector, nationwide industry-specific, rank-and-file networks modeled on an existing Amazon SALT network, and tighter integration of DSA’s national labor and electoral bodies. The overall architecture is built for scale.
The blueprint also defines the roles individual members are expected to play. DSA members in unionized workplaces are organized into industry-based Labor Circles, which feed into national rank-and-file networks. Within each union, members and staffers form a section that coordinates through the Socialists in Labor committee, which in turn works with the Socialists in Office committee for the same geographic area. At every level, electoral and labor work are integrated.
The result is a structure that operates alongside the union's official organizational chart, drawing on members of both organizations while remaining accountable to a different program. For a union member who joins DSA, workplace, industry, union, and political activity are all folded into a single coordinated apparatus designed by people they have never met and for purposes the union itself did not authorize.
The authors are candid about what happens when section priorities diverge from union priorities. They state that sections “will be given latitude to decide their orientation toward their local and international unions and to choose between supporting existing leadership in the case of an aligned union, working within a broader reform caucus, or creating an explicitly socialist caucus.”
In other words, that choice belongs to the section, not the union. The union is treated as the terrain on which the section operates. Whether the section supports, reforms, or opposes the union’s elected leadership is decided internally by the section, in coordination with the Socialists in Labor committee and the broader DSA program. Union membership is not a party to that decision.
The authors make clear that unions are expected to be politicized and spell out what that means in practice. They urge members to “pressure their unions to fight back against right-wing attacks on immigrants and multiracial democracy, and endorse an arms embargo on Israel.”12 While a national political organization may take a position on Israeli arms exports, a local teachers’ bargaining unit would not ordinarily address such an issue. The section bridges that divide by expecting the union to carry out the outside organization’s program on matters unrelated to class size, salary schedules, or workload. Even internal DSA critics do not dispute the program itself; they debate only how it should be implemented.13
The historical precedent the Groundwork authors invoke deserves closer scrutiny than they give it. They point to the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s as a model for the scale of organizing they hope to reproduce. During the CIO’s expansion, Communist Party organizers played major roles in chartering new locals and building industrial unionism, and many were extraordinary unionists. But the historical record also shows that Communist Party cadres within CIO unions maintained discipline to an external political line that shifted according to directives from Moscow rather than to conditions on shop floors in Pittsburgh or Detroit. The no-strike pledge during the Second World War and the 1948 Wallace campaign are among the clearest examples of this. CP-aligned union officers coordinated their positions with decisions made elsewhere.
In 1949 and 1950, the CIO expelled eleven international unions. Those expulsions were driven from the top by Cold War anticommunism and the Taft-Hartley regime’s non-Communist affidavit requirement and were, in that sense, acts of political coercion. But they also succeeded because rank-and-file members had seen the pattern and drawn their own conclusions. The Groundwork document cites the CIO’s expansion but omits the CIO’s expulsions. That omission reveals what the authors do not want their readers to consider.
The Groundwork document clearly identifies its next targets: public-sector unions. The authors’ target, SEIU and AFSCME, argue that aligning those unions would “deprive the Democratic establishment of key allies.”14 Their horizon stretches from Los Angeles to every multiracial public-sector union in the country.
Twentieth-century literature on “entryism”, which the Groundwork authors explicitly invoke, describes the tactic as something external organizations quietly do to mass organizations. They present it openly. Subversive and unapologetic entryism remains the same tactic; the difference is whether the membership is informed.
UTLA members are now being informed, by a document they did not ask for, written by authors outside their union, that catalogs UTLA as an asset of an organization whose program reaches far beyond any collective bargaining agreement. The document states that the union’s leadership building serves as a convening site for the outside organization’s meetings. It presents UTLA as a national model to be replicated in other unions. What it does not explain is how any of this was decided. Members were neither asked nor balloted.
When a union’s officers answer to an outside master, its building hosts that organization’s meetings, its school-board interlocutors come from the same organization, and its strategic value to that organization is laid out in a document meant for internal cadre, that union has been turned into something other than what its members joined, converted without consent. Now, these facts can be read, and every union targeted for future absorption can decide what to do with the momentum when it lands at their doorstep.
Ramin Farahmandpur is a former middle school teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He supervised student teachers in UCLA's Center X program while earning his doctorate in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He is now a professor at Portland State University, where he teaches sociology of education, education policy, and organizational theory, and writes Academic Gadfly.
Notes
1. Daniel C., Lyra S., and Sumter A., “Laying the Groundwork for a Class Alignment Labor Strategy (COMPLETE),” Building Up (Groundwork caucus of DSA), October 25, 2025, https://www.groundworkdsa.com/building-up/class-alignment-complete. The disclosure of the DSA-LA leadership meeting location appears in Part 4, in the concluding summation of the Los Angeles case: “DSA Los Angeles has its leadership meetings in the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) skyscraper in Koreatown.”
2. Ibid. The three unions are named in Part 4: “Already-aligned unions such as UNITE-HERE, UTLA, and CTU should be the first unions brought on board for this project.”
3. Ibid., Part 4. The passage reads in full: “The second, more long-term goal is to create a social and legal environment where allied democratic, militant, and left-wing unions can officially affiliate with DSA, as the militant shop-floor element of a socialist party.”
4. Alex Caputo-Pearl, "Los Angeles Teachers' Road to Durable Power, Part 1: 2014–2016," Jacobin and Convergence (co-published), September 2, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/09/utla-los-angeles-teachers-organizing. Caputo-Pearl names the full Union Power slate that won citywide office in 2014 and confirms the caucus captured more than half the board of directors seats.
5. “2019 Convention: A World to Win,” Democratic Socialists of America, September 2019, https://www.dsausa.org/2019-convention-a-world-to-win/. DSA’s national website identifies Myart-Cruz as one of the keynote and plenary speakers at the biennial convention in Atlanta, writing: “Cecily Myart-Cruz, Vice President of United Teachers Los Angeles/NEA, helped lead over 30,000 teachers on strike earlier this year … she brought the house down at this year’s YDSA conference and again at the DSA National Convention!” DSA-LA subsequently featured Myart-Cruz as a presenter at its own “Democratic Socialists for Schools and Communities First” education series in July 2020; see https://dsa-la.org/event/democratic-socialists-for-schools-and-communities-first-part-3/.
6. "What We Accomplished in 2019," DSA Los Angeles, February 2020, https://dsa-la.org/what-we-accomplished-in-2019/. The chapter's year-in-review describes its 2019 electoral work: "We campaigned for DSA-LA member, Jackie Goldberg, to take the open Los Angeles Unified School District School Board seat in 2019." See also "DSA-LA for Jackie Goldberg Campaign," DSA-LA campaign site, 2019, which introduces her as "DSA-LA member Jackie Goldberg."
7. “WGA/UTLA Picket,” California DSA, 2023, https://www.californiadsa.org/news/wgautla-picket. The post credits “Rocío Rivas (also a DSA member), who DSA-LA worked hand in glove with UTLA to elect last year.”
8. “Los Angeles Teachers Win Big After Massive Strike,” Democratic Socialists of America, January 2019, https://www.dsausa.org/news/los-angeles-teachers-win-big-after-massive-strike/. The post identifies Madee Weisner and Mark Campbell by name as dual DSA-LA and UTLA members during the 2019 strike.
9. “Phonebank for SEIU 99 + UTLA Strike Support,” DSA-LA events, March 2023, https://dsa-la.org/event/phonebank-for-seiu-99-utla-strike-support-2/.
10. “WGA/UTLA Picket,” California DSA, 2023, https://www.californiadsa.org/news/wgautla-picket.
11. Daniel C., Lyra S., and Sumter A., “Laying the Groundwork for a Class Alignment Labor Strategy,” Part 4. The section proposal reads: “The authors call for unionized DSA members and DSA staffers to create ‘sections’ within their unions. These sections are to organize within their unions to make them more militant, democratic, and left-wing.… Sections will be harmonized with chapter and national priorities through the creation of Socialists in Labor (SiL) committees, tasked with liaising with the sections to determine how they can support wider DSA priorities and how DSA can support them.”
12. Ibid., Part 4, under the heading “Fourth, the authors call for DSA union sections to politicize their unions.” The full passage reads: “Regardless of a DSA section’s decision as to whether or not to support existing leadership, a reform caucus, or form a socialist caucus, they should pressure their unions to fight back against right-wing attacks on immigrants and multiracial democracy, and endorse an arms embargo on Israel. These efforts should be coordinated with national and local DSA campaigns.”
13. Thomas Malone and Carlos Callejo III, “Don’t Mistake Access for Power: A Response to Class Alignment Strategy,” The Call (Bread and Roses caucus of DSA), February 3, 2026, https://socialistcall.com/2026/02/03/dsa-los-angeles-unions-class-alignment-strategy/. The response disputes the emphasis on top-down coordination and staff relationships but accepts the Los Angeles arrangement as the shared terrain of the debate, arguing only that the coalition should be built through rank-and-file shop-floor organizing.
14. Daniel C., Lyra S., and Sumter A., “Laying the Groundwork for a Class Alignment Labor Strategy,” Part 4: “These unions and their vast resources will provide not just inroads into demographics historically suspicious of DSA, but their alignment will also deprive the Democratic establishment of key allies. These public sector unions are to be considered strategic priorities for the class alignment strategy.”