Norman grantees build power for workers in Los Angeles to secure living wages and a Community Benefits Agreement.

The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE, Norman grantee 1996–2002) was created in 1993 by community, religious and labor leaders who recognized that Los Angeles’s celebrated economic recovery of the 1990s was bypassing its poorest residents, with seventy percent of the fastest growing jobs in Los Angeles paying less than $8.50 an hour and the number of working poor growing by 34%. LAANE’s answer was to organize communities so that economic growth would mean something real for the people doing the work. 

In 1997, they won one of the first living wage ordinances in the nation that required businesses holding city contracts or receiving city subsidies to pay a living wage — a policy that covered more than 10,000 workers across Los Angeles. In 2001, after two years of intense organizing, they won full enforcement of the ordinance for LAX airport workers and tourism workers of Santa Monica’s luxury hotel industry. LAANE remains active today and recently was a key partner in the successful campaign to establish a $30/hour Olympic Wage for LAX and hotel workers ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE, Norman grantee 1998–2002) has been a force for economic justice in Los Angeles since its founding in 1996.  In their early years, SAJE’s organizing campaigns were rooted in the Figueroa Corridor, a stretch of South Central Los Angeles that is home to 200,000 low-income residents — predominantly Latino immigrants and African Americans — living in the shadow of billion-dollar development plans. When the Staples Center proposed a massive expansion, SAJE joined the Figueroa Corridor Coalition — 300 community residents, 30 organizations, and five labor unions —  which won an unprecedented Community Benefits Agreement in 2001, the first of its kind in the country that required hundreds of affordable housing units, more than 2,200 permanent jobs for local residents, 70% of jobs at living wage or union scale, and $1 million for neighborhood parks.

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