Headlines

The City of Simi Valley and Service Employees International Union Local 721 have reached a new three-year labor agreement, avoiding a city employee strike that union members overwhelmingly authorized earlier this year.

After roughly five months of tense negotiations, the Simi Valley City Council unanimously approved Dec. 1 an updated labor contract for workers represented by the Service Employees International Union.

LMU’s total expenses for the 2023-24 fiscal year were $660.19 million — and faculty are interested in seeing exactly where it’s all going.

We talk about parallels to movements in the United States, like the immigrant rights movement and the Black Lives Matter Movement, as well as when UAW 4811 workers at the University of California institutions went on strike for the Palestine solidarity movement, and the massive SEIU 721 strike earlier this year.

We won our fight to join SEIU Local 721 in 2024 with 90 percent in favor. Our unit includes nearly 400 faculty members who teach in LMU’s Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, the College of Communication and Fine Arts, and the School of Film and Television.

Representatives from Service Employees International Union Local 721, which represents public works, administrative and police dispatch employees, said deteriorating conditions and noncompetitive salaries were fueling turnover.

While other religious colleges have stopped negotiating with faculty unions since 2020, Herbert told NCR that what is unusual about the situation at Loyola Marymount is that the trustees there did not raise the issue until more than a year after the non-tenure track faculty voted in June 2024 to join SEIU Local 721.

“America has no kings and working Americans will not stand by as a wannabe dictator wages war on our rights and our democracy,” said David Green, president and executive director of SEIU Local 721, which represents more than 100,000 workers and is one of the organizers of the event.

The event featured a 20-foot-tall balloon of President Donald Trump wearing a diaper, a 20-foot-wide by 3-foot-tall banner that read “No Kings for U.S.,” and thousands of handmade signs by participants as they marched along a nearly two-mile stretch down Spring Street.

Signs, flags, and people in costume filled the park, hoping to make their opposition to President Trump’s policies known.