The Constitutional Origins of the War in Iran

Richard Drake

 April 22, 2026

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Locations struck by: United States and Israel Iran, Hezbollah, Houthis, and PMF. Image Source: Wikimedia maps | Map data © OpenStreetMap – CC BY-SA 2.0

Events in the Middle East following the February 28, 2026, US-Israeli bombing attack on Iran recall for us the prophecy recounted by Herodotus of the oracles of Delphi to Croesus the king of the Lydians: if he attacked the Persians, he would destroy a mighty empire. The doomed empire turned out to be his own. The political, economic, military, environmental, and moral catastrophe of the current war unleashed by President Trump has raised questions around the world about his mental bearings and the future of the American Empire.

Much of the criticism aimed at Trump for taking the United States  into the ruinous Iran war concerns his alleged authoritarian departure from constitutional norms. A loud chorus online and in the press denounces him for flouting the Constitution’s separation of powers principle with regard to the provision granting Congress the role of declaring war. That Congress has surrendered this role since World War II  suggests that something other than Trumpism bears the responsibility for  the imperial presidency under which we now live. This is not to take away from the Trump administration’s unprecedented levels of incompetence and malfeasance. The fundamental problem, however, lies in the Article II qualifications and powers of the presidency in the U.S. Constitution itself.

It might be well to review some of the key anti-Federalist arguments of 1787-1789 for insight into the origins of the abyss now stretching before our feet. The anti-Federalists thought that the machinations of any fool or knave who happened to occupy the presidency would be furthered  by the 1787  Constitution devised in Philadelphia. In the vast literature that they produced, two speeches by Patrick Henry before the Virginia Ratifying Convention synthesized the dangers lying in wait for the American people under the proposed new government.

In the first of these addresses, on June 5, 1788, it is as if Henry were looking ahead to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis this past January 7 and 24, respectively. Henry observed that under the new Constitution, the people had no power against tyranny, should it come to pass. He foresaw the prospect of American citizens who could not assemble “without the risk of being shot by hired soldiers, the engines of despotism.” The existing law of the land, the Articles of Confederation,  did not make allowances for a chief executive or for direct taxation by the central government to support vast military capabilities against which the power of the citizenry would prove unavailing. What resistance could be made, Henry asked, by ordinary people against a Federal establishment thus armed.

Two days later, in a second speech, Henry expanded on his fears about Article II of the Constitution: “there is to be a great and mighty President, with very extensive powers, the powers of a King.” The framers of the Constitution supposed that the government would be honest, but Henry countered, “If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute.” The panoply of government power is in his hands. The constitutional provisions to remove such a man seemed highly technical and abstract to Henry, not in the least equal to an easily imagined scenario involving a ruthless seizure of power. Who would be there to stop such a president?

William Appleman Williams, the American historian most attentive to the concerns of the anti-Federalists, expressly called for the replacement of the US Constitution with an updated version of the Articles of Confederation. In a speech that Williams gave on November 5, 1965, about the increasing dangers of the war in Vietnam, he said of the Articles of Confederation: “That document offers a conception and a structure of regional and local communities for the maintenance and extension of democracy.” In his view, the Constitution of the United States had concentrated overwhelming power in the Federal government as the anti-Federalists prophetically had warned at the time of its formulation. Under the auspices of the Constitution, Washington had achieved a comprehensive mastery over American life: “Our humanity is being pounded and squeezed out of us by the consolidated power of a nationalist corporate welfare capitalism.” He counseled radicals to seek alliances with those traditional conservatives who, in their core political views, descended from the anti-Federalists and succeeding generations of the Constitution’s critics.

In much of Williams’s published work, but particularly in Empire as a Way of Life (1980), he identified the exigencies of defending and augmenting the corporate capitalist status quo as the source of all American wars. Patrick Henry had said in sadness on June 5, 1788, “Some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire.” Williams thought that by analyzing America’s wars from Plymouth Rock to Vietnam the growth and true purposes of this empire could be determined.

One had to begin by overcoming the cumulative effects of the disorienting propaganda that had accompanied all these wars. Williams began his book with a lesson in semantics. Patrick Henry had been an outlier in his condemnation of the American empire. At the time of their Revolution, Williams noted, American leaders often and unashamedly had used the words “empire” and “imperialism” to describe what they were doing in replacing the British Empire with one of their own. Fashions changed, however: “Later generations became steadily less candid about their imperial attitudes and practices, talking more about ‘extending the area of freedom’ and then ‘saving the world  for democracy.’” Through such verbal sleights did empire become a way of life for the American people as a means of “transforming the realities of expansion, conquest, and intervention into pious rhetoric about virtue, wealth, and democracy.”

The historical process that Williams called “our imperialist deception” culminated in the 1949-1950 National Security Council study known as NSC-68 when Americans “asserted the unique right and responsibility to impose their chosen ‘order among nations’ so that ‘our free society can flourish.’” We decided that the corporate capitalist status quo, which he dubbed the American Present, would be the future of the world. He thought that nothing in world affairs down to the present made any sense without reference to NSC-68, the Magna Carta for the United States to operate globally as a warfare state. The many codicils to this document, down to the U.S. National Security Strategy declarations of November 2025, proclaim America’s will to power.

The first practical illustration of the intentions behind NSC-68 became manifest in 1953 with Operation Ajax. Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, had sought to put an end to the exploitation of the country’s oil resources. The Mosaddegh government nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. To Washington and London, such an affront signaled the onset of a communist takeover in Tehran. The CIA and MI6 swiftly moved in to rectify the situation, overthrowing the Mosaddegh government and reinforcing the dictatorial powers of the Shah of Iran. A golden age of cooperation ensued between the CIA and SAVAK, the secret police of Iran.

Operation Ajax, the first US covert action to overthrow a foreign government in peacetime, became a model for subsequent actions of this kind in Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1965), Chile (1973), and the many other episodes analyzed in Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (2020). The overthrow of Mosaddegh also set in motion the events ultimately leading to the US-Israel war against Iran: the American-backed dictatorship of the Shah, the triumph in 1979 of the Islamic Republic of Iran under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the American hostage crisis of 1979-1981, America’s support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, the Islamization of Iranian society, and exporting the Iranian Revolution to many countries and groups throughout the region. Most fatefully of all, a parallel development involving the complete absorption of America’s foreign policy for the Middle East into the orbit of Zionism’s Greater Israel colonialist fantasies centered on the destruction of Iran have brought us to a decline and fall moment.

President Barack Obama correctly had understood that the only alternative to war lay in diplomacy, but the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action worked out during his administration had incurred the opposition of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. President Trump, the most devoted mouthpiece for the Israel lobby in the history of an office crowded with rival claimants for that distinction, took the United States out of the agreement. He has since replaced diplomacy with Israel’s regime decapitation strategy for Iran of do what we say or we will kill you. Some militarily impressive but morally reprehensible assassinations and mass murders have followed.

The high-tech recrudescence of the famous slaughters of political opponents perpetrated by the hoodlums of the Italian Renaissance and celebrated by Niccolò Machiavelli in his post-Christian manual The Prince (1513) is the subject of gloating and mirth in the Trump administration. The historian Jacob Burckhardt leaves no doubt in his classic Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) that these savage depredations and their excited approval by Machiavelli gave evidence of a fatal decline in Italian morality. American morality cannot be vouched for by Burckhardt’s standards.

The anti-Federalists of the eighteenth century did not foresee with precision the decline and threatening fall of the United States in our present circumstances. Men like Patrick Henry could not have conceived of a personality in the mold of Donald J. Trump, least of all as the twice-elected president of the United States. Certainly, some profound alterations in the American character had to have occurred between their time and ours for a state of affairs like the present one to become normalized as an essential part, even the dominant part, of the country’s politics.

What the anti-Federalists did see was the problem in the machinery of the Federal government now obvious  to all and long evident to discerning critics: empires do not need constitution-bound presidents; they need emperors of the “I am the state” variety. President Trump outshines all his predecessors in the delight that he derives from this role. William Appleman Williams identified Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and every occupant of the White House since NSC-68 as authoritarian presidents in reality and only bound to the Constitution when it suited their purposes. All these earlier presidents knew enough, however, to tamp down their excitement at the levers of power in conformity with the rhetorical norms of republican leadership.

For Patrick Henry it was just a matter of time before a megalomaniac careless of the niceties of power like Trump came along. The police and military force of the national security state, which Henry would not have had any trouble imagining in principle, had been implicit in the system from the beginning, not only by what the Constitution had said in Article II, but by what the document left unsaid about the inevitable corruptions of power. Henry had asked in 1788, “Have we not come through a dangerous war to free ourselves from a king’s tyranny. Why would we risk our freedoms for the assurances of mere words on parchment?” It is a question for today.

Richard Drake holds the Lucile Speer Research Chair in Politics and History at the University of Montana. Among his publications are Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism and The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion.

LABOUR HISTORY

The Ludlow Massacre Where 25 Miners and Family Members Were Killed During a Bitter Strike for Fair Wages and Conditions

Robert Forrant

 April 22, 2026

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The Ludlow Massacre in 1914 on this site brought congressional attention to miners’ labor rights in Colorado.
Denver Public Library

On a spring morning in 1914, miners in Ludlow, Colorado, were celebrating Greek Easter when the Colorado National Guard and a private security agency opened fire on their camp with a machine-gun-equipped armored car called the Death Special.

The miners waged a pitched battle with the National Guard for 10 days before President Woodrow Wilson ordered federal soldiers to intervene. An estimated 69 to 199 people were killed. It was the end of one of the most bitter and violent miner strikes in U.S. labor history, which had begun in September 1913. The strike and massacre prompted Congress to take a hard look at labor reform. But significant changes in labor relations and unionization didn’t come until the mid-1930s.

Some state labor laws were on the books, but in 1914 the U.S. House Committee on Mines and Mining reported: “Colorado has good mining laws and such that ought to afford protection to the miners as to safety in the mine if they were enforced, yet in this State the percentage of fatalities is larger than any other, showing there is undoubtedly something wrong in reference to the management of its coal mines.”

Once the initial shock of the violence wore off, the Ludlow strike received little public attention outside of the immediate families affected and some Colorado residents until late in the 20th century. In “Where Are the Workers,” Mary Anne Trasciatti, a professor at Hofstra University, and I edited a collection of essays written by labor historians and archivists that explore nationwide efforts to bring the history of labor and working people into mainstream narratives of U.S. history.

The Ludlow Massacre is one of the most dramatic and deadly of those stories. It rivals the West Virginia Mine Wars of the 1920s.

The Ludlow Massacre

In September 1913, roughly 10,000 mostly immigrant miners who worked for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. went on strike. The miners were represented by the United Mine Workers of America, which submitted a list of demands when the strike began, including implementing the eight-hour workday, being compensated for the time miners spent in the shafts, and the right to select their own housing and doctors.

Since national strikes were called in the 1880s demanding the eight-hour day, this had been a goal for workers throughout the U.S. In Colorado, voters had endorsed such an amendment to the state constitution in 1902, but it was not uniformly enforced.

A song by Woody Guthrie about the Ludlow strike and massacre recorded in the 1940s.

Coal mining in the early 1900s was labor intensive and dangerous. Death rates were high. Workers had no say in how the mines operated. From 1884 to 1912, more than 1,708 men died in the state’s coal mines, a rate twice the national average. In 1910, explosions at two Colorado Fuel & Iron mines killed 131 people. In 1912, 125 workers lost their lives in mine accidents across Colorado. That year, the annual death rate in Colorado’s mines was 7.06 per 1,000 employees, compared to a national rate of 3.15. Every trip down a shaft was fraught, with workers paid only for the weight of the coal they mined, not for their travel time.

John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s wealthiest man at the time of the strike, was the main owner of the fuel and iron company. With about 10,000 workers and nearly 70,000 acres of land under control, Colorado Fuel and Iron was one of the most powerful mining companies of that era.

Coal companies often owned entire towns, including miners’ homes, which was the case in Ludlow. Worker protests often led to widespread evictions. As a result of the Ludlow strike, 1,200 coal miners and their families were evicted and took refuge in tent colonies around the mines during the winter of 1913-14.

Colorado Fuel & Iron hired and armed 300 members of a private security agency known as Baldwin-Felts when the strike began. The agency was founded in the early 1890s by William Gibbony Baldwin and employed by mining companies in West Virginia and Colorado to repress strikes. Their job was to keep order and – if possible – break the walkout and reopen the mines.

Members of the United Mine Workers of America armed themselves as conflicts with the mining company’s private security force intensified.

Eventually, the Colorado governor, Elias M. Ammons, ordered the Colorado National Guard to join the fray on the corporation’s side, with the Rockefellers paying their wages. The Guard arrested hundreds of strikers.

Then, on April 20, 1914, the National Guard and the private company opened fire on the tent colonies where the miners lived. After several hours of gunfire, with miners defending their camp, 25 people were dead, including two women and eleven children trapped when the camp was intentionally set ablaze.

A photograph of the United Mine Workers of America camp for coal miners in Las Animas County, Colo. Denver Public Library, Special Collections

Months earlier, miners had dug foxholes under tents so women and children could avoid bullets randomly fired through the camps. When the armored vehicle opened fire, everyone in the camps ducked into the holes. Later, women and children were found by miners huddled together at the bottoms of their burned-out tents.

Many miners’ family members were saved when the engineer on a passing train witnessed what was happening and stopped on the track to shield them from the gunfire.

This violence led to 10 more days of conflict before President Wilson finally ordered federal troops to disarm both sides.

Changes to labor law

In Congress, the House Committee on Mines and Mining conducted an investigation into the events and released a report in 1915. John D. Rockefeller Jr. was summoned before the committee, where he was questioned for several hours on May 20, 1914. There, he admitted that he had not visited the site since the incidents that led to the deaths of workers and their families.

According to a New York Times report, when asked whether he knew that thousands of his employees had been evicted from their homes and were living in tent colonies, and that the striking workers and their families were suffering without work or food, Rockefeller replied that he could not say, but that company officials could provide the facts. None were forthcoming.

A federal Commission on Industrial Relations also held hearings, determined to quell the upsurge in early 20th-century labor violence.

In 1912, the immigrant- and women-led Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, also led to a congressional investigation. In its report on the 1914 miners’ strike, the commission described the strike by workers as “against arbitrary power.” It summarized that miners “passionately felt” that they were denied “a voice in fixing working conditions in the mines” and that political democracy had been “repudiated by the owners.”

The commission determined that the strike raised a fundamental question about whether workers had a right to a voice at work. This question would animate labor struggles into the 1930s.

In 1935, Congress passed and President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the National Labor Relations Act, which provided federal guidelines for labor union formation and stated that workers had a federal right to bargain over wages, hours and conditions of employment, the very things Colorado coal miners sought when they went on strike in 1913.

Commemorating the Ludlow strike and massacre

In 1915, officers of the United Mine Workers of America purchased 40 acres of land north of the Ludlow, Colorado, train depot, on the site where the tent colony had sheltered coal miners and their families during the 1913-14 strike.

Three years later, United Mine Workers officials dedicated a granite monument at the site where the women and children were killed. Labor historian James Green noted that of all the violence against workers at the time, none shocked the nation or troubled its collective conscience more than the Ludlow massacre because of the deaths of children. However, even incidents like the Ludlow Massacre did not become a significant part of the public discourse. This has changed some in the recent past.

Today, the tent colony site is a National Historic Landmark.

The labor movement in the United States remains a bulwark of democracy, and workers have often been a driving force for social and economic equality in their communities. Yet its stories are not widely known, even one so dramatic as this battle in the Colorado coalfields.

The recognition of the Ludlow site as a National Historic Landmark and the recent release of a Library of Congress research guide propel the history of labor and working people into the mainstream. Such place-based labor history promotes our understanding of how and why things we sometimes take for granted – such as the eight-hour workday, paid holidays or workplace safety laws – came about only because people were willing to risk their lives fighting for these rights.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Robert Forrant is Professor of U.S. History and Labor Studies at UMass Lowell.

LA Teachers Strike: SEIU Rising

Glenn Sacks

 April 22, 2026

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On the eve of the 2023 Service Employees International Union Local 99 strike, Los Angeles Times Columnist Robin Abcarian wrote “I don’t blame the union one bit” and condemned Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho for “just one more slap in the face” after Carvalho “responded to the (strike) vote by comparing the union’s action to a circus.” In reference to SEIU, Carvalho had tweeted:

“Circus = a predictable performance with a known outcome, desiring of nothing more than an applause, a coin, and a promise of a next show.”

For SEIU, LAUSD’s poverty-level wages should be OK

Carvalho was hardly alone in expressing contempt for SEIU’s members, LAUSD’s lowest-paid education workers.

Criticizing SEIU’s strike, John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, hosts of the popular, long-running John and Ken Show then on Los Angeles’ KFI AM 640, explained, “These [SEIU] jobs aren’t meant for you to have a home and a family…you can’t have families if you make so little money—it’s not responsible, it’s not practical.”

John and Ken were openly stating what many American conservatives believe but usually are too prudent to say–having kids and having a home are privileges to be reserved only for the social classes who can “afford” them.

‘My pay hasn’t really raised much since I started’

At the time of the 2023 strike, my colleague Eric Hernandez, a school custodian, was featured in the Los Angeles Times piece Three-day LAUSD strike means three days without pay. How are low-paid workers coping?:

“At one point in his life, Eric Hernandez, who has worked as a school custodian for 17 years, said he was forced to choose between sleep or increased stability.

“He worked two jobs: handling buildings, grounds and custodial duties at James Monroe High School in North Hills, while taking evening shifts at his neighborhood Target.

“But the lack of sleep ‘burned him out,’ forcing him to quit Target and return to his single salary — and the anxiety it induced.”

Hernandez notes:

“It’s unbelievable, but my pay hasn’t really raised much since I started. Guys who start tomorrow are only making a little less than me.”

Carvalho Surprised

When on March 21, 2023 SEIU–which had been working without a contract since 2020–finally struck, Carvalho seemed surprised that United Teachers Los Angeles honored their picket lines. Given his experience in the anti-union South managing Miami-Dade County Public Schools and contending with a much weaker teacher’s union–I know, I was once a member of it–Carvalho probably expected that teachers would cross the line and work.

With teachers and administrators in place and personnel brought in from Beaudry (LAUSD’s central offices) on an emergency basis, Carvalho figured LAUSD could roll right over SEIU, as school districts often do in similar situations.

Carvalho’s view wasn’t without foundation. At the time, the anti-teachers union LA School Report unwittingly paid UTLA a complement, writing:

“State law allows one bargaining unit to go on a sympathy strike with another union, but Bradley Marianno, an assistant education professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said it’s ‘highly unusual,’ for a teachers union to join a walkout with non-teaching employees.

“‘They may issue statements of support, but to join in [a] strike is a different, and relatively rare, matter…”

Labor Solidarity—an American tradition…

While our solidarity strike may have surprised LAUSD, what UTLA did was very much in line with the traditions of American labor. American labor unions were built through labor solidarity, and in recent decades unions have been undermined by the lack of it.

The 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, arguably America’s most important labor law, specifically targets sympathy strikes. President Truman denounced the bill and vetoed it, but Congress, concerned about the massive post-war US strike wave, overrode his veto.

The 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act further tightened restrictions on solidarity (aka “sympathy” or “secondary”) strikes.

UTLA’s solidarity strike served as a harbinger of the future and as an example for other unions.

Building support for the 2023 SEIU-UTLA strike

In early 2023, some UTLA members noted that SEIU did not honor our picket lines in 2019, and questioned why we should honor theirs. UTLA had to build support for honoring SEIU’s picket lines but there were good reasons to do so, both moral and practical:

+The eight unions representing LAUSD workers had long been hamstrung by the fact that our contract negotiations often did not line up, so LAUSD played us off against one another. This time our negotiations more or less lined up–if we passed up this opportunity, when would we be able to harness the joint power of our two organizations? In five or 10 years? This was a unique opportunity, and UTLA and SEIU leaders were wise to take advantage of it.

+UTLA is a union of educated professionals–we have higher social and economic status than SEIU, which is disproportionately low-income, minority, and immigrant. We are stronger than they are, and more fortunate. If one group must go the extra mile to achieve this unity–a unity which benefits both unions–it was appropriate that it was us.

+If SEIU had honored our picket line in 2019, my understanding is that this would have been illegal. We were able to legally honor their picket line in 2023 because it was an unfair labor practice/“Unfair Practice Charge” strike. I believe in honoring picket lines under any circumstances, but asking a union to carry out an illegal strike is not a small thing.

+We were both up against a common adversary. What sense would it have made for UTLA to watch 30,000 SEIU workers battle Carvalho and stand on the sidelines or, worse, actively undermine them by crossing their picket lines, when we too were in negotiations?

Breaking News: Florida Man Causes…

According to observers, on March 22, 2023, when tens of thousands of striking UTLA and SEIU members surrounded LAUSD’s downtown headquarters on Beaudry Avenue and Carvalho’s driver struggled to get him through the massive crowd, he seemed taken aback by what he had set off. One of the best picket signs at that rally was a “Florida Man” picket sign made by my Monroe Social Studies colleague Stephanie Memije–“Breaking News: Florida Man Causes LAUSD Strike”.

But Carvalho is skilled…

At the March 24, 2023 press conference with Mayor Karen Bass and SEIU Local 99 Executive Director Max Arias in which they announced the tentative agreement, Carvalho began by speaking so convincingly about the mistreatment of SEIU workers that you almost forgot he was the superintendent–he sounded more like a SEIU organizer.

He followed by subtly and skillfully working in some key talking points:

+Let’s forget how in this strike I got my head handed to me–let’s focus on the future

+Don’t blame me, it’s my predecessors’ fault.

+Let’s forget how I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making this deal—I’m leading the way with “transformative” changes

In announcing the healthcare aspect of the agreement, Carvalho sounded like Bernie Sanders as he emphasized “healthcare as a human right.”

Carvalho also paid UTLA and SEIU union leadership a backhanded compliment by noting that “This agreement is going to make a lot of superintendents very nervous…”

Did 2026 LAUSD leadership shakeup help lead to a settlement?

In March, after a year of negotiations, UTLA Valley East Area Chair Scott Mandel said that in 41 years, he had “never seen the district so intransigent in contract negotiations.”

Carvalho felt that he had erred in his handling of the 2023 strike, had been forced to give away too much, and wanted to claw back some of it in the 2025-2026 negotiations. But the dominant figure throughout the 2025-2026 battle was LAUSD Chief of Employee Support & Labor Relations Kristen Murphy. UTLA bargaining team members described Dr. Murphy’s demeanor as disrespectful and imperious, and many felt that she, more than Carvalho, was the real hardliner in LAUSD.

By the time the SEIU/UTLA v LAUSD conflict came to a head between April 8 and April 14, both Carvalho’s and Murphy’s influence had been weakened.

Carvalho was put on administrative leave by LAUSD on February 27 after his home and office were raided by federal agents as part of a Department of Justice investigation into the failed artificial intelligence company, AllHere, that the district contracted with for a chatbot called Ed.

At the end of March, LAUSD/Murphy told UTLA they were bringing important new proposals that could settle the contract and avert a strike. Educators on the 150-member UTLA bargaining team undid their Spring Break plans and returned but, in what they must at first have thought was an insulting April Fool’s Day prank, LAUSD’s offer was only a tiny bit better than before.

LAUSD apologized to UTLA the following week, the chastised Murphy was much more respectful in subsequent negotiations, and LAUSD accepted that UTLA, a disciplined and well-organized union, was not bluffing.

LAUSD’s mulish hardline stance–“stuck on stupid”, as one UTLA leader had put it–had brought things to this point. Acting superintendent Andres Chait had less connection to LAUSD’s failed strategy and thus something of a freer hand. Two days before the unions were to strike, Chait helped make a deal with UTLA and Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, then, with only hours remaining until we struck, with SEIU.

Glenn Sacks teaches social studies at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District.