Executive Summary

For thirty years, LAANE has been at the forefront of the nation’s most dynamic progressive movement, leading several groundbreaking living wage campaigns and pioneering a new approach to economic development that has become a national model for community empowerment. LAANE’s efforts to transform conditions in key industries have improved the lives of over a million and a half people.

LAANE grew out of the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest, which was sparked by anti-Black racism but quickly became a bread riot that cast the city’s rampant working poverty in stark relief. LA’s mayor and City Council lobbed pro-business policies at this economic inequality. Those policies failed miserably.

LAANE grew out of a grassroots movement, led by UNITE HERE Local 11, Black leaders, faith leaders, workers, and community members to build policies that help people, not businesses. LAANE is led by organizers who have worked for decades in Los Angeles, in City Hall and at worksites across the city, to tackle corporate greed and income inequality. Using a combination of organizing, research, communications, and policy work, LAANE has created a successful model for change which has resulted in policies such as the 1997 Los Angeles Living Wage, the Century Boulevard Living Wage, Raise LA, Long Beach Measure WW, and many more. These policies have delivered tangible benefits to working families by raising wages, expanding worker protections on the job, tackling environmental justice issues that put workers and low-income neighborhoods especially at risk, and empowering workers to lead.

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