About 55,000 L.A. County workers walked off their jobs Monday night, disrupting public services from healthcare and social work to libraries and parks.
Leaders of SEIU Local 721 said the two-day strike started at 7 p.m. Monday, sparked by what they characterized as a failure by the county to fairly negotiate a new contract.
“Clearly, they thought they were above the law. They thought we would never strike,” said union head David Green in a statement. “They thought wrong.”
Juliana Yamada is a photography fellow at the Los Angeles Times. She grew up in Torrance and earned her bachelor’s degree in photojournalism from San Francisco State University. She has held photo internships at the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and the San Francisco Standard and has worked with the Associated Press, CalMatters and more. In 2024, she received grant support from Women Photograph for a yearlong photo essay.
Rebecca Ellis covers Los Angeles County government for the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she covered Portland city government for Oregon Public Broadcasting. Before OPB, Ellis wrote for the Miami Herald, freelanced for the Providence Journal and reported as a Kroc fellow at NPR in Washington, D.C. She graduated from Brown University in 2018. Ellis was a finalist for the Livingston Awards in 2022 for her investigation into abuses within Portland’s private security industry and in 2024 for an investigation into sexual abuse inside L.A. County’s juvenile halls.
Mark E. Potts is the senior editor for video at the Los Angeles Times. A native of Enid, Okla., Potts graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a master’s degree in broadcast journalism. He has created and edited video for DreamWorks, YouTube, Microsoft, Sony and BET.
