As outside spending continues pouring into the Los Angeles City Council District 11 race, the labor endorsements lining up behind incumbent Councilmember Traci Park and challenger Faizah Malik are exposing something more fundamental than a routine political disagreement. They expose a split between two very different visions of whose interests city government should serve.
Park has secured backing from several construction and infrastructure-oriented unions, including IBEW Local 11, which represents private sector electricians in the Los Angeles construction industry. Their political priorities reflect their membership’s core interest in keeping large union construction projects moving. With Los Angeles in the middle of billions of dollars in Olympic-related infrastructure, airport and convention center modernization, and transportation projects, the trades have a direct material stake in which candidates control key votes at City Hall.
Park has also received endorsements from the associations representing LAPD officers and LAFD firefighters. Those organizations deserve a category of their own. Labor scholars and civil rights advocates have long argued that police associations are not unions in any meaningful sense of the word. Unlike virtually every other union in the country, law enforcement associations are not affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Rather than organize alongside the working class, police have historically functioned as the enforcement arm of employer power, breaking strikes, dispersing picket lines, and protecting property against the workers who built the American labor movement. Their associations have used collective bargaining not to advance economic justice but to limit officer accountability and shield members from discipline. Black Lives Matter has argued that police associations have no place in the labor movement at all, calling them instruments of union-busting and state-sanctioned violence.
Faizah Malik, by contrast, has drawn support from the Engineers and Architects Association, which represents thousands of civilian engineers, architects, planners, inspectors, and technical professionals employed across dozens of Los Angeles city departments, and from UNITE HERE Local 11, the hospitality workers union that has become one of the city’s most aggressive advocates for higher wages, renter protections, and broader economic justice. These are workers who live with the consequences of how the city spends its money. Many UNITE HERE members are renters struggling with rising housing costs. EAA members are the civilian professionals who keep city departments running, often at lower pay and with fewer benefits than the sworn officers whose unions back Park.
What makes the EAA endorsement structurally unusual is that the union has been affiliated with IBEW Local 11 since 2013. The two groups share a union structure but almost nothing else. One represents private sector construction trades whose fortunes rise with large capital projects, while the other represents civilian public servants whose daily reality is shaped by city staffing levels, compensation structures, and how municipal budgets are allocated. That divergence has now broken into open public view in a competitive City Council race.
At the center of civilian workers’ frustration is a set of compensation arrangements that critics describe as double dipping. These structures allow certain city employees to collect salaries and pension benefits simultaneously while civilian workers operate under far less generous terms.
The most established is the Deferred Retirement Option Plan, known as DROP, which allows eligible LAPD officers and LAFD firefighters to formally retire for pension purposes while continuing to work and collect their full salaries, with pension payments accumulating in a separate account earning guaranteed annual interest before being paid out as a lump sum. Former City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie publicly described DROP as double dipping. Former City Controller Laura Chick, who initially supported the program, later criticized it as well. EAA members have argued that the sworn officer associations backing Park have used their political influence at City Hall to preserve and expand exactly these kinds of arrangements, at the expense of civilian workers who are paid less, receive smaller pensions, and are excluded from DROP entirely.
A more recent and potentially far larger variant became the subject of a lawsuit filed in July 2024 by IBEW Local 18, which represents nearly all Department of Water and Power workers. The union sued the city after the city attorney’s office took the position that employees who had retired from other city departments, collecting pensions through the Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System, could subsequently take jobs at DWP, which operates under a separate pension system. That would allow them to draw a LACERS pension while earning a DWP salary, then retire again and collect a second pension from the DWP plan as well.
IBEW Local 18 head Gus Corona called the arrangement “the most extreme ‘double-dipping’ scenario any municipality has ever seen” and warned that taxpayers and ratepayers would ultimately bear the cost. He had earlier labeled it “DROP on steroids” in a cease-and-desist letter to City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto.
The numbers behind the lawsuit underscore the stakes. As of May 2024, seven DWP employees were already collecting a LACERS pension simultaneously. Between 81 and 253 additional DWP employees were eligible to do the same, with another 1,700 expected to become eligible in the future. The arrangement also carried a built-in pay advantage unavailable to workers moving in the other direction. LACERS retirees entering DWP could start at higher salary steps by applying their prior city service time. DWP retirees seeking city-side positions had to take a six-month break in service, start as new employees at the bottom of the pay scale, and work at least five years before their LACERS pension vested at all.