State of the Unions

Los Angeles was praised time after time as a hotbed of union organizing during last week’s four-day meeting of national AFL-CIO labor leaders here.

But it’s still not clear whether the attention given to Southern California will translate into substantial financial and logistical backing from the nation’s labor federation for the union campaigns underway in this area.

That comes in contrast to what is happening in Las Vegas, where AFL-CIO officials recently pledged to help bankroll efforts by a consortium of unions to recruit more workers in the hotel, health-care and construction industries.

Still, Miguel Contreras, leader of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, is hopeful. He said one of the keys to winning AFL-CIO support is finding a way to coordinate such local organizing efforts as those involving Guess garment workers, waterfront truck drivers, asbestos-removal laborers and home health-care workers.

“There’s a lot of organizing going on,” Contreras said. “It’s a matter of bringing them [the different unions] all into a room and figuring out how they can all help each other out.”

That type of teamwork, in fact, is one of the reasons the AFL-CIO decided to make Las Vegas an initial target of its new “Union Cities” program. For instance, unions in the nation’s gambling capital plan to use their financial clout as major buyers of health-care service to win agreements from the health-care industry not to fight unionization efforts.

The only Los Angeles campaign to garner concrete support from the AFL-CIO last week was that of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union to organize about 285 workers at downtown’s New Otani Hotel & Garden.

AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney says he will travel to Japan the first week of April to press the owners of the hotel to stop fighting the union’s organizing campaign. The planned trip is believed to be the first time that a head of the American labor movement has headed overseas to go to bat for a local union’s campaign.

Taking Care of Blitzness

Get ready for the “blitz.”

That’s the name of the United Farm Workers’ initiative to blanket California’s Central Coast strawberry-growing region with union organizers for about two months beginning in mid-April. It marks an escalation of the union’s efforts to organize the state’s 20,000 strawberry pickers.

While Los Angeles labor leaders await word on whether more local organizing drives will receive help from the AFL-CIO, the blitz is already drawing strong support from the federation and its member unions.

The blitz will begin immediately after a planned mass march in Watsonville on April 13. The union is protesting the pickers’ low wages, along with what they say is a lack of bathrooms and clean drinking water in the fields.

But Gary Caloroso, spokesman for the grower-financed group opposing the union drive, the Strawberry Workers and Farmers Alliance, said the UFW brought in extra forces last year--college students and other young activists--and that it failed to turn the tide for the union.