Miguel Contreras

As America’s new Ellis Island, Los Angeles is viewed as ground zero in the national labor movement’s battle to reconstitute itself as a more formidable force by organizing more workers, particularly recent immigrants. For decades, the percentage of U.S. workers who are union members has been shrinking. It now stands at 14%. Unions are striving to change that.

One of those at the center of the revival effort is Miguel Contreras, 46, the elected head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the umbrella organization for nearly 400 unions with a claimed membership of 700,000 workers--18% of the county work force. It is the nation’s second largest central labor council, after New York’s.

The son of San Joaquin Valley farm workers, Contreras learned labor organizing as a teenager by working with a master, the late United Farm Workers co-founder Cesar E. Chavez. “Cesar always told us,” Contreras said, “that the imaginary shackles you have to your employer are always there unless you as a worker have a feeling of self-worth, [unless] you know that you can go get a job somewhere else and still make a living. Unfortunately, many poor people tied into low-wage jobs don’t think that. A lot of them feel this job is it. Cesar taught us to break those imaginary shackles. That’s the greatest lesson I’ve learned, clearly. And that’s what he taught thousands of people.”

Contreras’ family risked everything to join the farm-workers movement, which he describes as “half civil rights, half union.” During one bitter strike in the summer of 1973, Contreras was arrested 18 times for violating antipicketing injunctions.

When that strike did not result in a new contract, Chavez organized a grape boycott and Contreras was sent to help run it in Toronto, where he stayed for nearly three years, earning $5 a week, plus room and board in a Jesuit seminary. Later, he became a farm workers organizer in the fields, then an organizer for the hotel and restaurant workers union, where he met his wife, Maria Elena Durazo, the fiery head of that union’s local in Los Angeles. They have been married for 10 years and have two sons, Michael and Mario. Contreras spoke to The Times in his office at the Federation of Labor, near downtown.

Question: Some analysts blame megatrends outside of unions’ control, like globalization, to explain falling union membership, while others say unions share the blame for not organizing aggressively enough. What do you think of that latter assessment?

Answer: I think there is some validity to it. Part of our biggest problem has been that for a long time unions did not focus their resources on organizing. In a rough manner, the 1930s and ‘40s and somewhat the ‘50s were spent organizing workers, thousands of manufacturing workers. The next several decades were spent servicing them, which we did well in terms of negotiating and collective bargaining and grievance handling and arbitrations for the workers represented. But each year the work force that we represented became smaller and smaller. . . . The national leadership of the AFL-CIO paid a price for that in 1995, when it was ousted because people saw we were increasingly becoming less of a force in America.

Q: How successful has John J. Sweeney, national president of the AFL-CIO since 1995, been in turning the decline around?

A: For the first time, last year we did not lose membership, in Los Angeles and the country. . . . That’s a big victory.

Q: Sweeney’s program calls for dramatically expanding the share of union budgets devoted to organizing--from 2% to 30%. How are member unions reacting when you ask them to devote so much of their budgets to organizing?

A: We’re actually going through that process now, and right now we’re picking Ted Rohrlich writes about local affairs, including labor issues, for The Times.

up the service workers, the carpenters, the flight attendants and the hotel workers who are [already] putting more resources into organizing. The key to our success is going to be helping move the ones who are not going in that direction. We’ll see by the end of this year how many we’ve moved.

We also know that we have to set the example, so here in the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, we’ve put together an organizing department to help mobilize the rank-and-file membership. We have over 700,000 AFL-CIO members. Our goal by the end of this year is to be able to mobilize 1% of them effectively--7,000 people--for street demonstrations and also for political operations, and to increase that capability each year. . . .

Q: If you fail in your efforts and your base stays the same--at 14% of the national work force and 18% of the L.A. County work force--or even drops, at what point do you become so marginalized that for all practical purposes you cease to exist as a significant force?

A: If we don’t move to organizing, within 10 to 12 years we won’t exist.

Q: You have said you got a big boost for your organizing efforts from an unlikely quarter--that former Gov. Pete Wilson was your best organizer. What did you mean?

A: Our best organizer in the political field. He helped wake up the labor movement with his Proposition 226 [last year’s unsuccessful initiative to curb labor’s ability to spend its member dues for political purposes]. We mobilized up and down the state like we never mobilized before, because our political lives were on the line. . . . We knew this was a bold attempt by right-wing forces to take labor out of the political process. If they were successful, they would have taken us out of the process to help elect a governor, they would have introduced legislation to reduce the minimum wage, legislation on right to work and legislation to reduce health and safety standards. It was all going to come down the pipeline. So we had to take a stand.

Q: Unions in California have taken a more active role in politics since 1996, switching tactics from the traditional handing out of checks. Instead, unions began supplying bodies to work on independent expenditure campaigns and to get out the vote. Are unions using this to create labor-organizing opportunities, particularly among the surging population of new-citizen voters, such as Latinos, many of whom are also working poor?

A: Clearly we looked at the landscape in Los Angeles County and said that if we’re going to organize here, we have to do several things. One is that we have to make inroads to those communities in Los Angeles that would be open to organizing and open to our message about empowering working families. And clearly those are the minority communities.

No. 2 is that we decided to end the way we do politics. We decided we’re going to put our checkbooks away and tell the politicians to put their hands away, that we’re going to spend more of our resources on educating our rank and file. We decided that we needed to do programs that we called kitchen-table economics on our members, so that when they came out and paid the bills once a month at the kitchen table, they could look at their bills--whether they be utility, the rent, the mortgage--and see how they related to politics. . . .

We no longer campaigned on the candidates, telling our members why candidate A was a great guy and candidate B was not so great. We decided to tell them, “These are the issues: overtime, worker protection and medical benefits,” and where the candidates stood. And time and again it showed that the candidates we wanted to endorse had the better record. It was a matter of educating our members. Because we found out that if we sent them a slate card without any explanation, it didn’t mean anything.

Q: Going back to Gov. Wilson, how did his support of Proposition 187 and the affirmative-action and bilingual-education propositions help you?

A: It did in a big way, because clearly Gov. Wilson used wedge-issue politics to divide us. . . . What we told people is Pete Wilson has used the proposition method to create the state of hate in California: These politics are just there to divide us. And that if he’s going to do that, we’ll take what he gives us. So we will then mobilize and make an outreach to the African American community, to Latino communities and to labor families and say, “Stand up. You can’t let this person continue this way.”. . .

On the immigrant Latino community, we’ve been working with them for about two years. We found out that the right message is, one, they had an obligation to vote. They applied for amnesty, they got their residency, they took the U.S. citizenship . . . and they’re motivated to vote. . . . Second, it was always, “We’ve got to get rid of Pete Wilson and Pete Wilson’s people.” So we used Pete Wilson as a motivator.

Q: Though Los Angeles is no longer home to large-scale unionized auto and aerospace manufacturing operations, it still outpaces Chicago, for example, in the number of manufacturing jobs, now mostly nonunion and in small factories. These represent a daunting challenge to organize. How are you going to do it?

A: Fifteen or 20 years ago, if you were a member of a working-class family in Los Angeles County, you could have graduated from this school district and gotten a blue-collar job that provided you with a decent income. Nowadays, you can’t graduate from high school and go into a job with a decent income. It’s not possible here. Those blue-collar union jobs are gone, relaced by technology and service industry and small . . . nonunion manufacturing operations. . . . And the challenge for us is that they pay low wages and few, if any, benefits, and they provide a high concentration of employment for Asian and Latino workers.

Q: Which is the same population that you’re working on politically.

A: That’s correct. . . .

Q: Traditionally, unions here traded political support of building projects for short-term unionized construction jobs. You have said you still want the unionized construction jobs but you have an additional agenda. What is it?

A: We want to make sure that these development projects [are] good for this community. . . . By saying that, I mean they have to be constructed by workers paid a prevailing rate, but also that those [service-industry] jobs they leave behind have to be livable jobs that people can sustain a family on.

Q: What do you see as the primary problem facing Los Angeles now?

A: Disparity in wages, clearly. The economic gap is growing. That creates a huge underground economy in Los Angeles. We also have to make diversity work for us and not divide us. . . .

We’re in a city of transformation, and we have to be on top of that, and we’re not. How are we training the work force for the years to come? The numbers are mind-boggling at the school-board level. Over 68% of the kids [in Los Angeles Unified School District] now are Latino. And in the younger grades, kindergarten and first grade, it’s [higher]. And this is the work force in 10 years.

Are we on top of that? What kind of jobs are we training them for? How are we closing the economic gap here? Those issues have to be worked on along with the issue of bringing the communities together so that there isn’t African American versus Latino, versus Asian, versus Jewish, versus Anglo.

Q: Back to economics: How significant is the living-wage movement to solving the disparity-of-income problem?

A: I think it’s symbolic. Clearly it’s not the key, not the answer. But it puts the issue on the debate table. And that’s what’s important.

Q: What do you think is the solution?

A: (chuckling) It starts with a “u.”*

“Each year the work force that we represented became smaller and smaller. . .The national leadership of the AFL-CIO paid a price for that in 1995.”

“We decided to end the way we do politics. We decided we’re going to put our checkbooks away and tell the politicians to put their hands away.”

“Nowadays, you can’t graduate from high school and go into a job with a decent income. It’s not possible here. Those blue-collar union jobs are gone.”