L.A. Area Now a Model for Labor Revival

Three years into a historic push to organize the region’s multiethnic work force, Los Angeles labor unions have begun to see results, adding more than 85,000 members this year alone and building a network of political and community allies that is paying off in new laws and public support.

Perhaps more than anywhere in the nation, unions here have embraced the more aggressive, sophisticated approach to organizing promoted by AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney. And with its heavily immigrant, low-wage work force--which many see as ripe for organizing--the region once known for its hostility to labor is being viewed as its next great hope.

Led by a re-energized County Federation of Labor and a few committed locals, and backed by money and resources from the national AFL-CIO, Los Angeles-area unions have spent millions of dollars in recent years on organizing drives and political campaigns.

They also have used resources in more strategic ways, such as targeting whole industries.

It remains to be seen whether the gamble will pay off in the long run. But experts say labor needs nothing less than that kind of commitment if it is to stage a comeback after two decades of decline.

Only about 10% of the nation’s private work force is unionized, compared to about 30% in the mid-1970s, said Henry Farber, a labor economist at Princeton University. Although it trails traditional union cities such as Detroit and New York, Los Angeles is slightly above the national average, with 11.4% of its private employees and about 19% of all workers in unions.

And it is one of the few areas where the rate of unionization has actually grown--albeit slowly--in recent years. Building that growth into a genuine movement is now the challenge for union activists.

“The stakes are very high,” said Ruth Milkman, a UCLA sociologist who is writing a book detailing six local union campaigns--half of which failed. “If they don’t do it, they have no future.”

Organizing has become even more urgent with the approach of the AFL-CIO national convention in October--the second major union gathering in Los Angeles in two years. Miguel Contreras, a former farm worker organizer who assumed leadership of the local federation in 1996, said he wants high profile victories at places such as Los Angeles International Airport to prove that the region is a smart place for unions to invest.

If he succeeds, Contreras said, the county will be flooded next year with organizers from such brawny unions as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers of America.

“The time is right,” said Contreras. “The question is, are we ready?”

Labor’s recent history in Los Angeles has been peppered with false starts, however, and even the most enthusiastic concede that the victories are coming more slowly than they would like.

New membership continues to be dominated by the public sector, a union stronghold. By far the largest chunk of employees organized this year--74,000--were minimum-wage home care workers who encountered little resistance from the local, state and federal agencies that employ them.

Despite several expensive initiatives, labor--which was hit hard by the loss of union aerospace jobs in the early ‘90s--has barely made a dent in low-wage manufacturing industries such as garment, which employs nearly 100,000 in the county.

Also, relatively few locals--less than 5% of the region’s 300--have heeded calls by Contreras and Sweeney to devote at least 30% of their budgets to organizing, a daunting goal for unions that have paid lip service to organizing for a generation.

“We’re trying to change the culture of an entire organization, including a lot of people who’ve been running things the same way for 30 years, and that takes time,” said Jon Barton, organizing director for the County Federation, which represents 300 union locals with about 700,000 members.

As an indication of progress, Barton cited his own job. It didn’t exist two years ago; now he has a staff of six. Overall, Los Angeles unions employ about 200 full-time organizers, more than double the number of a few years ago.

That change hasn’t escaped the attention of local businesses. “There’s no doubt that they have more members and have been more politically active,” said Anita Zusman, vice president for legislative affairs at the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. Noting that Contreras will be the featured speaker at a chamber board meeting in two weeks, she added, “They’re important players, and our goal and our hope is to work with them.”

Strategy for the Long Run

Organizing strategically, as more and more Los Angeles unions are doing, offers big payoffs. As a union represents a larger share of an entire industry, it has a better shot at pressuring employers to improve wages and benefits, which in turn attracts more members.

But that approach requires an enormous upfront investment in research and outreach. “You have to bring in the community, start making contacts with workers and their families, and do it on a large scale,” said David Sickler, former regional director for the AFL-CIO.

Sickler knows from experience. In 1989, he helped create the California Immigrant Workers Assn., an experiment in community-based organizing funded largely by grants and the national AFL-CIO. The association helped spark a major success in the private sector: the 1992 wildcat strike by drywallers, which ended with the unionization of 5,000 immigrant workers.

But the association was draining more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, and beyond the drywallers, it accomplished little in concrete membership gains. In 1994, the AFL-CIO pulled the plug.

Community-based organizing was far from dead, however. Unions merely learned to target specific industries or job centers--and to be patient.

One example is the 18-month-old campaign at Los Angeles International Airport, which has employed a dozen full-time organizers and cost a coalition of local and international unions hundreds of thousands of dollars. So far, the campaign has yielded less than 500 dues-paying members.

But there is potential for many more: The airport employs 50,000, and only 20,000 of them belong to unions. Perhaps more significantly, unions organizing the airport have built coalitions with religious and community groups that now appear to be fully in their corner.

“These campaigns have to be looked at as a dynamic,” said Vivian Rothstein, director of the Respect at LAX drive. “One aspect is changing the community discussion about what’s right, and this campaign has definitely done that.”

The airport campaign is a case study in organizing beyond the job site. Union activists worked hard at getting the city’s 1997 living wage ordinance to apply to all airport workers, then returned repeatedly to the City Council when employers balked. And they enlisted the support of local religious leaders, who led processions through airport terminals in an attempt to shame employers into dropping anti-union fights.

The campaign is only now starting to bear fruit. Three months ago, 200 workers for the food concession CA One joined the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union through a streamlined process known as “card check,” in which an employer agrees to recognize the union if a majority of workers sign authorization cards.

Last month, two more employers representing 500 workers--W.H. Smith and Duty Free Shops--agreed to a card check election, which virtually guarantees a union victory.

A bitter fight to organize 900 airport screeners employed by Argenbright Security may come to a head next week, when the service employees union sponsors a public election for workers--over Argenbright’s objections.

Run by the Santa Monica-based Center for Dispute Resolution, with the official backing of the Los Angeles City Council and a dozen state legislators, the election will not be binding. But if the outcome is strongly in the union’s favor, as it anticipates, the pressure on Argenbright to accept it will be strong.

Los Angeles unions have also grown more politically savvy, going far beyond writing checks to grooming candidates and helping to shape their messages. The County Federation has played an important role in signing up new citizen voters, primarily Latino immigrants, building what it hopes will be a long term relationship.

“We’ve been very successful,” said Fabian Nunez, the federation’s political director. “In 12 out of 13 races we targeted in the last few years, we won.”

Those victories are beginning to pay off, in local laws such as living wage ordinances passed by the city and the county, and at the state level. A bill that would prohibit state contractors from using consultants to fight union drives is working its way through the Legislature. It was sponsored by Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles), a former service employees union organizer elected to the Legislature with union support in 1997.

There’s no guarantee that those hard-won political successes will translate into increased membership. Unions are up against far more than employer resistance, including the ambivalence of many workers and fundamental changes in the global economy, which allow employers in many industries to simply leave rather than fight a protracted union war.

After several years of energetic effort, unions nationwide have barely organized 10% of the expanding work force, said Farber, the Princeton economist. “Unions grew up as a manufacturing industry phenomenon, and manufacturing has been shrinking,” he said. “Now unions are stuck with the hard task of retrenching, and they really haven’t figured it out yet.”

In Los Angeles, unions are betting their future that they’ve found a way. “We’ve always thought it would take a while,” said Contreras. “But there are opportunities here, probably more so than anywhere else today.”

* PARISHES RALLY FOR LABOR

More than 100 congregations urge Catholic hospitals, USC to settle union disputes. B1