L.A. Labor Leader Leaves Gap to Fill

Organized labor in Los Angeles was in the doldrums last summer after a long, high-profile supermarket strike ended in humiliating defeat. Making matters worse, prominent reformers in the national labor movement were calling for the elimination of regional councils like the one headed by local union chief Miguel Contreras.

It would have been a fine time for the top officer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor to go on the defensive. Instead, Contreras began planning an audacious initiative: tax businesses in order to buy books and tools for all community college students in Los Angeles. Then he called for an unprecedented gathering of local unions to promote the plan.

The strategy worked: The convocation in September at the Los Angeles Convention Center flipped the mood, energizing local labor leaders with a goal and restoring their sense of power, in part by reminding them how far unions have come in the county in the last decade.

Contreras, who died Friday night of a heart attack at 52, had a knack for turning around tough situations with big ideas, leaving others to sweat the details. Labor scholars and colleagues said that was how he built a thriving coalition of unions and community groups in L.A., while labor in much of the rest of the country continued to see its size and influence decline.

Today, presidents of the county’s top unions plan to meet at federation offices near MacArthur Park to take the first steps toward choosing a successor.

Charles Lester, the federation’s political director under Contreras, probably will be appointed to fill Contretras’ post as secretary-treasurer for the next 60 days, said Rick Icaza, the federation’s longtime president and president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770.

“That’s as far as we’re going to go right now,” Icaza said of the interim appointment. “We want to give everyone time to mourn before we start thinking about the future.”

He spoke Monday from the federation lobby, amid flower arrangements and burning candles. Telephones rang constantly. Local labor organizers wandered in and out, putting together a memorial to be held Thursday afternoon at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Icaza stared ahead; his eyes watered. “I just don’t know how we’re going to replace him,” he said.

Nine years ago, Icaza called together another such board meeting, after then-Secretary-Treasurer James Wood died of cancer. Miguel Contreras, then political director, won the job after surviving a power struggle between the old guard of Los Angeles labor and a cadre of Latino insurgents who backed him.

The federation today is a far more cohesive body than it was in 1996, said Icaza, who credited Contreras’ diligent efforts to pull its member unions together.

In a recent interview, Contreras recalled that during his first weeks in office, he visited the presidents of the top 20 unions in town. “I asked each one of them to climb an imaginary hill with me and look down at what Los Angeles could be,” Contreras said. “And then I asked them to think about what it would take to get there.”

The son of migrant farmworkers who cut his labor teeth on the grape boycott, Contreras had good material to work with, according to scholars who studied the blossoming of the L.A. labor movement in the 1990s. Los Angeles was already known as a center for new labor activism, led by a handful of activist Latinos such as Mike Garcia, an architect of the janitors’ campaign, and the hotel workers’ Maria Elena Durazo, whom Contreras had recently married.

A growing gap between rich and poor in a city known around the world for Hollywood excess set the stage for a fight on basic principles, said activists who worked with Contreras. The ingredients for a big movement were there, but Contreras compounded them by bringing people together and imbuing them with confidence.

“His genius was in making people around him feel powerful, no matter how adverse the circumstances,” said Madeline Janis-Aparicio, director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, an influential advocacy group for low-wage workers that began as one of those big Contreras ideas.

An attorney who once practiced at a high-profile Los Angeles law firm, Janis-Aparicio was recruited by Contreras in 1992 with a vague notion to “create something” to help the region’s working poor. Within a year, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy was born. It is now a bustling nonprofit with a string of pay-boosting victories under its belt, including city and county laws and private agreements with developers that set a new standard for a “living wage.”

The alliance also served as a conduit between Contreras’ unions and religious and community groups that might have been uncomfortable if approached by unions directly. Now labor rallies routinely start with a mix of religious blessings, and rank-and-file crowds are often sprinkled with members of groups representing seniors, women, immigrants and African Americans.

Most Contreras initiatives worked on such multiple levels, Janis-Aparicio said. The end result was often less important than the process of getting there, as long as that process involved connecting people and getting them to care about a cause.

The student initiative touted in September was another example. Even if eventually adopted, the ultimate payout -- a few hundred dollars for books and tools for each community college student in the city -- will be relatively modest.

But Contreras knew that setting the agenda and working toward it would have their own rewards. Free books was a cause that members of every federation union could support, especially because internal polls showed that a large number had attended community colleges.

The boldness of the proposal helped position labor as a player with vision in the politically loaded debate over higher education. And campus signature-gathering campaigns, already in the early stages, would expose a whole new generation of potential union members to the new progressive face of labor.

At the same convention in September, Contreras called for a $1-million Labor Solidarity Fund to support future battles with employers. The amount was largely symbolic: $1 million would have been swallowed up in a day by the massive supermarket strike. But it sounded powerful, and when local presidents representing construction workers, teachers, janitors, longshore workers, nurses and parole officers, among others, unanimously pledged to fund it, the convention hall crackled with a sense of invincibility.

Contreras made sure the nation’s top labor official, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, was on hand to see it. Reformers took note as well. Before long, both sides in the contentious debate over labor’s future were touting local federations as essential building blocks that should be strengthened across the country -- modeled, of course, on the Los Angeles experience.

If a contentious struggle between national union presidents leads to the breakup of the national AFL-CIO, as some labor leaders fear, the solidarity fund started by Contreras might serve another purpose -- as the glue that holds the local federation together.

“We’d been having a lot of discussions about it,” said Mike Garcia, president of the Service Employees International Union Local 1877, representing thousands of Los Angeles janitors. “He was grappling with how to institutionalize unity in Los Angeles, and how to serve as an example to the rest of the labor movement.”

Contreras was a deal maker who understood power and how to use it behind the scenes, colleagues said, but was at his best at noisy rallies that fired up the rank-and-file for big initiatives.

“He was happiest at a Dodger game with his son, or at a rally with thousands of cooks, dishwashers, janitors, grocery checkers,” said Janis-Aparicio. “You could see it. He had that sparkle in his eyes, so happy, so excited to see the collective power of these people.”

Contreras was planning one such mega-rally when he died. It was set for Pershing Square, May 25, colleagues said. Thousands of union members and allies would be there to help launch the next big Contreras idea, a campaign against a series of ballot initiatives supported by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Icaza of the United Food and Commercial Workers said it was unclear whether the rally would still be held, but he thought that it should -- now as a tribute.