Unions targeting the LAX area

As an estimated 1.8 million travelers pass through Los Angeles International Airport this holiday weekend, they will hear a sound now nearly as familiar at the airport as the roar of jumbo jets: the chants of unions.

This year, LAX and the neighborhoods around it have emerged as the leading hot spot for labor organizing in California, and perhaps in the western United States. Three major international unions are seeking to represent workers who toil at the airport or nearby businesses. In the last six months, airport janitors and the drivers of hotel shuttle buses have been organized by union locals.

The reasons for the airport’s growing importance in labor organizing range widely, and include a shift in the national labor movement’s strategic focus, and unions’ enormous clout in Los Angeles politics.

But LAX also is attractive to the labor movement for some of the same reasons that many travelers have come to despise it: In a sprawling city, it is a compact, cramped world apart, full of workers and people. Those characteristics make it a relatively cost-effective place to organize workers and attract public attention.

“This is the frontier of unionism,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a UC Santa Barbara professor and leading labor historian. “You can leverage quasi-governmental entities such as airports to make the environment neutral if not necessarily favorable for organizing.... LAX will be a model around the country for this kind of thing.”

In the run-up to the Thanksgiving holiday, when news about LAX was certain to gather attention, some unions stepped up activity around the airport.

The Engineers and Architects Assn., which represents technical and professional employees in the Los Angeles city government, the airport and other locations, has declared a one-day strike of some of its workers at LAX for Sunday. Essential workers who toil on runways and airport operations are required by court order to show up for work, however.

Labor organizing at LAX also has benefited from official actions by the city this week. On Wednesday, the City Council gave formal approval to an ordinance that would apply the “living wage” to workers at a dozen hotels near the airport -- a clear victory for Unite Here, the international union for hotel workers.

On Monday, the city attorney’s office announced that the city’s living wage ordinance, which guarantees wages and benefits of at least $10.64 per hour, applies to a group of about 300 janitors who clean planes at the airport. That reversed an earlier legal opinion that exempted them.

Those janitors, who work for the contractor World Service, voted this summer to join a union, Service Employees International Union Local 1877. Last week, they threatened to strike, drawing attention to the fact that they make $8.50 per hour and do not receive health benefits. New talks on a first contract for the unionized workers are scheduled for next week.

LAX has long been a special place in a city with a long history of antipathy to labor. Many of the airlines and other workers there have been unionized for decades.

The labor and community coalition that produced the living wage law in 1997 grew out of a dispute at the airport over the contracting out of food service operations at the airport, which cost hundreds of people their jobs. The living wage ordinance has affected more jobs at the airport than at any other place.

Labor also has done extensive organizing in nearby communities such as Inglewood, Lennox and Hawthorne, where many airport workers live. (A report by the Century Boulevard Commission on Jobs, Tourism and Communities says that more than 20,000 of the 200,000 people in those three communities either work at the airport or in related businesses.)

“I think it’s fair to say that there’s nothing like this in the country,” Madeline Janis, of the nonprofit Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, said of the combination of labor and community organizing around the airport.

Among the many organizing campaigns, the largest has been Unite Here’s effort to unionize hotel workers. The union has turned the roads outside LAX into a stage for frequent protests. On Sept. 28, about 300 supporters of hotel workers sat down in the middle of Century Boulevard during rush hour as a peaceful protest. They were arrested.

A spokeswoman for Unite Here says the LAX-area hotels represent the largest piece of a national organizing effort.

Unite Here is a member of Change to Win, a coalition of unions that split from the AFL-CIO last year to devote more of their resources to organizing. Two other Change to Win unions -- the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters -- also are organizing around LAX.

SEIU is in the early stages of organizing employees of the dozens of contractors and subcontractors that work inside the airport. The union has demanded that they receive better training, in part because of security concerns at LAX. If employees are well trained and professional, union officials reason, they will be able to win higher salaries.

For their part, the Teamsters have piggybacked on the hotel workers’ effort. Earlier this year, Teamsters Local 986 successfully organized shuttle bus drivers. And Teamsters Local 911 is seeking union cards from more than 700 workers at private parking facilities, such as Wally Park, in the vicinity of the airport.

“When I found out more than a year ago that the union was planning to go after the hotels, I thought this is the right moment for me to organize the parking,” said Jose Monjaras, an organizer for Teamsters Local 911.

Many of the businesses around the airport have been slow to cooperate with one another and develop a joint strategy to counter unionization. For example, the new living wage ordinance for airport-area hotel workers was discussed in the City Council for six months before business made a belated, unsuccessful effort to block it.

Harvey Englander, a lobbyist who represents the airport-area hotels, says the living wage ordinance has awakened the business community near the airport and around the county. But with union-backed politicians holding a majority of elected positions in Los Angeles, labor has the upper hand.

“As long as you have a city government that is willing to bend over backwards to help a faction, we’re going to be faced with this,” Englander said.

And at the airport, the organizing efforts have reached a critical mass. With so many ongoing labor campaigns and so much political support, workers around the airport say they feel more comfortable asserting their rights.

Late last week, Amelia Alvarez, one of the janitors who joined SEIU Local 1877 this summer, demonstrated outside Tom Bradley International Terminal, where she makes $8.25 per hour cleaning the inside of planes bound for Europe. Though fearful that she might face retaliation from her employer, she said in Spanish that she found comfort in her many friends who work near the airport and are engaged in similar struggles.

“You see everyone electing to do this. You see all the different union T-shirts,” said Alvarez, a 49-year-old native of Veracruz, Mexico. “They have confidence. I think we can do it too.”

joe.mathews@latimes.com