Named for labor leader, UC program fights for funds

During state budget deliberations each year since 2003, Republican lawmakers have tried to scuttle funding for a University of California institute dedicated to studying organized labor and workplace issues.

And each year labor leaders and Democratic lawmakers have rallied to the program’s defense. But this year, the fight is different. This year it’s personal.

In January, the UC Institute for Labor and Employment was renamed the Miguel Contreras Labor Program, after the late labor leader.

The institute’s foes argue that the state should not pay academics to teach unionization, but the program’s supporters say attacks on the institute amount to affronts to Contreras’ legacy.

“He was a favorite son of ours, a brother to us, someone who truly championed the return of the attention in our state to labor. We’ve certainly said that this is personal as well as political for us,” said State Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles). “We can fund $6 million to honor the legacy of one of our own, and that’s why we will fight for this.”

Contreras was a close ally of many leaders in the Legislature, including Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles), who proposed the name change in his capacity as a UC regent. After the name change in January, Nuñez released a statement saying he was “glad to be in a position” to preserve the funding.

That funding would allow the Miguel Contreras Labor Program “to function in a manner that lives up to its name,” he said.

Contreras’ widow, Maria Elena Durazo, former president of Unite Here Local 11, said renaming the program after her husband “fit like a glove” because, as part of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, he had been one of the institute’s most vocal supporters.

Republican lawmakers say they want to eliminate the program because “the state should not use taxpayer funds to help a special interest group,” according to a list of proposed cuts to the 2007-08 budget that Senate Republicans are pursuing.

“We’d like to see it deleted,” said Senate Republican Leader Dick Ackerman of Irvine. If universities “want to teach business classes, that’s fine,” he said. “They have business administration and financial planning classes. When it comes to labor, I think that’s left to people when they get out” of college and “start getting out in the real world.”

Durazo finds such talk troubling.

“I think without a doubt it’s an attack on Miguel and what he fought for and what we all hope to continue fighting for the way he did,” Durazo said. “I never thought after a unanimous vote by the UC Board of Regents that we would ever have to face another threat on funding for this program.”

The debate centers on $6 million in state funds set aside for the program, which serves as an umbrella organization for a variety of research initiatives and two labor centers, one at UCLA and the other at UC Berkeley.

Defenders say the centers conduct research on labor issues; critics say the centers groom union activists.

For years these programs received the majority of their funding from the budgets of the universities where they are housed. Then in the 2000-01 budget, former Gov. Gray Davis approved $6 million to create the institute encompassing the two centers and charged with carrying out “research, education and service involving the world of work, and the public and private policies that govern it.”

But since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger took office, the program’s budget has been in flux.

In the 2004-05 state budget, the institute’s funding was reduced to $3.8 million. The next year, Schwarzenegger used a line-item veto to eliminate the institute’s funding.

“A lot of people did not know if they were going to have jobs,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. That year UC officials redirected about $1.25 million from other research funds to keep the program running, according to UC officials and H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the state Department of Finance.

The $6 million was restored in last year’s budget. Staffers for Nuñez said this month that the governor promised the Assembly speaker that he would not use his veto power to cut the program’s funding in the budget for 2007-08. That budget remains stalled as Democrats and Republicans in the state Senate wrangle over cuts.

Palmer said he was not privy to conversations between the speaker and the governor about the program and would not discuss them if he were. “What I can tell you is that we will continue to have conversations with all legislative leaders in trying to pass this budget,” he said.

With their funding uncertain, staffers at the two labor centers have resumed the legislative dance begun four years ago, transforming themselves from academics to lobbyists.

Sharon Delugach, staff director at the UCLA center, spent two days this month roaming the Capitol, popping into the offices of state senators, flagging down chiefs of staff in the hallways, listening to the advice of seasoned lobbyists. Delugach said she was familiar with the rhythms of Sacramento but that “we’re not lobbyists. I didn’t have a specific plan, I didn’t have any meetings.”

The politicking had begun much earlier. When word got out last spring that the program’s budget was once again in trouble, organizers in academia, labor and politics sent advisories to their groups asking them to write to Schwarzenegger.

One such organization is the California Faculty Assn., which, though not affiliated with the UC system, urged lawmakers to “reject the cut and save the UC Miguel Contreras Labor Program to serve California’s majority: middle- and low-income working people.”

The labor centers have long been controversial. A labor research institute was established at UCLA and UC Berkeley in the early 1940s, and the current labor centers at the schools were established in 1964, Wong said.

Conservative politicians have long accused such programs of being taxpayer-funded fronts for liberal agendas. Wong said those criticisms are antithetical to the work of the labor centers and reflect a limited view of how research and teaching should be conducted at a public university.

According to the program’s literature, 60% of the $6-million funding is allocated to research and faculty activities and 40% is allocated to the UCLA and UC Berkeley centers for education and community outreach.

Benjamin Aaron, emeritus professor of law at UCLA, joined the institute at UCLA in 1946 and was its director between 1960 and 1975.

Aaron said that during the Red scare in the 1940s and ‘50s, UCLA’s research institute was accused of advancing communist causes.

Although Aaron presided over the center after that time, he said he spent much of his time defending it.

“I’m not surprised,” Aaron said of the current attacks. “I’m depressed.”

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ari.bloomekatz@latimes.com