Durazo: Good for L.A.?

MARIA ELENA DURAZO, named Friday as interim leader of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, was both the logical and sentimental choice of union members. Having led L.A.’s dynamic hotel workers’ union, she can help to knit that labor group and the others that broke off last year from the AFL-CIO together with those that stayed. And, as the widow of the popular Miguel Contreras, the federation leader who died suddenly less than a year ago, she can help L.A.’s labor movement retain its considerable political clout.

Whether her permanent appointment to the post later this year would prove to be in the city’s best interest is an open question. At a time when the labor movement is declining across the nation, it is resurgent in Los Angeles, and it has a huge effect on how the city functions -- for good and ill. The leader of the County Federation of Labor has a large role in setting the tone of the civic debate.

The federation’s member unions mistakenly thought they hit gold last year when they pulled Martin Ludlow from the City Council to be their leader. No one backed that choice with more passion than Durazo. It turned out that Ludlow had cheated his way into elected office by dipping into union dues to secretly give his campaign an edge.

Durazo enjoys a reputation for integrity. The organizing skills she demonstrated in rebuilding her union and in helping hotel workers across the country win nationwide contracts that expire more or less at the same time -- this year -- have made her a national figure in labor. But the negotiating abilities she honed with the hotels union are not the same as the consensus-building and political acumen she will need to be an effective leader of an organization that encompasses 356 unions representing 825,000 members throughout the county.

Contreras helped to reshape City Hall and Sacramento with an uncanny ability to see three or four elections into the future. He made the political roadmap while others -- notably, Durazo -- better articulated the endgame: union workers creating a solid new middle class.

But with labor-friendly officials now well-ensconced in office, low-wage union workers seem as far as ever from becoming a new middle class. The new leader of the County Federation of Labor has to possess at least some of Contreras’ political skills or risk losing ground at the ballot box. But Durazo must be sure labor plays clean with its power, not least because of the added scrutiny sure to follow the Ludlow fiasco. She must be a diplomatic prodigy, shuttling between spatting locals that now belong to different national labor organizations. All that while continuing to back member unions in contract talks -- not for just the high-profile contracts for police and firefighters that will undoubtedly be in the news this year, but also for the lesser-known unions that represent a majority of federation laborers.

And Durazo also must be willing to reassess the ballot-box strategy on which Contreras built the federation, and the combative approach on which she built the hotel workers’ local. The question she should ask is whether these tactics still work well for the minority of laborers who are unionized in Los Angeles and, by extension, for the rest of the city.