Firebrand Named to Top L.A. County Labor Post

Maria Elena Durazo, the widow of a powerful Los Angeles labor figure and an influential leader in her own right, was named Friday to the top post in the region’s largest labor group, becoming the first woman to hold the job and opening a new, possibly contentious chapter in the area’s labor-management relations.

Durazo, the new chief of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, has long been known in local labor circles as a firebrand unafraid to employ extreme tactics, a quality that has often improved wages and benefits for her workers but roiled the city’s large business community.

She once compared the labor situation in Los Angeles to apartheid in South Africa. Another time she had hotel maids who were embroiled in a contract dispute make up a bed -- in the middle of Figueroa Street.

Some business leaders publicly greeted Friday’s announcement with polite restraint, but others privately wondered whether Durazo could moderate herself.

Durazo must still stand for election in May to her new job as secretary-treasurer -- the top staff position -- of the federation. But she will be a heavy favorite to win. She passed up an opportunity to take the job last year after the unexpected death of her husband, longtime federation chief Miguel Contreras.

The change at the top of the federation -- which bills itself as the largest labor council in the nation -- was set in motion by the departure of Martin Ludlow, who had left the Los Angeles City Council to take the post after Contreras’ death last spring. On Friday, Ludlow signed a plea agreement and admitted that he illegally used union funds in his 2003 council race.

That opened the door for Durazo, 52, who has headed the union local representing hotel workers since 1989 and is perhaps as well known as her late husband for hard bargaining. He invented a word for her: agitational.

A friend and ally of both Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles), Durazo is best known for leading unyielding and often very public worker campaigns.

In 1999, she fasted for 11 days on behalf of the workers she represented. Years earlier, in a move that outraged then-Mayor Tom Bradley and was intended as a jab at the hotel industry she was battling, Durazo produced a video portraying Los Angeles as a dismal and unsafe destination and then mailed copies to hundreds of convention planners across the United States.

Her appointment to the federation post will test whether she can work constructively with other unions and, especially, with the leaders of business and government. Asked her opinion of Durazo, the president of a key business group in town, Carol Schatz, was tactful and brief.

“She’s a passionate leader of the labor movement, and we look forward to working with her,” said Schatz, president of the Central City Assn.

Should business be afraid?

“They love me!” Durazo joked in a recent interview and then sounded as if she had perhaps mellowed. “It’s our responsibility to do the best we can for the workers, but it’s also our responsibility to make sure the industry is profitable, prosperous and growing.”

And she added: “We feel strongly that for the good of our community -- and our country -- that working men and women should be able to raise their children, send them to college and buy a home. That’s not asking too much.”

The federation is an umbrella group of 354 unions with 825,000 members. Although its success in local elections has been mixed, its power can be formidable when it comes to pushing candidates or when it exerts its leverage during times of labor strife.

Rick Icaza, the federation’s president, said he is not worried if business is a little apprehensive about Durazo.

“She’s not into it to please management,” he said. “I believe that she will be instrumental in solidifying the labor movement, not creating labor unrest.”

Durazo said she is taking the job because she views unions as the solution to many of the region’s problems.

She plans to follow the federation’s established game plan: help elect union-friendly candidates who will pass laws that support labor and clear the way for businesses and new developments that agree to welcome unionized workers. Last fall, for example, her union dumped $82,000 into the campaign to get Jose Huizar elected to the City Council.

“It’s hard, because I’m not going to have the same day-to-day contact with the cooks, the maids and the dishwashers,” Durazo said of the new job. “But they know that whatever I can do with the labor movement in Los Angeles will ultimately benefit them.”

Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College, said: “It’s the labor movement that made America a middle-class society in the ‘40s and ‘50s. I’m sure that’s what Maria Elena hopes for Los Angeles.”

The seventh of 11 children, Durazo grew up in a family of farmworkers following the crops from town to town in a flatbed truck.

In a typical year, she went to two or three schools as her family moved. Sometimes the Durazos rented homes; sometimes they squatted -- pitching tents by rivers or irrigation ditches.

The first of her family to attend college, Durazo set her sights on becoming an attorney. She eventually attended the People’s College of Law -- which Villaraigosa also attended -- but, inspired by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers movement, dropped out to dive into the world of labor. She began as an organizer in the sweatshops of L.A.

As was the case with Ludlow last year, there has been grumbling in the ranks of some unions that Durazo was more City Hall’s choice for the job than theirs. But the federation board’s decision to appoint her was unanimous.

“She’s a unifier, and she understands the Los Angeles labor movement,” said Dave Gillotte, president of Firefighters Local 1014, which represents about 3,000 county employees. “The issues that the labor [federation] tackles are the issues that are pertinent to all working-class folks in the county.”

Durazo said she greatly prefers to work with businesses that understand the importance of having a middle class in Los Angeles. She argued that giving more money and benefits to workers would ease the crunch on local governments to offer the kind of basic, safety-net services, such as healthcare, that leave them strapped for money.

“I’m not looking for a fight. I’m looking for what’s best for workers, and I strongly believe there are many allies who believe the same thing in business, the clergy and the political arena,” she said. “That being said, if there are businesses who decide that they will not respect the workers, then we’re in for some battles. It’s not what we prefer.”

Asked what has inspired her over the years, Durazo didn’t hesitate to point to one moment that shaped her views.

“There is a very vivid scene that stays with me -- I must have been 5 years old,” she said. “It’s being in a church with a small white casket being carried down the aisle. It was my infant brother, who had died because my mom and dad couldn’t get him to a doctor.”

The church was somewhere in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. It was not a familiar one to the family, and Durazo recalls a priest taking up a collection so her family could afford to bury her brother.

Finishing the story, she asked: “How could that be that 11 kids and two adults working in the fields day in and day out didn’t have enough money to bury one of the family?

“How could that be?”