Latinos Fight for Clout in Restaurant Union Local

When waiter Juan Perez and his co-workers began circulating petitions a few years ago to get their union local to address some of their grievances and appoint a shop steward, several petitioners lost their jobs.

“Every time they (management) let someone go, it silenced the group,” Perez recalled, adding with a half-smile, “It was like the days of the Old West when they’d string someone up in the plaza to quiet everybody down.”

Last summer, Perez was named shop steward. By then, he and his co-workers had come to view their union’s long-entrenched Anglo leadership as more protective of management than of workers and intent on excluding the overwhelmingly Latino rank-and-file membership from participation in the union.

That view is widely shared among Latino members of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, Local 11, which represents about 16,000 workers in the Los Angeles area, including busboys, waiters, janitors, cooks and maids at the city’s biggest hotels.

Union leaders dismiss the charges as the rantings of a handful of “dissidents” and as the usual rank-and-file griping in an era of waning union loyalty and participation.

The conflict between the local’s leaders and a dissatisfied but largely unorganized opposition from minority rank-and-file members is not unique.

It has become a familiar scenario within unions in California as continuing immigration from Latin America and Asia transforms the work force in industries across the state.

Nor is it a new phenomenon. The labor movement’s history is replete with examples of the internal pressures that result as a new immigrant group struggles to wrest control from an earlier one. Often, the conflict crystallizes around the issue of language.

In Local 11, language reflects a broad range of cultural and historical differences between an older generation of European immigrants long in control of the union and a new wave of Central American and Mexican immigrants that some view as better educated and more demanding than earlier ones.

Translation Issue

Critics point out that despite the fact that most union members speak only Spanish the local has refused to provide full Spanish translation at its monthly general membership meetings. Moreover, a union-imposed rule that officers be U.S. citizens effectively blocks many of them from leadership posts.

“They (the leadership) are afraid,” said Rafael Lemus, a part-time waiter who spends most of his time trying to organize workers against the union’s leadership. “They know that once there’s participation, there will be change.”

Local 11’s top executive, Andrew (Scotty) Allan, whose nickname and Scottish brogue are remnants of his immigrant past, berates Lemus as “a leader without a following.”

Lemus has been unable to capitalize on members’ discontent and has yet to mobilize workers to effectively challenge Allan, who was first elected secretary-treasurer in 1963 and has easily won reelection every three years since.

“People are afraid,” said Perez, noting the precarious position of many of his co-workers who are in the country illegally. “That’s the first thing that the bosses bring up when, in a moment of courage, a worker dares to speak out.”

After a year of unsuccessfully petitioning for Spanish translation of membership meetings, Lemus and two co-workers filed suit last year. Labor experts say it is the first time that a court has been asked to decide whether a union is required to conduct its meetings in the language spoken by a majority of its members.

The lawsuit, before U.S. District Judge Richard Gadbois Jr. in Los Angeles, contends that the local’s practice denies Spanish-speaking members equal participation in the union’s meetings and the opportunity to influence union policy.

Since the suit was filed, the language issue has been raised several times at the local’s meetings--without notice--and voted down.

“This is the United States of America, and the language of this country is English,” said Edmund Anthony, 78, one of several retirees on the local’s executive board opposed to full translation at meetings. Anthony noted that the local already offers translation of questions and answers at the meetings whenever a member requests it, which is seldom, and that most union documents and literature are provided in Spanish and English.

The union’s lawyers argue that because full Spanish translation has been rejected by a vote of the membership, the court has no right to interfere in the union’s democratically set policies.

A decision in the case is expected this fall.

Some ‘Naturally Evolved’

Attorney Arturo Morales, who represents the three plaintiffs, said his hope is that the suit will force the local, and other unions, “to come to grips with the changing composition of the work force in Los Angeles, especially in the low-wage industries.”

Adaptation by unions to the demands of a changing work force has been varied, labor experts say. Although some unions seem to have “naturally evolved” into providing translation and other services for Latino immigrant members, others have changed only after extensive internal conflict or not at all.

Abe Levy, considered the “dean of labor lawyers in Los Angeles” whose firm represents hundreds of labor unions in Southern California, including Local 11, maintains that the Latino experience in the labor movement is no different from any other immigrant group.

His father, one of the founding members of the garment workers union in New York, fought to have meetings of his predominantly Jewish immigrant local conducted in Yiddish.

“It was quite a battle,” Levy said. Unlike Local 11’s dissidents, Levy said, his father managed to organize his co-workers to vote for the language change and was later elected secretary-treasurer of the local.

Beginning in the early 1900s, Levy said, each new immigrant wave has followed a similar path: “They come in and start working. A few start understanding how the union works and soon they start running for low union offices. Then, you find them slowly taking control of the union.”

UCLA historian Juan Gomez Quinonez, a specialist in the history of Latinos in the labor movement, said the pattern of largely Latino unions run by non-Latino leaders is breaking down.

He said Los Angeles is second only to Chicago in the proportion of Latinos in union leadership posts but added that most unions with large Latino memberships in the region still have a long way to go to achieve parity in their leadership ranks.

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which has historically represented an immigrant work force, has several high-ranking Latinos in its Western region. The union began conducting its meetings in Spanish--with English translation--about a decade ago, said Miguel Machuca, the union’s regional organizing director.

“As more and more Hispanics were coming into the union and we felt the need to communicate with them, we did it voluntarily,” he said. The ILGWU was also among the first unions to begin organizing illegal alien workers.

Machuca recalled attending AFL-CIO meetings during the early 1970s at which the main topic was “the illegal alien problem.” The common view was that illegal aliens depressed wages, he said.

Machuca, an immigrant from Mexico, remembers standing up at those meetings and posing the challenge: “Are we going to fight them (illegal aliens) or are we going to organize them?”

Latino leadership, however, is not a guarantee of greater responsiveness to a Latino immigrant constituency.

About half of Local 11’s staff is bilingual, but critics charge that few are in decision-making positions and that most are out of touch with the rank and file.

At the United Furniture Workers of America, Local 1010, a small local with members throughout Southern California, membership meetings were held in English for more than a decade, despite Latino leadership.

Change came three years ago, after a hard-fought battle that resulted in the election of a new slate of officers, many of them Spanish-speaking immigrants.

A Long Battle

In Teamsters Union locals at canneries in Northern California, where small groups of Anglos have dominated the locals for years, Latinos have been waging a long battle, said Mike Johnson, West Coast organizer for the Teamsters for Democratic Union, a national Teamsters group trying to internally reform the union.

“We’ve been able to push a number of canneries to have membership meetings in both Spanish and English,” Johnson said. “But as soon as we stop pushing, they revert to English only.”

Nevertheless, Levy, Local 11’s lawyer, insists that such issues should be handled internally. He calls the suit by the three hotel workers “just another example of governmental interference in the affairs of unions,” a trend that most labor leaders find disturbing.

Some union leaders, however, contend that Local 11’s position is indefensible, as well as self-defeating.

Local 11’s refusal to provide full Spanish translation at its meetings is “plainly chauvinistic,” said Machuca of the ILGWU. “And it’s dumb. . . . How can you work together with your members if you’re not communicating with them?”

Local 11’s Allan, a veteran of what he called “real battles” with his own superiors from the hotel workers international, is not worried.

Allan bucked the international in 1975 by refusing to keep an international officer, already on the international’s payroll, on Local 11’s payroll as well. Allan later testified before an investigative subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs that the international had unilaterally placed the officer, who performed no significant duties, on the local’s payroll.

With battles like that under his belt, Allan sees Lemus and his group of dissidents as a minor annoyance, “like a fly buzzing in my ear. . . . I’ve had 100 Lemuses in my 20 years (as a union leader). They keep me in office,” he said, laughing. “I’m the lesser of two evils.”

Allan’s high-level union politics are of little concern to hotel workers who see themselves enmeshed in a frustrating day-to-day battle of their own on the job--without the leverage to win it.

Busboys and waiters complain that behind the carefully orchestrated banquets and mirrored ballroom walls of some of the city’s most luxurious hotels, they have to put up with abusive language and treatment from bosses. Others say they are punished with days off work without pay any time their bosses think it is warranted. Maids and housemen complain about not having time to eat lunch because of overwork and about the lack of control over irregular work schedules.

“We find ourselves alone, without any form of (union) backing, powerless to deal with even the simplest problems at work,” Perez said. “The feeling of impotence is maddening.”

Allan maintains that complaints from workers are largely unfounded and that the city’s major hotels are “very, very good to employees.”

When a problem does arise, “we just pick up the phone (to call the particular hotel) and it’s settled,” he said. “We get 1,000% cooperation from the hotels.”

In answer to workers’ complaints that they were not offered an opportunity to discuss the recently ratified union contract with hotels, Allan asked, “What’s to discuss?”

‘Accept or Reject’

Ballots mailed to members, urging them to ratify the contract, were “in black and white: ‘Here’s what’s been offered, accept or reject,’ ” Allan said. The vote was 6 to 1 for ratification, with about 25% of the eligible members voting.

“Legally, I don’t have to go to the workers (for contract ratification),” he added. “I have the authority to sign it myself.”

Dahlia Dinnocent, a paid union business agent, contended that this new generation of workers is just “greedy.”

“They think they’re better because they have some education,” said Dinnocent, who began her career in 1949 waiting tables at Du-Par’s Restaurant across from Farmers Market. In those days, she said, the Mexican busboys and cooks were a hard-working, docile lot who “didn’t ask for much.”

Today’s workers, she said, are “more aggressive. . . . They want more and more. It never ends.”

Lemus, however, contended that this new generation is made up of immigrant workers better equipped than previous generations to defend themselves because some have participated in labor movements at home or have been schooled in the highly charged politics of war-torn Central America.

‘I Learned to Fight’

Perez said he learned from watching his father and uncles stand up to the bank and the land commissioner in his Mexican hometown.

“I learned to fight for my rights--for life itself--from (their) example,” he said. “It’s not something you learn in books, but from what you see, and it stays with you.”

Lemus has been kicked out of the union hall for using a megaphone to verbally attack union leaders and once got into a scuffle with a union officer. He has organized petition-signing campaigns among fellow workers and picket lines in front of the union offices, and he said he has been blackballed from working at most hotels in town.

“People say I have a personal vendetta against Scotty Allan, that I’m a communist and out to destroy the union,” he said. “But my only fight is for a democratic union.”

Lemus said he would like to fashion his union activities after those of another labor organizer he respects.

“Like Cesar Chavez,” he said, “we, too, can organize and influence change--as undocumented workers.”