COLUMN ONE : Unions Try Bilingual Recruiting : A handful of aggressive local organizers are making unprecedented efforts to replenish their ranks with immigrant workers, especially Latinos. So far, the strategy is paying off.

Not many years ago, most American labor unions did not have much use for a newly arrived immigrant such as Roberto Rodriguez. Immigrants were often here illegally, did not speak English and were regarded as potential strikebreakers.

These days, Rodriguez, a $7.65-an-hour factory worker, sits in a conference room across from his bosses, who run a large automobile wheel foundry near Compton. After helping organize a wildcat walkout and successful union representation election, he is part of a five-member employee committee trying to negotiate a first contract for 1,200 co-workers, virtually all immigrants.

To an increasing number of labor strategists, Rodriguez, a former Mexican schoolteacher four years removed from his native Jalisco, symbolizes the future of organized labor.

Desperate to replenish their ranks, a handful of unions are making unprecedented efforts to recruit immigrant urban workers--the fastest-growing segment of the work force--regardless of whether the immigrants are here legally.

Los Angeles, a region with a history of antipathy toward unions but with the greatest surge of immigrants, has become an unofficial national organizing laboratory, where new hypotheses are tested by aggressive, bilingual union organizers.

These organizers believe they are participating in the beginning of a national labor resurgence. If so, it will be glacial.

Weakened by a decade of plant closings, concessionary contracts and aggressive “union avoidance” tactics by management, unions now claim only 12% of America’s 84 million private-sector workers, compared to nearly 30% in the early 1970s. Last year, the American work force grew by 425,000, yet the number of unionized workers--public and private--fell 220,000, to 16.7 million. Many unions remain stagnant institutions that put more lip service than muscle into organizing.

Against this background, it was startling news when three times in the last nine months unions here won large campaigns against major companies with considerable resources. Each time, the workers were almost exclusively non-English-speaking Latino immigrants:

* Last June, the Service Employees International Union’s “Justice for Janitors” campaign won a strike in Century City by 200 janitors, who were demanding that their employer recognize their union. An international cleaning company, International Service Systems, agreed to pay increases and health benefits covering between 500 and 700 employees. The strike was marked by the ugliest local labor confrontation in recent memory, a violent clash between Los Angeles police and 400 striking janitors and their supporters that occurred when police cut short a march from Beverly Hills into Century City.

The victory was also significant because janitors bypassed the usual National Labor Relations Board election for union recognition. Instead, they declared themselves to be members of SEIU and demanded that their employer sign a union contract. This reflected a growing belief among organizers that government-supervised elections, intended to protect workers from retaliation, actually make it easier for management to stage elaborate anti-union campaigns.

* Last December, the International Assn. of Machinists won an election giving it the right to negotiate a labor contract at Rodriguez’s company, American Racing Inc., an arm of a $1-billion Tennessee-based aluminum corporation. It was the largest recognition election organized labor had won at a Los Angeles manufacturing company in 20 years. Contract talks are under way.

* Last month, the janitors’ organizing campaign won a contract for 800 to 1,000 janitors employed by the biggest non-union janitorial company in Los Angeles, Bradford Building Services. The Century City victory appeared to have given organizers leverage. This time they won without a strike. Threats of walkouts at another company owned by Bradford’s parent corporation were enough.

With the Bradford contract, the service employees union completed a three-year drive to win back most of the downtown janitors it had lost during the last decade. When the campaign began in 1988, 30% of downtown Los Angeles janitors in major office buildings were unionized. Now, about 90% are.

The three victories were huge compared to the small-scale organizing by American unions these days.

Most unions add members in chunks averaging 50 at a time. In a typical year, all unions in Los Angeles and Orange counties organize only 3,000 to 4,000 members from among millions of non-union workers. Representation elections covering more than 500 workers at a time occur only about a dozen times a year in the United States, and management wins the overwhelming majority.

Union staff support in the three campaigns was also unusual. In each one, national or regional offices provided six to eight full-time organizers.

The increased activity--which unions hope to spread to Asian immigrants--has grown out of Southern California’s dependence on cheap labor and the growing permanence and assertiveness of Latino immigrants.

In the last decade, this region enjoyed a boom in companies that produce non-durable goods, such as food processing companies, textile and apparel makers, printers and paper producers. Competition for jobs among immigrants, employers assumed, would allow them to keep wages and benefits low.

However, a more stable Latino immigrant--a better target for union organizers--has been entering Southern California. The federal Immigration Reform and Control Act, which took effect in 1987, allowed immigrants here before 1982 to apply for amnesty and exercise their rights without fear of deportation.

Many Mexican immigrants now plan to stay in the United States, and many gravitate toward manufacturing or service-sector jobs, according to a RAND Corp. study released this month. The study debunked the long-held belief that most Mexican immigrants are single, young male farm laborers who are working here temporarily while supporting families in Mexico.

Stability aside, these people remain economically desperate.

Latinos are much more likely than other ethnic groups to live in poverty and to be employed in low-wage occupations, a 1990 Census Bureau report said. They also are more likely than any other ethnic group to be without health insurance. Even among Latinos with jobs, half are uninsured, according to an American Medical Assn. study.

The benefits of a union contract--$5.75 an hour instead of $4.75, a Kaiser health plan instead of reliance on overburdened county medical clinics, and a grievance procedure at work--are enormous. They sometimes override the fear of employer retaliation that stymies many union drives.

National labor law allows illegal immigrants to participate in union campaigns, but gives them no protection against deportation. Immigrant-rights attorneys say employers try to dampen union drives by threatening to report illegals to immigration authorities, although union activists say the threats rarely lead to deportations.

“A lot of the people who are here have taken risks simply to get here. They have stronger political views, more courage,” said Andy Stern, national organizing director of the 950,000-member Service Employees International Union.

The fact that a number of immigrants from Central America and Mexico had participated in unions in their homelands often makes them easier to organize than American-born workers. When janitors staged their aborted march into Century City last June, many marchers symbolically wore red bandannas over their faces, pulled close to the eyes, the way some Latin American labor demonstrators hide their identity from the government.

Campaigns by the janitors and the wheel workers were reminiscent of the glory days of the United Farm Workers union, a movement that was built around migrant Latino workers in the 1960s, only to be crushed by internal dissent and political pressure by growers.

Protest chants--”The people united will never be defeated,” Si, se puede (“Yes, you can”), and Quatro y cinquenta no paga la renta (“$4.50 an hour doesn’t pay the rent”)--recalled organized labor’s historic role as a social movement.

The organizing drives have had their poignant scenes.

Ana Veliz, a janitor who was in her third month of pregnancy, suffered a miscarriage in the violent Century City demonstration. Police, citing security concerns, ordered organizers to cut short their march when it neared the Century City office towers. When they refused, dozens of marchers, including Veliz, were clubbed with nightsticks.

Did she have regrets? In her one-room, $425-a-month apartment, Veliz, who with her husband left six children behind in El Salvador, pondered the question.

“Ganar quatro viente cinco no es j usto,” she said. (“Making $4.25 an hour is not right.”)

In the wheel workers campaign, clusters of afternoon-shift employees would routinely get off work at midnight, then stop by a storefront organizing office a mile away. A poster in the office pictured turn-of-the-century immigrant coal workers in Pennsylvania, with a railroad president’s quotation: “They don’t suffer. They can’t even speak English.”

For hours, workers would discuss strategy with organizers and review problems at work, such as excessive production demands. Some slept all night on the floor. A committee of 40 workers met with organizers every Sunday morning for months.

“I’ve been organizing 15 years and I’ve never seen a worker commitment like this,” said Dick Floyd, a national machinists organizer who spent months here on the campaign.

David Sickler, the AFL-CIO’s West Coast regional director and the man widely credited with coordinating much of the organizing resurgence, said the Los Angeles victories illustrate that four years after immigration reform, immigrants and unions are becoming “more comfortable” with each other.

“It’s where the new membership is,” said Sickler, 48, whose pressure on national AFL-CIO leaders in Washington has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to Los Angeles to develop a 3,000-member immigrant workers association that culls new organizing leads, an innovation found nowhere else in the country. “Not only that, but these are also the workers who want to organize first and the fastest.”

Rodriguez, 30, a soft-spoken man who lives in a rented house in Compton with his wife and 3-year-old son, believes that the union drive he joined at American Racing is historic.

“We’re sure that others will follow this movement,” he said. “We see some workers losing fear in some facilities. We can be an example. People from other (adjacent) plants are asking us questions, how they can organize. Once other workers out there see that they can get a good contract--once they see that we can--they will also struggle and fight.”

The national leadership of organized labor has yet to cater to immigrants. Even though more than 1 million Latinos belong to unions, the 14-million-member AFL-CIO has no Latinos on its 35-member executive council. The council still supports sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants. Many organizers and some top union leaders believe that that stand sends the wrong message to the Latino community. They say sanctions give employers a pretense to harass immigrant workers involved in union activity.

What is more, national union leaders are almost uniformly middle-aged white men, demographically estranged from the immigrants and women who will fill the majority of new jobs in the future.

Nevertheless, even the AFL-CIO’s top brass, who last year set up a national organizing institute in Washington to train a more sophisticated breed of labor organizer, acknowledge that unless labor spends more money on organizing and more energy appealing to new kinds of potential members, unions are not likely to survive as an institution.

Organized labor is still grappling with fundamental changes in the national economy. Its traditional base of manufacturing workers is fading. Its leverage over employers has been weakened because many firms have moved facilities overseas. International competitive pressures have prompted U.S. businesses to seek wage and benefit concessions from unions and to fight organizing drives with new fervor.

The hardest blow was the 1982 recession. Coping with plant closures and layoffs left many unions with no energy for organizing. A 1985 study found that private-sector unions in California employed only 95 organizers among 7,000 paid staff positions.

Today, unions in the manufacturing sector hold only half as many representation elections as they did before the 1982 recession.

Without an organizing resurgence, union workers may make up as little as 5% of the private-sector workplace by 2000, according to Stephen G. Bronars, a UC Santa Barbara labor economist who last fall authored a study on union membership.

In Southern California, it did not take much imagination to view immigrants as one potential answer. But labor was slow to respond.

Scott Washburn, a former farm-worker organizer, remembers standing in downtown Los Angeles at 7th and Spring streets in 1980, watching the swirl of Latinos and thinking how great it would be to set up a social center for immigrants that would gradually encourage them to begin organizing drives. But no union would undertake that until 1990, when the International Ladies Garment Workers Union--by then able to claim only 2,000 members among 100,000 garment workers in Los Angeles’ factories--opened a service center in the downtown garment district. The union’s headquarters in New York also announced that it would double its organizing staff in Los Angeles from 10 to 20, a move many labor observers believe is too little too late.

When the immigration reform act took effect, stirrings of movement began.

SEIU began its national janitor-organizing program in 15 cities in 1988. Los Angeles was nearly a lost cause. Non-union firms, relying on lower-paid Latino immigrants, had underbid union contractors. Thousands of union janitors, mostly blacks, lost their jobs.

In 1987, the AFL-CIO established a Labor Immigrant Assistance Project in Los Angeles. Two years later, the AFL-CIO funded a California Immigrant Worker Assn.

By the spring of 1990, Justin Ostro, the machinists union’s western regional vice president in San Francisco, did something he had wanted to do for years: He assigned a staff member to look for potential immigrant-organizing opportunities in Los Angeles.

A few months later, coincidence obliged at American Racing’s foundry in Rancho Dominguez, near Compton. Rodriguez and other workers, who had voted against Teamsters representation in 1988, organized a wildcat three-day walkout by 800 of the 1,200 employees. They walked out to complain of production changes made after the company conducted a time-motion study, which sought ways to improve the speed and efficiency of manufacturing. Management’s promise of a 5% wage increase brought them back to work, but did not satisfy them.

Wildcat strikes are rare. Among immigrant workers--traditionally the most passive and easily exploitable of workers--they are rarer. Four unions, seeing the obvious possibility for new members, came running. AFL-CIO officials gave the machinists the right to organize. Ostro’s spadework had paid off.

The night the workers voted for union representation, an organizer drove to the plant to pick up one of the workers who had been witnessing the ballot count. The worker was crying with delight.

In the office the union had rented, Ostro called an associate to report the union’s victory. In accepting the congratulations he made an admission that spoke volumes about the new breed labor hopes to recruit.

“These people had this thing won before they found us,” he said.