Transforming Unions’ Men-Only Club : Labor: The change is slow, but one sign is a 29-year-old woman’s election as president of one of Orange County’s largest locals.

Running a union is still largely a man’s game.

But slowly that’s beginning to change: In the 1980s, a handful of Southern California women rose to the leadership of big local unions.

In June they were joined by one more: Angela Keefe, who’s unusual not just because she’s a woman but because she’s only 29.

Keefe beat a male incumbent in an election for president of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union local in Orange County and Long Beach.

The local has 5,000 full-time members, which makes it one of the largest in Orange County.

It’s not clear whether Keefe’s victory is part of a trend. Nobody, in fact, keeps statistics on how many women run unions in the region or the nation.

But many women agree that the labor movement, like much of the rest of society, is behind in getting women into top jobs.

“The higher you go in the labor movement, the more male-dominated it is,” says Keefe.

Sure, women have made some inroads: They have led unions, for instance, whose members have until recently been mostly women, such as the flight attendants’ and nurses’ unions.

Some have been elected not so much because they’re women as because they represent another group that has traditionally been shut out of union leadership in Southern California--Latinos.

But in industries where there are traditionally few women--the building trades, for instance--union leadership is still almost exclusively male.

So where change is coming--though some women say not enough--is usually in the service industry unions, where quite often neither sex is a big majority of the membership.

It’s in those unions that women are being elected to lead locals. And that, of course, is the first step in moving up the ladder.

It takes a long time to climb, though. Consider Lenore Miller, who started out as a secretary for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union 34 years ago.

It was only in 1986 that she was elected the first woman to head a large U.S. labor organization. The department store union now has 140,000 members in 35 states.

“We find more and more women are coming into leadership positions in the union,” says Miller, “because more women are working these days.

“But just a glance at the numbers will show you that women are underrepresented in leadership roles everywhere,” she says. “The old view of traditional roles dies slowly.”

The biggest Southern California local led by a woman is probably Los Angeles’ Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union Local 11, which has 11,000 full-time members.

“As much as I’m a trade unionist first, you only have to look at the statistics to see women are not represented as they should be,” says Maria Elena Durazo, who--like Angela Keefe in Orange County--beat an Anglo male for the presidency of her local. That election was three years ago; Durazo was reelected in December.

Since the hotel and restaurant union is nearly two-thirds men, Durazo needed their support to win; while all hotel housekeepers are women, for instance, most restaurant kitchen workers--and most waiters in fine restaurants--are men.

Even many male union officers agree that women aren’t represented in union leadership in proportion to their numbers in the work force.

“It’s still rare to find a woman leading a local,” says Don Mear, a business representative for the Operating Engineers’ local in Anaheim. “It’s still a good-ol’-boy network.”

Female union leaders are loath to criticize the labor movement in these dark days, when unions say membership is falling off and the federal government’s labor regulations have been tilted toward employers.

But many acknowledge that the lack of female leaders is disappointing--especially considering that unions are supposed to be far more attuned than industry to issues of fairness and diversity.

Some of these new female leaders, meanwhile, turn out to be more aggressive than their male predecessors.

That’s the case with the Hotel and Restaurant union local in Los Angeles.

And it is a big reason why Keefe got elected in Orange County.

Her election, in fact, wasn’t really decided on the issue of gender at all: It was more about attitude: Keefe wanted to get tougher with a couple of employers--the posh Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach and the big Inn at the Park hotel in Anaheim--that are bogged down in contract negotiations with the union.

That contrasted with former President Steven A. Beyer’s more measured, moderate approach.

Durazo, in Los Angeles, is no shrinking violet either. Her local caused an uproar recently when it circulated a video called “City on the Edge,” which accused the city’s big hotels of low-wage, union-busting tactics that are turning Los Angeles into a socially polarized city unsafe to visit. This in the middle of an ugly contract fight with the city’s big hotels, including the Westin Bonaventure and the Biltmore.

The video may have helped: The union announced what it said was a favorable settlement last month.

And there was another issue besides gender in both women’s elections: Race, which is often a far more important issue in Southern California labor politics these days.

Southern California’s work force is becoming increasingly Latino, especially in the kind of hard, dirty, low-wage jobs the hotel and restaurant industries specialize in.

Over the last 20 years the composition of the hotel workers union has changed to reflect that: It’s gone from predominantly Anglo to a Latino majority. Now that change is starting to show in the leadership of these locals too.

Durazo, in fact, beat an Anglo who was also--and perhaps only incidentally, male--when she was first elected president in 1988. While the local is 70% Latino, the former leaders refused to print the local’s newspaper in Spanish as well as English and otherwise slighted Latino members, she says.

“Sex was only an issue indirectly,” says Durazo, “in the sense, I think, that being a woman got across the point that people were ready for a change.”

Keefe, although she is Anglo, speaks fluent Spanish and ran on a slate replete with Latinos. Her opponent, on the other hand, had not a single Latino candidate on his slate. Keefe played heavily on race in the election.

It’s not women, in fact, but Latinos whom unions are targeting for recruiting drives in Southern California.

It’s fertile ground: Latinos are one of the least-unionized groups in the United States, says Jack Otero, president of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement in Washington, which is trying to recruit more Latinos.

Meanwhile, lots of obstacles remain for women trying to get ahead in the labor movement, much as in private industry.

“When I go to Labor Council meetings in Orange County, the majority of people who attend are still men,” says Linda Porter, the part-time president of a smallish, 600-person Communications Workers of America local in Walnut. CWA, in fact, is known as a pretty good union for women: Several Southern California locals have female leaders, and the CWA official in charge of California is a woman.

“One of the biggest problems for women is, if you have children, how many nights can you spend at meetings?” says Porter, an AT&T; employee.

“And believe me, a lot of this job involves night meetings.”

State of the Unions While the U.S. labor force has steadily increased in the past six years, union membership has slipped fewer men join unions or retain membership in unions. However, women are taking up some of the slack: One in eight women belong to a union, and they represent more than a third of all unionized workers. (All membership figures are in thousands.) Fewer Members Since 1988, unions have lost nearly half a million members.

Total U.S. Union Percentage Year Work Force Membership in Union 1986 96,903 16,975 17.5% 1987 99,303 16,913 17.0 1988 101,407 17,002 16.8 1989 103,481 16,960 16.4 1990 103,905 16,740 16.1 1991 102,788 16,568 16.1

The Rise of Women in Work Force The number of women entering the work force during the last six years was double that of men. Union membership fell nearly 7% among men, but women increased their union involvement by almost 6%. Increasing the Ranks Women make up nearly half of the total work force, and more than a third of the labor union population. Ethnic Mix Blacks make up 11% of the total U.S. work force but account for 14% of union membership; whites are 82% of the total labor pool, and Latinos represent the same percentage of the total work population as they do union membership. Work Force

White: 82% Black: 11% Latino: 7% Union Pool White: 79% Black: 14% Latino:7% Note: There is no category for other races, and some Latinos have been included in both the white and black population groups. Sources: American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Researched by DALLAS M. JACKSON / Los Angeles Times