NEWS ANALYSIS : Fast-Growing Union Hits Obstacles in L.A.

The high-spirited Service Employees International Union, known for its confrontational tactics and success in recruiting low-paid minority workers, often is praised for being on the leading edge of the American labor movement.

But in recent days in Los Angeles, the SEIU has run headlong into bedeviling problems, and has learned anew how punishing serving on the front lines of labor’s struggles can be.

The SEIU--the nation’s fastest-growing union and the biggest in California, where it represents more than 300,000 workers--is absorbing the brunt of the pending 5,200 layoffs and demotions of health care workers announced Friday by Los Angeles County officials.

One day earlier, a separate Los Angeles SEIU local long celebrated for its hallmark “Justice for Janitors” organizing campaign was judged by union leaders in Washington to be deadlocked in a power struggle with racial overtones. The local’s officers were ousted, and a trustee was brought in from Northern California to clean up the mess.

Still, even in its recent crises in Los Angeles, the SEIU may illuminate key issues lying ahead for organized labor. And the way SEIU handles its dilemmas, labor experts say, could influence the course taken by other big unions.

In Los Angeles and elsewhere, the ranks of public sector workers--the U.S. labor movement’s main stronghold over the last several decades--are under attack as an anti-government mood deepens and municipal budget battles flare.

Likewise, as a pioneer in organizing immigrant janitors and others among the nation’s lowest-paid workers in the private sector, the SEIU must find a way to keep peace in its increasingly diverse ranks.

In the case of the planned layoffs of the county health care workers, SEIU leaders have cast the controversy as far more than just a labor issue. The resulting clinic closings and other cutbacks in health care services, they say, would have a devastating impact on the poor.

“If we can’t solve a problem in Los Angeles that is so crucial, it will send the wrong message to so many other communities across the country” facing budget crises of their own, said John Sweeney, president of the SEIU.

Yet, the broad impact on organized labor also is high on the minds of Sweeney and other SEIU officials, spurring them to extraordinary efforts on several fronts to save local union jobs.

Even before the local battles emerged, Sweeney was writing a new chapter in the story of the U.S. labor movement. Currently, he is leading a historic insurgent campaign that is favored, in balloting next month, to take control of the 13.3-million-member AFL-CIO, the umbrella organization for most of the American labor movement.

While Sweeney’s election chances aren’t expected to be influenced by the events in Los Angeles, he has nevertheless thrown himself into the union’s local, state and federal lobbying efforts to win funds and reduce the number of layoffs of union workers. Sweeney personally raised the issue with President Clinton when the two met on Labor Day, and union officials continue to press the White House for at least $178 million in health-care funds.

Locally, after a summer of strategizing, protesting, marching and lobbying, SEIU Local 660--which represents half of the county’s 85,000 workers--promised this weekend to come out fighting ferociously. Local 660 President Alejandro Stephens told union leaders at a lengthy strategy session Saturday that this week will be among their most important to date in the ongoing fiscal crisis.

Their main goal is to pressure the County Board of Supervisors, grappling with the worsening county financial situation, into saving the jobs of the health-service workers given layoff notices on Friday.

Because federal money is so uncertain, and due to the smaller than hoped for bailout approved by state lawmakers, the supervisors may vote for even more health cuts, including shutting down one or more hospitals. Stephens told union leaders that the union must confront the supervisors over the issue with a massive show of force at their weekly board meeting on Tuesday.

Already, the supervisors plan to shut down three-quarters of the county’s health clinics and centers Oct. 1, and to eliminate 75% of outpatient services at its six hospitals.

“The way to turn this around is to make an example of a politician,” Stephens told union officials. “We need to mobilize, and stay in their faces. . . . They listen to you when you are out in numbers.”

Recently, one of the targets of the SEIU’s hardball pressure tactics has been Board Chairwoman Gloria Molina. While she relies strongly on labor support, Molina has said she may oppose a $100-million loan deal crucial to a $150-million bailout package passed late Friday by the state Legislature.

On Friday, in front of a crowd of angry workers who had just been told they would be laid off in two weeks, Local 660 General Manager Gilbert Cedillo asked Molina to accept the loan deal. After hesitating, Molina said she agreed with the idea in principle, but she since has privately voiced qualms.

The local this summer also hired political consultants to wage a $500,000-plus television ad campaign showing a tombstone for Los Angeles County--saying the economy would die if the supervisors did not keep government running at its usual level. Then the union and its political aides created a “civic-sounding” coalition to broaden the campaign from one of just saving union jobs to one of saving the entire county. The resulting group, now known as the “Emergency Coalition to keep L.A. Working” offered a lengthy list of revenue-raising proposals as alternatives to government downsizing, prompting Molina to tell Cedillo in a raucous board meeting packed with vocal union protesters that it offered little in the way of real solutions.

The SEIU’s extraordinary efforts reflect the importance of public sector jobs to the entire AFL-CIO as well as to the union itself, more than half of whose 1.1 million members are government workers.

In fact, some authorities argued that the public sector has almost single-handedly kept the labor movement from crumbling in recent years.

The percentage of employed American workers in unions has declined from a peak of 35.5% in 1945 to 15.5% currently, but if the highly unionized public sector work force is not counted, the percentage would fall even further, to 10.9%.

Union leaders say the main reason for the disparity is fundamental: Corporate America hires union busters and employs other techniques to frustrate organizing, while government agencies generally do not.

But with efforts to slash government gathering momentum politically, the public sector no longer figures to be a safe haven for unionists. Already, in states with first-term Republican governors such as New York and New Jersey, unions already are battling to hold onto their jobs.

“It’s a threat to the union movement,” said Laura Ginsburg, director of public policy for the public employees unit of the AFL-CIO.

“You had better believe that we are going to be out there fighting like hell.”

Yet California, so often a national trend-setter, is leading the way again on this battlefront, with the cutbacks planned in Los Angeles County as well as those imposed in financially crippled Orange County.

“The crisis is hitting earlier in California, but there will be many, many more to follow,” said Karen Tramontano, a Sweeney aide who oversees lobbying and other government-related issues for the SEIU. She predicted that the job and health-service cutbacks will be especially sharp if Republican-sponsored plans to curtail the Medicare and Medicaid programs are approved by the federal government.

In the private sector, the SEIU has made its name through its clamorous, in-your-face organizing drives. Some union activists believe that its strategy of recruiting workers on the bottom of the economic ladder, including many non-English speaking immigrants, foreshadows the future of the American labor movement.

The SEIU’s techniques, at the same time, are reminiscent of the labor confrontations of the 1930s. The Justice for Janitors campaign, for instance, has been marked by street protests and an infamous Century City march in 1990 in which demonstrators were beaten by police.

Los Angeles has been the scene of some of Justice for Janitors’ greatest successes, directed by the diverse SEIU Local 399. The percentage of janitors working in major Los Angeles commercial buildings that are unionized has risen from 10% in 1987, when Local 399 launched its campaign, to about 90%.

But with the growth has come increased tensions. In June, a 21-member dissident slate called the Multiracial Alliance won control of the union’s executive board. Then the new board immediately locked into a power struggle with the local’s holdover president and longtime leader, Jim Zellers, and his administration.

Although both factions include minority members, newly elected Latino officers and Zellers, who is white, immediately squared off, and the protesters launched a hunger strike. In a letter to the local’s members last week, explaining his decision to throw out all of the officers, Sweeney noted that the warring factions confronted each other with “blatantly racists signs or banners.”

In addition, Sweeney appointed Mike Garcia, president of an SEIU local based in San Jose, to serve as trustee of Local 399 for up to 18 months.

To some extent, labor observers say, the tensions at Local 399 are to be expected as a union evolves in a new direction.

“It’s almost inevitable,” said UCLA labor economist Daniel J. B. Mitchell. “If you change the people you represent, you’re going to have political repercussions.”

Mitchell and other labor experts said that in some respects, the Local 399 situation evokes memories of the cultural differences that led the Congress of Industrial Organizations--which recruited large numbers of low-skill immigrants from central and eastern Europe--to break away from the old American Federation of Labor in 1938. (The organization reunited in 1955, recreating the current AFL-CIO.)

On the other hand, some labor officials--Garcia among them--dismiss the idea of inevitable tensions between new immigrant unionists and longtime union members. They point to successes in Southern California in recent years in unionizing immigrant drywallers from the construction industry, along with Latino machinists at the big American Racing Inc. wheel plant in Compton.

Still, even Garcia admits that some of the friction in Local 399 reflects “a natural process.”

“Call them growing pains,” he said.