Going to Work on L.A. : In Its Many Low-Paid Laborers, Unions See Big Potential for Organizing

By STUART SILVERSTEIN

Feb. 22, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

BAL HARBOUR, Fla. —

The bastions of union strength have long been such big Northern cities as New York, Detroit and Chicago, but America’s labor activists are now focusing on a new metropolis: Los Angeles.

Both among ground-level labor organizers and at the top ranks of the new regime running the AFL-CIO, Los Angeles is seen as possessing explosive potential for union growth. Among the big targets for organizing are the garment-making and food-processing industries.

The densely populated Los Angeles area represents “the biggest concentration of nonunion workers, and it’s organizable,” said Susan Cowell, the New York-based vice president and staff director for Unite, the big garment workers union.”Los Angeles is the top priority for the labor movement.”

Los Angeles’ heightened profile stems largely from the growing sense that its heavily immigrant work force, once thought to be reluctant to join unions, is receptive to organized labor’s call.

The outlook changed in recent years with major organizing successes among immigrant Latinos working as janitors, drywallers and production workers.

“It’s the same as New York, New England and Philadelphia were in the early 1900s,” said Arthur A. Coia, president of the Laborers’ International Union and chairman of the AFL-CIO’s organizing committee.

Although Los Angeles has a substantial number of union workers, organized labor has made deeper inroads in other big cities. For instance, a study by two Florida State University professors found that 16.5% of the work force in the Los Angeles-Anaheim-Riverside area belonged to unions in 1994, compared with 27.3% in the New York area and 24.1% in the Detroit area.

What’s more, union activists are tantalized by the city’s massive number of low-paid workers, particularly in manufacturing.

As a symbolic gesture, the AFL-CIO is switching its traditional winter executive council meeting from this South

Florida resort area to downtown Los Angeles next year. The intent, labor federation officials said, is to get closer to where labor’s key struggles are being played out.

The increased focus on organizing in Los Angeles, as well as in the South and other parts of the country considered ripe for union recruiting, comes as labor’s numbers are sagging.

Recent government figures show that the number of workers belonging to unions fell by 388,000 to 16.4 million last year. That amounts to 14.9% of the work force, down from a high of about 35% in the 1950s.

Union organizers are tight-lipped about their plans in Los Angeles, both to avoid tipping off management and because specifics are still sketchy in many cases. One key element of the strategy to be taken by various unions, however, has already emerged.

Called community-based organizing, it involves providing services and working with neighborhood groups to familiarize working people with unions. Eventually, the theory goes, these workers will want to join unions. The technique contrasts with the traditional company-by-company organizing approach--a strategy that in Los Angeles, where so many people work in small plants and shops--would be prohibitively costly and time-consuming.

Unite, for instance, runs a “justice center” at its office in the MacArthur Park area that provides language and citizenship classes, along with training and advice for workers who want to resolve pay issues and other disputes at their workplaces. “We’ve created a lot of goodwill in the community,” said Steve Nutter, the Los Angeles-based director for Unite’s western region.

Another project expected to expand organizing in Los Angeles is the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project, envisioned as a coordinated, multiunion campaign to recruit predominantly minority workers along the Alameda corridor.

The intended targets are food-processing and other manufacturing and distribution businesses that can’t easily move their operations to other states or countries to avoid unionization.

At the same time, the innovative LAMAP venture has hit various roadblocks, illustrating the difficulties that labor activists will face in Los Angeles and other areas destined for more organizing. LAMAP, once expected to include as many as nine unions, now has no more than four full-fledged backers.

“In some format, it will go forward, but it won’t be as it was originally conceived. The scope will be far less,” said Bob Muehlenkamp, director of organizing for the Teamsters, one of the main unions backing the project.

Meanwhile, top national AFL-CIO leaders are paying special attention to Los Angeles and other parts of California, making frequent visits to the area. Moreover, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney has long been attentive to Los Angeles issues.

Until he won his insurgent campaign to take the helm of the AFL-CIO in October, he was president of the Service Employees International Union, one of whose most notable successes was organizing immigrant janitors in downtown Los Angeles.

When Los Angeles County’s budget crisis recently flared, Sweeney personally lobbied President Clinton for a federal aid package that saved the jobs of Los Angeles County health-care workers.

Los Angeles’ role in the labor movement is also bolstered by what apparently is an unprecedented number of Southern Californians sitting on the AFL-CIO’s executive council, its key decision-making body.

Two were added last year to the 54-member body: Sumi Haru, the first national vice president of the Screen Actors Guild, and Douglas McCarron, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.

There were two other Angelenos already on the council: Alfred K. Whitehead, president of the International Assn. of Fire Fighters, and Jake West, president of the International Assn. of Bridge, Structural & Ornamental Iron Workers.

Another addition to the council last year, United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez, is a Californian with long ties to the Southland. In addition, Arlene Holt, vice chairman of the California Democratic Party, left Los Angeles to join the new AFL-CIO administration as the top aide to Linda Chavez-Thompson, the AFL-CIO’s executive vice president, the No. 3 position in the labor federation.

Times researcher Jennifer Oldham contributed to this report.

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Organizing the Southland

Labor union organizers have labeled the Southland (Los Angeles-Anaheim-Riverside) a top priority in their push to expand the country’s stagnating unions. A sampling of large metropolitan areas and the percentage of their total work force holding union membership in 1994:

New York-north New Jersey-Long Island: 27.3%

Detroit-Ann Arbor: 24.1%

Seattle-Tacoma: 22.1%

San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose: 20.4%

Los Angeles-Anaheim-Riverside: 16.5%

Boston-Lawrence-Salem: 15.1%

Miami-Ft. Lauderdale: 9.6%

Atlanta: 9.0%

Dallas-Ft. Worth: 8.0%

UNION MEMBERSHIP

National union members as a percentage of total work force:

1995: 14.9%