AFL-CIO Chief to Press L.A. Case in Japan

In an extraordinary action to draw international attention to a Los Angeles workplace dispute, the nation’s top labor leader disclosed Wednesday that he will go to Japan to press the cause of workers seeking to unionize downtown Los Angeles’ New Otani Hotel & Garden.

The planned trip by John J. Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, is believed to be the first time that any head of the American labor movement has traveled abroad to lobby directly for a local union’s campaign.

It also marks an important symbolic step by the AFL-CIO in its efforts to reinvigorate the nation’s labor movement. Sweeney’s top priority is to dramatically step up efforts to recruit new members, particularly immigrants and minority workers such as those at the New Otani.

The AFL-CIO chief said the four-year campaign to organize about 285 mostly Latino employees at the Japanese-owned hotel is typical of the “basic struggle” many workers face when employers fight fiercely to keep out a union.

UCLA labor expert Daniel J.B. Mitchell said the underlying message of Sweeney’s trip will resonate among employers and workers.

“It’s like the Pope going to Harlem. It has a symbolism beyond any particular dispute,” Mitchell said. “It speaks to Latinos and people at the bottom of the income-distribution [ladder], and it speaks to Los Angeles, which unions hope to organize.”

In a statement, New Otani management immediately dismissed Sweeney’s effort as “just another in a series of stunts aimed at . . . confusing the public, with distorted or outright untruthful information.”

Hotel spokesman Charles Ecker said the AFL-CIO is trying to inject life into what he characterized as a torpid organizing campaign and boycott. He said organized labor’s efforts have attracted little support among workers and is failing to dissuade patrons from visiting the popular downtown hotel or its restaurants.

“We are not going to give in,” Ecker vowed.

Sweeney led an estimated 2,000 union supporters through downtown Wednesday to demonstrate at the New Otani. He told the rally that “this is a fight between a valid international labor movement and a multinational law breaker.”

He and other top AFL-CIO leaders warmly endorsed the often-confrontational tactics of Maria Elena Durazo, the outspoken president of Local 11 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union, which is trying to organize the New Otani workers.

The AFL-CIO’s executive council, which wraps up its four-day winter meeting in Los Angeles today, passed a resolution endorsing the boycott and calling on management to stop its alleged surveillance of union supporters and other “anti-union tactics,” activities the company denies being involved in.

Durazo, the daughter of former migrant workers, is praised by supporters for energizing a once-dormant local and championing the plight of the mostly immigrant, low-paid and largely nonunion work force in the region’s huge tourism industry.

Local 11 has courted the aid of community groups and politicians, gaining the support of other unions, Latino and Asian-American groups, celebrities and civil rights leaders.

However, management has assailed Durazo as being more interested in public relations than helping workers--a characterization reiterated by New Otani executives Wednesday.

The two sides also reiterated their calls for workers to decide whether the union should represent the hotel staff. But they continued to differ on the election process that should be used.

Management has sought a traditional secret-ballot election. “We continue to believe that the workers have a right to decide for themselves,” said Ecker, who said a majority of workers oppose a union.

Durazo countered that a management-created “climate of intimidation” at the New Otani makes it impossible to hold a fair traditional election. She referred to the hotel’s dismissal of three union supporters two years ago, the subject of an unfair-labor-practices complaint against the New Otani that a federal administrative law judge is expected to rule on early this year.

Instead, the union is pushing management to agree to a “card check” election process, in which workers vote on unionization by signing membership authorization cards.

Under such a process, a union becomes entitled to represent workers if more than 50% of them sign the cards.

Nationwide, union activists are increasingly turning to the card-check approach as an alternative to secret-ballot elections. Union supporters are trying to sidestep the conventional secret-ballot process largely, they say, because it enables companies that want to keep unions out to contest such elections for years through legal maneuvers.

The dispute at the New Otani also assumes a cutting-edge role in the labor movement because it involves the use of aggressive and often novel organizing strategies--from informational pickets to street theater to civil disobedience and an ongoing boycott. In addition, it is taking on a major transnational corporation at a time of increasing economic globalization.

“What’s happening at the New Otani is a model for future organizing efforts everywhere,” said Richard Bensinger, the AFL-CIO’s director of organizing.

The AFL-CIO support comes as the Los Angeles Unified School School District prepares to vote Monday on whether to award an $83-million high school construction project to a partnership headed by Kajima International. The concern is part of Kajima Corp., the Japanese construction conglomerate that owns a controlling interest in the New Otani. Union officials have called on the school board to reject Kajima because of the New Otani dispute and the company’s controversial history, dating back to its alleged use of Chinese slave laborers in World War II-era mines.

Sweeney said he plans to travel to Japan the first week of April. While there, he will seek a meeting with the top executives of both Kajima and with representatives of the New Otani Hotel organization itself, which manages a chain of hotels including the Los Angeles facility.

Aides to Sweeney said he also will meet with officials of RENGO, Japan’s equivalent of the AFL-CIO.