Labor of Love

Controversial . . , “ Miguel Contreras says, introducing Maria Elena Durazo with adjectives culled from press clips. “Confrontational . . . agitational. . . .”

Los Angeles’ top union leader, Contreras wears a gray suit and dignified, gentle demeanor. Durazo has a presence more like the raised-fist graphics on her yellow T-shirt.

When the two meet onstage at this UCLA “teach-in,” their body language--a slight, self-deprecating bow from Durazo, faint mutual smiles--is an intricate study in the dynamics of power.

Both, after all, are critical players at a critical moment in Los Angeles’ labor history. It’s the third week in February, and the national AFL-CIO has come to town to declare that this polyglot megalopolis will demonstrate that unions can defend “working families” in the new global economy. As Contreras says, “From tortillas to tourism, it’s here in L.A.”

And here in L.A., where largely minority janitors and hotel workers are the latest to organize what they see as a fight for dignity in an era of mega-mergers and disposable employees, Contreras and Durazo work against the same sort of resistance that has opposed labor activists since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

This day, there’s something else going on in the handshake that links Contreras, the secretary-treasurer of the powerful County Federation of Labor, and Durazo, who heads the high-profile hotel and restaurant employees’ union.

Perceiving an ever-so-slight linger in the leaders’ touch, one activist whispers to another: “They’re married, you know.” Before they can explore that bit of gossip, though, Durazo steps behind the mike.

“We’ve got to loosen up a bit!” she yelps.

When she finishes her swaying, sloganeering, bilingual spiel with the debatable promise “We’re going to make L.A. a union town,” the 200 or so people in the audience give her one of those rhythmic, all-fired-up, clap-clap-clap ovations.

Then, when the applause finally fades to silence, an old bald guy with a white beard stands up like the ghost of Joe Hill and startles the room with a bellow: “Organize! Turn it around! Make L.A. a union town!” And darned if the crowd doesn’t pick up the chant and get the place rockin’ all over again.

Onstage, Contreras watches Durazo with a smile that is personal and political--that suggests both affection and respect. It’s a respect he learned the hard way.

*

Contreras and Durazo were born one year and 75 miles apart, in the sort of dusty San Joaquin Valley towns that feed America.

A middle child among six sons, Contreras grew up in a shack on a grower’s 400-acre grape and tree fruit ranch near Dinuba.

Durazo’s father, like Contreras’, came to the U.S. in the 1940s, when growers and other employers pushed through the bracero program to help assure a steady labor force. But unlike the Contrerases, the Durazo family never stayed put.

“Depending on where the crop was and where my mom was pregnant, that’s where we were born,” says Durazo, who entered the world in 1953 in Madera, the seventh child, with four more to follow.

Contreras and Durazo tell their stories on a Sunday morning, in their pleasant home on a tree-shaded Los Angeles street that has already sprouted several pink and green nylon Easter Bunny flags on front porches.

Like much in their lives, the interview is the result of negotiation. Contreras had wanted to put it off. Durazo preferred doing it promptly. After the teach-in, she approached her husband. He blanched. Then he smiled. “OK,” he said, “but I get to skip church.”

So here they sit, a platter of pan dulce set on a child’s plastic table before them, in a room with white carpet, well-stocked bookcases and walls displaying the obligatory Angeleno earthquake cracks.

From time to time as the couple talk, 6-year-old Michael roars in like a missile, lodging himself headfirst in the white couch on which his parents sit side by side, telling their parallel tales.

At 5, Durazo began hauling pails of water to the workers. Soon she joined them, picking grapes, nectarines, peaches, plums, olives, tomatoes and string beans.

“Here’s my crew,” Durazo’s father would tell growers as his family jumped from the old flatbed truck that carried them up and down the California-Oregon agricultural corridors.

“My dad took a lot of pride in his work,” Durazo says. “He loved working in the fields. He really believed in nature and the land and the harvest.”

Durazo’s mother, who often worked in canneries, took a more business-minded approach: “You’ve got to argue! You’ve got to get more,” she’d tell her husband. “She was feisty,” Durazo says.

Durazo paints her childhood more as a lark than a hardship. She smiles fondly in recalling the wailing guitars and accordions of the open-air community dances her parents still love; she giggles at an old photograph of herself and her sisters dressed up to entertain the family as the Supremes or Shirelles.

But her memory also turns up less pleasant, though equally vivid, images. One is of a small white box being lowered into the earth.

The family was living in a tent on a grower’s property, Durazo says. Her little brother got sick. There was no doctor. No health care.

Such images came back to her, she says, when her older brother became the first in the family to attend college and promptly began dragging his sister off to Chicano rights and United Farm Workers union marches. And when she won scholarships to St. Mary’s College in Moraga, and her parents were embarrassed that they could only send tacos and burritos instead of tuition, other indignities of farm labor came back to keep her activist instincts burning.

“Why should they feel bad?” Durazo wondered. “They worked hard all their lives.”

*

Contreras, too, harbors images that now look like guideposts to his chosen career.

He recalls, for instance, the early morning in 1973 when he and his father and brothers stepped onto the porch of the home they’d built from scrap lumber when their original home was condemned. The glare of pickups’ headlights illuminated the scene, he says.

Three years earlier, grape boycotts and labor strikes had finally given Cesar Chavez the clout he needed to launch the UFW, and the Contreras boys and their father had been marching with the legendary union leader ever since.

But now the contract had expired and the growers were digging in. The bosses’ men arrived before sunrise.

“The supervisor told my dad he was the best worker he ever had,” Contreras remembers. “But, he added, ‘We cannot have any more Chavistas working for us. We’re going to have to let you go.’ After 24 years, there was nothing. No severance. No vacation pay.”

No one in Contreras’ family had ever been arrested, he says. But that summer, he alone was locked up 18 times for violating injunctions against picketing. “My mother was going crazy wondering which of her sons or husband she should visit in jail.

“That strike solidified for me what I want to do with life,” Contreras says.

While Contreras was rising steadily through the ranks of the UFW, and then the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, Durazo edged between laboring and labor organizing.

She married at 22 and had a son, Mario, a year later. When the marriage failed, she moved to Los Angeles, surviving on a series of odd jobs and then an organizing position with the garment workers’ union, which had targeted the city’s sweatshops.

After several years, Durazo took a job at a labor law firm, while earning a juris doctorate from the People’s College of Law. At the firm, she met officers of Local 11 and accepted the organizing job that led to her current position.

Durazo’s immersion into activism and Contreras’ steady ascent through the union ranks took place at a time when organized labor was in decline. Between 1965 and 1995, membership would sputter from 28% to 15% of the work force.

Both Durazo and Contreras found themselves battling forces external and internal. With ‘80s merger mania, reformulated companies were often quick to give unions the boot. Businesses in general showed increasing hostility to labor, and Congress seemed indifferent at best, Contreras and Durazo say.

Both also acknowledge, however, that the labor movement brought many of its problems on itself.

The Los Angeles local of the hotel and restaurant employees’ union, otherwise known as HERE, was in particularly bad shape, losing members at the rate of 1,000 a year and reeling from strife between the union’s white, English-speaking leadership and its increasingly Latino and Spanish-speaking rank and file.

In 1987, Durazo led one of two slates of candidates trying to wrest control of Local 11 from what she saw as an out-of-touch leadership. When local officials charged ballot fraud, the international put the local in trusteeship and sent Contreras in to help straighten things out. Durazo and her supporters promptly took to the sidewalks with a raucous protest of what they saw as an old boy power grab.

Contreras recalls watching the “insurgents” through his office window.

Mario, who has been listening from the hallway, chimes in: “Mom used to come home and tell me, ‘Some guy at work is messing up everything.’ ”

Eventually, Durazo says, she and her local supporters accepted that the international had the workers’ interests in mind.

“We institutionalized the revolution,” Contreras says.

“But on our terms,” Durazo says. “On our terms.”

“After that, we started to work together on the same team,” Contreras says. Casting a sidelong glance at his wife, he adds: “From then on, I couldn’t keep her off of me.”

“This,” Durazo says, “is where the story differs.”

*

What’s indisputable is that the two married in December 1988, that Durazo was elected HERE’s president and has kept the position ever since, and that Contreras continued to rise in the labor ranks, ultimately winning election as the head of the AFL-CIO’s local federation, which represents 325 unions and 700,000 members in Los Angeles County.

From the start, Durazo maintained the higher public profile, earning the label of “publicity monger” from some of her critics.

The move that stirred the most rage against her, though, was her distribution in 1992 of a video titled “City on the Edge,” which portrayed Los Angeles as a place where poverty breeds criminality. Riot-flogged city leaders and labor supporters alike blasted Durazo for a recklessness that verged on civic treason for kicking her city when it was down.

Durazo responds that she began circulating the video long before the riot and only after the city’s hotel industry repeatedly refused to negotiate with her union on such matters as health benefits. She says her tough approach worked.

Says Contreras: “Local 11 sent a clear message: ‘If you want to declare war on its members, you’d better be ready for a war, no holds barred.’ ”

Such tactics and attitudes have assured that Contreras and Durazo would accumulate passionate supporters and detractors over the years.

Steven Dornbusch, for instance, is not the only early Durazo backer who now shreds both, saying they put their careers ahead of the workers they serve.

But Michael A. Straeter, who ran against Contreras for the federation seat, says that by and large the rank and file respect the couple’s vision of the labor movement’s future.

“They understand,” says Supervisor Gloria Molina, “the role labor unions should be playing. They are a very very powerful couple.”

*

It’s late February, but an unseasonal Santa Ana has blown in a premature spring day.

“Who’s got the power?” someone shouts, and the crowd of perhaps 2,000 responds: “We’ve got the power!”

“What kind of power?”

“Union power!”

The demonstration started at Pershing Square, across the street from the hotel where the AFL-CIO was making history by holding its first executive committee meeting ever outside resort enclaves in South Florida. The picket signs, made of corrugated plastic now, tell a uniquely L.A. tale: Steel workers . . . AFTRA . . . Casino Workers . . . Office and Professional Employees . . . Aerospace Engineers . . . Motion Picture Studio Local 8 Grips. . . .

But it was the diverse mix of men--and, more significantly, perhaps, women--marching through the downtown streets that really made union leaders take note.

AFL-CIO leader John Sweeney says Los Angeles reminds him of immigrant-rich New York City during the post-Depression heyday of union activism: “. . . For the next 100 years,” he declares, “the chief exporter of the solidarity and brotherly and sisterly love that puts the ‘movement’ in the labor movement will come from Los Angeles, Calif.”

Business leaders, of course, cringe at the prospect of a more militant union movement. They warn that overreaching rabble-rousers will hurt the economy that feeds them as excessive wages and regulations drive employers to other states or countries.

But from an impromptu stage in Little Tokyo, the union leaders counter with their new and refined pitch: about the injustice of CEOs getting rich while worker salaries shrink, about the impact of corporate “irresponsibility” on families and communities. International unionization, they thunder, is the only counterbalance to globe-trotting corporations’ growing might.

Amid the all the speechifying and singing of solidarity songs, it’s unlikely that many observers notice as a more personal, less political scene unfolds.

“I came to this country for a better life,” an immigrant worker tells the crowd. He says the union is fighting to make it possible for him to support his wife and two children on hotel wages.

As he speaks, on the stage behind him, 6-year-old Michael Contreras, decked out in a flannel shirt and jeans, gets a hug from his mom, who passes him to his father for a quick hair-ruffling as she guides another speaker to the stage. When Contreras goes back to schmoozing local politicians, Michael crawls around in front of the podium, where stepbrother Mario edges in to make sure he doesn’t fall.

No one says it, but the message that scene conveys is exactly the one the union movement is selling, the one Durazo and Contreras call the story of their lives: that sometimes, raising a family goes hand in hand with raising hell.

* Times staff writers Stuart Silverstein and Patrick McDonnell contributed to this story.

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YEAR U.S. UNION MEMBERS % OF WORK FORCE 1945 14,322,000 35.5% 1970 19,381,000 27.3% 1995 16,360,000 14.9%

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(Source: 1997 World Almanac)

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Miguel Contreras and Maria Elena Durazo

Background: Both born to farm worker families in the San Joaquin Valley. Married in 1988. They have a son, Michael, 6; Durazo has another son, Mario, 20.

Claim to fame: He’s secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor; she’s president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, Local 11.

Passions: Durazo and her sisters are devoted oldies fans. “To this day, when we get together, inevitably we get up and perform [as the Supremes]. We just have to do it.” She also loves gardening. Contreras enjoys deep-sea fishing and is an avid zoo-goer.

Durazo on always missing the first month of school as a child because her family was still harvesting crops: “I was always too embarrassed to say we were out working. . . . Some of the children were connected to the growers, and Mexicans working in the fields weren’t held in the highest esteem.”

On the farm worker life: “It wasn’t all grim and gloomy. We had a great family. Very close. Very protective.”

On how her father motivated his children to pick: “He negotiated a flat rate with the growers, then he would give everybody quotas depending on their age, and we could keep anything beyond that. We had a little capitalist incentive.”

Contreras on hearing, as a boy, that Cesar Chavez’s grape boycott had forced the ranch on which his family worked to recognize the United Farm Workers: “The owner drove up in a powder blue Cadillac and called us into the shed. . . . He said he just got back from Delano and that he couldn’t move our grapes because they didn’t have the ‘damn black UFW bird’ on the box. . . . Everyone started chanting, ‘Viva Chavez!’ He was so upset, he got into his car and drove off leaving a big dust trail.”

On following Chavez’s suggestion that the farm workers deliver fruit to striking longshoremen in San Francisco, despite that union’s hostility to the UFW: “I remember the look on the longshoremen’s faces when we arrived in a caravan of beat-up pickup trucks from the valley, with boxes and boxes of fruit.”

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