L.A. Unions Step Up Demands on Developers

In Los Angeles, where big projects don’t get built without organized labor’s support, the price of that support has just gone up.

“We’re going to the new developers . . . and saying, ‘If you’re going to go to the public table and ask for subsidies . . . then you have to guarantee a ‘living wage’ and guarantee that workers have the right to organize,” said Miguel Contreras, executive secretary of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

The demands are a bold attempt to capitalize on labor’s recently demonstrated ability to turn out large numbers of voters in state and local elections.

They go far beyond the labor movement’s traditional demand that developers seeking labor’s support simply provide short-term, unionized construction jobs while a project is being built.

“Those days are over with,” Contreras told a recent political seminar at the Pat Brown Institute of Cal State L.A. “We learned our lesson in downtown Los Angeles.”

Contreras was referring to the political backing that unions gave the downtown building boom of the 1970s and 1980s.

That boom was financed with heavy city subsidies, which labor supported in return for construction jobs. But unions, Contreras said, have struggled ever since to organize the janitors, cafeteria workers and hotel staffers who wound up working in the new downtown skyscrapers.

The new demands, which Contreras promised will be made on major projects like the contemplated $12-billion expansion of Los Angeles International Airport, are in addition to unionized construction jobs. As such, they are part of labor’s renewed national emphasis on union organizing aimed at reversing unions’ long decline.

The new emphasis on organizing resonates especially well in California, because it dovetails with two significant trends: First came the decision by key union

leaders two years ago that they would participate in elections not only by writing checks and making endorsements, but also by providing bodies to get out the vote. Those same officials also began to extend their focus beyond union members and their families to a fast-growing pool of potentially union-friendly, new-citizen voters, many of whom are Latino working poor who stand to benefit from a living wage.

The changes in emphasis came about as labor felt its existence threatened in California by Republican initiatives to restrict overtime and to curb union leaders’ ability to direct members’ dues for political ends. Many new-citizen voters simultaneously felt threatened by what they perceived as a series of anti-immigrant initiatives emanating from outgoing Gov. Pete Wilson.

Unions took advantage of the synergy. “Pete Wilson was actually our best organizer,” Contreras said. “Wilson’s state of hate politics enabled us to branch out and reach out to Latinos, to African Americans and to labor families” in helping shape a Democratic resurgence in the Legislature and the election of the state’s first Democratic governor in 16 years.

Eager to capitalize on those successes, Contreras told the Cal State gathering: “If you want to come ask for our support, whether it be [for something] from [Gov.-elect] Gray Davis all the way down to City Council members here [in Los Angeles], you have to address . . . issues [like living wage].”

Contreras, whose own background includes stints organizing for the United Farm Workers union and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, is acting in concert with a national program advocated by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. It is intended to, as Contreras put it, “change our culture of unionism--to break away from the traditional business unionism [of representing members already in the fold] into that of a culture of organizing.”

Contreras said he hopes to increase the number of union organizers in Los Angeles from 500 to 5,000 in the next few years and, by the end of next year, to be in the position to mobilize 7,000 of the county federation’s 700,000 members for demonstrations every other month as part of a national program called “Street Heat.”

“We’re telling the business community and we’re telling the political community that it’s not business as usual as far as we’re concerned,” he said.

The influential construction trades unions, which are among the 240 unions affiliated with the county federation, have endorsed the new strategy, he said. “They see it as a win-win for everybody in making a better Los Angeles.”

The strategy has been successful so far with developers of Staples Arena under construction downtown and with developers of a huge theater, retail and hotel complex planned for Hollywood. Both developers, whose projects get public subsidies, have promised a living wage and neutrality as unions attempt to organize their workers.

David Malmuth, the senior vice president of the Hollywood developer, TrizecHahn Development Corp., said this week that his company agreed to the conditions in part to secure the backing of City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, in whose district the project is located. Goldberg, he said, has close ties to a hotel workers’ union local led by Contreras’ wife, Maria Elena Durazo, and is the council sponsor of the city’s living wage ordinance. Like other council members, she has final say over most zoning matters in her district.

Contreras cited city-owned LAX as the place “where the fight is now” between airlines that would like the facility to expand and unions that would like to wrest concessions from the airlines in return for political support.

The labor leader is well-positioned to participate in the fight. He was recently named to the city’s Airport Commission by Mayor Richard Riordan, an appointment that increased labor’s clout in Los Angeles’ political arena.

In the controversy at LAX, airlines have been resisting efforts by unions and the City Council to raise the hourly pay of about 3,000 service workers from the state minimum wage of $5.75 an hour to the city-approved living wage of about $7.65 an hour.

At the same time, the airlines have been trying to persuade city officials to overrule adamant neighborhood opposition and approve a dramatic expansion of the overcrowded facility.

Contreras said city officials who believe that the expansion is necessary to sustain the region’s economic growth, have approached the unions for political help in overcoming neighborhood opposition.

“This time,” Contreras said, “we’re saying, ‘We learned our lesson in downtown Los Angeles. We’re not about to give you our support for a few construction jobs. We [also] want to know the other side of the equation. What are you going to do about the service workers’ jobs?’ ”