She’s Working Overtime for L.A.’s Living Wage Battle

Madeline Janis-Aparicio, the mother of Los Angeles’ “living wage” movement, felt exhausted and angry.

She felt exhausted from spending five years creating and monitoring the city ordinance that requires L.A.’s municipal contractors to pay their workers far above the minimum wage.

She felt angry because a longtime adversary was involved in an initiative campaign to block the Santa Monica City Council from adopting its own living wage ordinance. To her dismay, the campaign was calling itself “Santa Monicans for a Living Wage.”

This squabble, plus the years of confronting employers and their lawyers, plus the responsibility of raising three children, finally forced Janis-Aparicio to stay home for several weeks. Before retreating, she quickly raised tens of thousands of dollars from sympathetic foundations to try to prevent the initiative from qualifying for the November ballot. It was not enough: Voters in Santa Monica will now make the final decision.

That’s not front-page drama, particularly in this era of renewed labor fervor in Los Angeles. Yet after a lifetime of work behind the scenes, Janis-Aparicio has emerged as labor’s alter ego. Her ability to organize priests, community groups and workers has won wide admiration.

Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who introduced the living-wage ordinance, says: “She was the author of the movement that got it to happen.”

The ordinance covers only a few thousand workers--airport baggage handlers, library janitors, parking-lot attendants--less than 1% of the city’s work force. But to Janis-Aparicio it is a first step toward bridging the gap between the city’s poor and affluent.

“That’s how you create change, not thinking that you’re going to have to change the wages of a million people at once but that you can have incremental goals . . . that build on each other.”

Janis-Aparicio, 40, started filing suits on behalf of renters in downtown L.A. slums as soon as she got her law degree from UCLA in the mid-’80s. She went on to run a prominent Central American refugee center and then created the network behind the 1996 living wage law.

She earns $55,000 a year running Los Angeles Allied for a New Economy, a nonprofit group that was created by organized labor to rally community support for organizing drives. She and a staff of two dozen devote themselves to making sure municipal contractors live up to the living-wage law, which mandates pay of $7.51 an hour with benefits or $8.76 without.

LAANE, as it is known, also tries to spread the living-wage gospel to other cities. Janis-Aparicio has traveled to a dozen places from San Francisco to Connecticut to train living-wage activists. When the Santa Monica City Council voted to consider requiring coastal hotels to pay workers at least $10.69 an hour plus benefits--triggering the rival initiative on November’s ballot--it was a direct response to the spadework Janis-Aparicio had done in L.A.

Nationally, more than 40 living-wage ordinances have been enacted, and scores more have been proposed, some with teeth, some more symbolic. Los Angeles was not the national founder of the movement--it was the third, after Baltimore and New York. But the L.A. law is considered the broadest, combining higher wages, health benefits and removing some obstacles to union organizing.

As a result, Janis-Aparicio is accorded great affection in the ranks of organized labor and social groups angered that minimum-wage jobs, paying only $5.75 an hour, leave workers below the poverty line.

“Some leaders need to be the center of attention,” said Donald Cohen, president of San Diego’s Center of Policy Initiatives, which recently succeeded in passing a living-wage law. “Others develop other leaders.”

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Janis-Aparicio, an Anglo who was raised in middle-class Granada Hills, remembers taking several extended trips to Mexico with her artist mother. “There was huge poverty and desperation. I was just a teenager . . . but I was really upset about the inequalities.”

A good high school student and debater, she attended Amherst College in Massachusetts in the late 1970s and joined protests against U.S. support of right-wing governments in Central America.

When she moved back to Los Angeles in 1982 she launched herself into a movement offering sanctuary for Salvadoran political refugees who had illegally immigrated. In a mixture of romance and politics, she fell in love with and married Edgar Aparicio, a refugee who believed his wife and young daughter had been murdered by the Salvadoran government.

“Her personal commitment to the work seemed to come from her relationship to her husband. It gave her an appreciation for what our clients were going through . . . the homeless, poor immigrants,” remembers Nancy Mintie, founding director of the Inner City Law Center, where Janis-Aparicio represented tenants.

In the late ‘80s, eager to gain a stronger understanding of business and government, she joined the prestigious downtown firm of Latham & Watkins. But she left in less than a year to direct the Central American Refugee Center, which became Los Angeles’ most prominent refugee network. Under Janis-Aparicio, it helped thousands become citizens and started a campaign to create zones for legal street vending.

And then, in 1993, she regretfully resigned. Among the reasons: Some in the organization wanted a Central American to lead it.

She put on a happy face. She said she was glad the Central American community had matured to produce its own leaders. Privately, she could not reconcile abandoning a cause so personal: Her husband and father of their twins was Salvadoran. Her home’s first language was Spanish. Inside, she was Salvadoran.

She went back to Latham & Watkins, aiming to quickly save enough money to move her family to El Salvador--plans that changed when she became pregnant with her third child.

Around the same time, the roots of the living-wage movement took shape.

Two of L.A.’s most influential labor leaders, Miguel Contreras and Maria Elena Durazo, approached Janis-Aparicio with the idea of running a nonprofit group that could rally community support for labor’s causes. LAANE was formed.

The first payoff came two years later, in 1995. Contreras, then political director of the county Federation of Labor, and Durazo, president of the largest hotel-and-restaurant-workers local, were trying to rally support for hundreds of workers at Los Angeles International Airport, who were threatened with layoffs when a new company took over a service contract.

Under Janis-Aparicio, LAANE mobilized labor groups and a variety of social activists and convinced the City Council to pass the Service Worker Retention Ordinance, which prevented new city contractors from laying off workers for 90 days.

By then, Baltimore had passed its living-wage ordinance and New York was considering one. Labor leaders saw LAANE as the perfect tool to do the same here. “There was this hidden injustice, the underbelly of the deep metropolis,” Janis-Aparicio says.

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Today, LAANE has a budget of $1.5 million, raised primarily from liberal donors and the staff. Employees covered by the ordinance are routinely trained by Janis-Aparicio’s staffers to familiarize them with their bosses’ obligations, and LAANE staffers introduce themselves to new city contractors.

There’s a philosophical divide that cannot be bridged between those who favor the living wage movement and those who oppose it. Proponents believe companies will not pay higher wages unless forced by local law. Opponents--most notably Mayor Richard Riordan, whose veto of the ordinance was overridden by the City Council--are convinced that mandating a higher minimum wage will lead employers to scale back the number of entry-level jobs. Economists have authored dueling studies on this question for decades.

So contentious is the living-wage law that there are great differences of opinion on how many city-contracted workers are covered by it. Janis-Aparicio estimates 10,000. A UCLA study put the number between 3,000 and 7,000.

Small but important battles have been fought over the question of who the ordinance covers. In one case, Staples Center contended it was not subject to the living wage law because its city contract was with the Community Redevelopment Agency, which gets its authority from state law. Janis-Aparicio and her staff reacted by convincing the council to pass a separate amendment forcing Staples to comply.

A few weeks ago, Staples Center canceled living-wage training that LAANE staffers were supposed to perform for workers. The decision was made after a national magazine published a photograph of Janis-Aparicio participating in a labor-backed protest at Staples. A Staples spokesman said the picture proved Janis-Aparicio had broken a pledge that the living-wage campaign would not venture into union advocacy.

In the Staples battle and the ongoing campaign in Santa Monica, Janis-Aparicio’s foe has been the law firm Latham & Watkins. Lawyer George Mihlsten and the firm had represented numerous companies that sought exemption from the living-wage law.

Latham & Watkins had advised the pricey beachfront hotels in Santa Monica that sponsored this November’s initiative. Their campaign took shape after the Santa Monica City Council voted to study an ordinance that would require higher wages for more than 3,000 nonunion hotel workers. The initiative would raise wages for a smaller number of city-contracted workers but would explicitly forbid the city from enacting a broader living-wage law to cover all businesses in a designated area.

Santa Monica council members have accused the luxury hotels behind the initiative of intentionally misleading voters by using the “living wage” slogan in their campaign.

Janis-Aparicio was already feeling stressed--too little sleep and a loss of appetite--when she heard about the formation of the Santa Monica initiative campaign. She said she angrily spoke with Mihlsten on the phone. “I basically told him he was lower than dirt,” she said.

Mihlsten, speaking generally of his professional adversarial relationship with Janis-Aparicio, responds more tactfully: “The fact that I represent a client with a different viewpoint doesn’t mean I don’t have the utmost respect and admiration for her.”

Even employers who are weary of fighting Janis-Aparicio are loathe to speak ill of her or her cause, aware that the living-wage movement has gathered significant momentum in a prosperous economy.

Employers have found in some cases that there are political benefits to siding with Janis-Aparicio. Take Nederlander-Greek Inc., which operates the Greek Theatre. Because Nederlander agreed to pay workers the living wage two years before it was required, Janis-Aparicio has sided with the company in its bid to obtain an extension operating the city-owned theater. “We think she’s a vehicle for positive change,” said David Green, Nederlander senior vice president.

Janis-Aparicio says the most important element of the campaign to pass the living-wage law was mobilizing workers to testify at council hearings. Many were afraid, fearing retaliation. But she managed to bring some to the Bob Big Boy’s near City Hall, where they would practice what they wanted to say to council members. Inevitably, some froze when their moment came, but Janis-Aparicio saw a greater lesson.

“You see workers who are not used to their employer looking them in the eye . . . suddenly they’re being paid attention by a council member--it’s such an empowering thing.

“A lot of us think small: ‘Keep what I have,’ not have anyone take it away.’ It takes someone saying, ‘Hey, we can have a just society,’ ” she says. “I think I was fortunate in history to be at that moment when there was this potential.”