Labor Marches Into L.A.’s Leadership Void

The most striking thing about the federal threat to take over the LAPD last week was the extent to which almost no one was surprised by it. Some cities would blow a gasket if the feds came in and threatened to take over their police force. In Los Angeles--aside from one frustrated police chief and one flummoxed mayor--the relief was almost palpable.

And why not? The feds already call shots at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Ditto for the county jails. Oh, anxious lip service was paid and brows were furrowed, but the anguish was so perfunctory that the truth was apparent: L.A. is only too glad to let someone else be the boss--again.

Why? Because in the past few decades, bossing L.A. has gotten simply exhausting. It’s huge, it’s contrary, half of it doesn’t speak English and the other half hasn’t been downtown since the white people stampeded out of Watts. Its divisions are so contagious that even its Million Mom Marchers degenerated into ethno-class bickering. Because its nonpartisan government was designed by people whose aversion to political interest was positively phobic, L.A. can’t even come together under the tattered tents of two-party politics.

So who can blame the place for wanting to just let the whole enchilada slouch toward receivership? Well, funny you should ask. Because last week, though it got little notice, the one entity with a vision for the new Los Angeles--and an interest in giving it some semblance of a normative political institution--quietly ratcheted up its growing influence.

In the midst of municipal meltdown, the representatives of organized labor called a June 10 Town Hall meeting, at which upward of 5,000 Angelenos are expected to show. The topic: not police or politics but the plight of undocumented workers. The audience: everybody from emergency room doctors to janitors. The message: Rampart isn’t the only thing that matters in this city, nor the only cause that cries out for someone to lead. There are also things, like the income gap (as the janitors union showed last month) and school finance (as the teachers union is showing this month). And--the candidate for next month’s issue--immigrant amnesty.

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It’s not news that organized labor has grown exponentially in these fat times, nationally and in Southern California, nor that its steepest rise has been in Greater Los Angeles. More people joined unions last year in Los Angeles County--91,000--

than in any metropolis since Walter Reuther organized the auto workers in 1930s Detroit.

The explosion has been noted chiefly for its economic implications. But in the drift of Greater L.A., labor’s growth has social implications as well. Whether you like those implications probably depends on how you like unions, but one thing is indisputable: They’re filling the leadership void like nobody else.

“It seems to me that L.A. is really at the heart of answering the--well, call it the $35,000-a-year question of whether people from different ethnicities and cultures and backgrounds can live in peace and harmony.” The speaker here is not an elected leader, but the political director of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, Fabian Nunez, speaking by cell phone on his evening commute to a suburb far to the east.

“I think the boom in labor has been so large here because we cut across the ethnic differences to the root of the city’s problems. Where you work, and how much you make, and whether you’re treated with dignity in the workplace--these are issues that all working families share. Our members are men and women, African American, Latino, Asian, white people of all nationalities. They’re doctors at the county hospital. Hotel workers who wash dishes at chic restaurants. Janitors--and the teachers who teach the janitors’ kids.”

In other cities, this would be discounted as self-serving happy talk about a nonexistent rainbow coalition. But Nunez’s claims have merit in a way that no other L.A. institution can match. Only labor has offered the sort of big tent here that cities rely on to educate voters and force people together--even when they have nothing in common and live far apart and don’t like the color of each other’s skin.

In another place, that purpose might have been served by political parties, but this place has historically preferred government-by-developer. And now that a new metropolis cries out for something to coalesce around besides ethnic identity and random charisma--well, what’s striking is that the feds and shop stewards are the only ones answering that call.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.