ICE Raids at World Cup Games? A Los Angeles Union Says, No Way!

On Friday, the first World Cup match featuring the U.S. team will be held at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, one of those innumerable small cities nestled in the very heart of Los Angeles. Whether those in attendance will have access to food and drink, however, is much in doubt, as the 2,000 workers who prepare, sell, and serve said food and drink may go on strike, for reasons political, humane, and existential. Their union—Local 11 of UNITE HERE, which represents hundreds of thousands of hotel and restaurant workers across the country—has told the stadium’s food contractor, Legends Global, and World Cup sponsor FIFA that the workers won’t be on the job unless they guarantee that ICE agents will be kept away from the stadium.

Local 11 had other more conventional demands on wage increases and the like, and this afternoon reached an accord on them with Legends Global. The union stated, however, that it reserved the right to walk off the job if ICE agents appeared at the stadium. On social media, the local stated that “Workers have the contractual right to walk off the job if the union determines in good faith that federal immigration enforcement threatens worker safety during a World Cup match.”

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Soccer, of course, is the pre-eminent team sport in much of the world, and very much so in Latin America. In the U.S., its fan base disproportionately tilts toward immigrants, and in Los Angeles, most of those immigrants, and many thousands of the fans expected to fill the stadium on Friday, will be immigrants from Latin America. For that matter, so will many of those food servers.

Local 11 has an almost unmatched history—not just locally, but nationally, too—as an advocate and defender of immigrants. Since its corrupt leadership was ousted by a rank-and-file revolt in the late 1980s, it has led the charge for immigrant rights in the industries where its members work, as well as in Los Angeles, California, and the nation.

As Mexican poverty and the civil wars in Central America brought hundreds of thousands of immigrants to Los Angeles in the 1980s and ’90s, the city’s hotels rushed to hire them, on the theory that immigrants worked cheap. In response, Local 11 waged a highly innovative organizing campaign that not only enlisted its own zealous members in speaking with workers at non-union hotels, but also enlisted local clergy of every known denomination in the effort, backing a statewide ballot measure that raised the California minimum wage, and forming the first organization in the country advocating for a living wage for workers at companies that had contracts with city governments. At the time, most unions viewed private-sector organizing as a hopeless cause, so that Local 11’s successes were viewed as extraordinary to the point that even the national AFL-CIO’s stick-in-the-mud president Lane Kirkland was compelled to honor the union on a visit to L.A.

What also made Local 11 stand out was its very high percentage of immigrant members. Meetings of its rank and file (a number of which I attended as a reporter-editor of the L.A. Weekly) were conducted in Spanish with simultaneous translation into English. And in the course of the ’90s, it won contracts with the city’s leading hotels with groundbreaking provisions for its immigrant members: specifically, that if a member was deported, the hotel would guarantee that member’s re-employment if he or she returned within two years, and even with the seniority rights that member had earned if he or she was able to return within one year.

Throughout this period, the local was led by a firebrand president, Maria Elena Durazo. As she led the campaign to oust the local’s previous leaders (who insisted on conducting meetings and printing local literature in English only, as a way to keep the immigrant majority of the membership from mounting an opposition campaign), she met an organizer from the national union, Miguel Contreras. They married, and half a decade later, Contreras became the head of the Los Angeles AFL-CIO—a federation of more than 300 local unions with hundreds of thousands of members. It was, Contreras realized, a sleeping giant, and within a year of his ascent to leadership, he had many of those unions’ members and staffers doing what conventional wisdom had long said would never work in spread-out Los Angeles: walking precincts. Moreover, in 1994—two years before Contreras became head of the federation—a Republican-backed state ballot measure, Proposition 187, had passed, outlawing the provision of any public service, including the right to attend K-12 schools, to undocumented immigrants. Contreras decided that the unions’ canvass should target not just union members but L.A.’s immense and growing Latino communities as well.

It worked. While the core of Los Angeles had long been heavily Democratic, its peripheries had been electing Republicans to Congress, the legislature, and city offices straight through the late ’90s. By 2002, both the demographic changes and the labor offensive had turned those peripheries reliably blue at every level of government, in the process changing California from a purple state to a deep-blue one. Nor was this simply a matter of replacing white elected officials with Latino or Asian ones; in one notable L.A. City Council election, the Latino candidate backed by some old-guard Latino elected officials was defeated by his Jewish lesbian challenger (Jackie Goldberg—a veteran of UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement), whom the unions went all out to support. On the council, Goldberg was the author of the city’s Living Wage Ordinance.

One way Contreras was able to monitor the campaign activities of the Fed’s 320 local unions was to keep a scorecard of the number of shifts its members and staffers spent either precinct-walking or phone-banking. By the turn of the millennium, a pattern had emerged, in which Local 11 and the L.A. local of SEIU’s janitor union—the two most immigrant-heavy locals in all of Los Angeles—usually ranked one and two. Not coincidentally, both those locals’ organizing and contract campaigns were the city’s most visible, enlisting more community support than other unions’ campaigns, as well as the backing of the elected officials for whom their members had campaigned.

In 1999, the quadrennial convention of the national AFL-CIO was held in Los Angeles, partly in recognition of the fact that historically anti-union Los Angeles had become a center of union activity and rebirth. That convention voted to reject the Federation’s previous opposition to immigration, in large part because what growth the movement was then having was substantially among immigrant workers. In the early 2000s, the national organization designated Durazo as the leader of its immigrant rights and immigrant naturalization campaign. (In the years since, Durazo has served in the California legislature, and is currently a shoo-in to win one of the five seats on L.A. County’s Board of Supervisors.)

Los Angeles, of course, was the place where the Trump administration began its wholesale seizure and deportation campaign. It remains, in a sense, the epicenter of the great Third Wave of immigration to the U.S., the metropolis that immigrants from Latin America and Asia remade. In the wake of the huge Angeleno pushback against the ICE raids last year, it should come as no surprise that the possibility of an ICE presence and ICE arrests at the city’s World Cup games should become a source of local resistance. And it certainly should come as no surprise that it’s Local 11 that has the strategy and clout to lead it.