You may not have heard of Antonio Villaraigosa, but in about a month he is likely to be on the cover of Time and Newsweek.
Villaraigosa is the front-runner to become the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles in the June 5 election. Almost more important, his likely win is the fruit of a remarkable resurgence of the labor movement in LA, based substantially on the organizing of the immigrant and low-wage work force. His emergence is an emblem of the most interesting social movement since the civil rights era.
Villaraigosa less than a decade ago was a union organizer. He got elected to the California State Assembly, quickly rising to speaker by 1998. That this man may soon be mayor of the largest city in America's largest state is one of the few hopeful harbingers for liberals in an era that seems not only politically conservative but politically dead.
Both parties in a sense have become the party of Washington, and most voters don't seem to be paying attention. The Democrats, now in opposition, are having a hard time playing that role because they still think of themselves as the party of government. And, indeed, they are doing a valiant job defending those aspects of government that most Americans value: Social Security, Medicare, aid to education, environmental protections.
But this sort of institutional role doesn't rouse much popular energy. And while the Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, and his House counterpart, Dick Gephardt, have done a pretty fair job of playing leader of the opposition, both are necessarily focused on the midterm elections of 2002, where a shift in a very few seats could catapult both men into the much more consequential jobs of Senate majority leader and House speaker.
But that dramatic change depends on electing a handful more Democrats in a few swing districts, a project that reinforces caution. This is why the grass roots are so important if America is to enjoy a resurgence of progressive politics and government.
And, indeed, there are two noteworthy things going on at the grass roots - a revived labor movement focused on getting all Americans a living wage and the new energy of immigrant communities.
Both of these trends have come together in the Villaraigosa candidacy. In Los Angeles, unions worked together with progressive legislators to organize some 60,000 home care workers and win legislation requiring Medicaid reimbursements to pay them a middle-class wage. The home care campaign, in turn, built on the success of the Justice for Janitors campaign, nationally and in LA, which has resulted in middle class wages for janitors.
Home care and janitorial work are both heavily Latino in Los Angeles. But the resurgent union movement there spans African-Americans and other immigrant groups as well.
This new energy also reflects new priorities at the national AFL-CIO, whose leader, John Sweeney, former president of the service employees union, has made the organizing of low-wage workers a priority. Under Sweeney, with prodding from the local movement in places like LA, the AFL-CIO dramatically reversed its traditional position on immigrants, seeing them as potential allies to be organized rather than threats to American workers.
By a fortuitous convergence, labor's shift to a pro-immigrant stance coincided with the reign of California Governor Pete Wilson, whose flagrantly anti-immigrant position has wrecked the Republican Party's hopes with Hispanics in California for at least a generation.
What almost killed the American labor movement was the idea that union leaders should behave like statesmen. Sweeney, in contrast, has had the wits to recognize the power of grass-roots movements, and to provide them resources - and not just in LA.
Though the national media have not paid much attention, local living wage campaigns, built on local organizing, have succeeded in city after city. Harvard University finds itself badly on the defensive because, despite its outsized wealth, it is refusing to pay several hundred service workers the $10.25 an hour that the Cambridge City Council has determined to be a living wage in Greater Boston.
By another coincidence, the AFL-CIO executive committee held its quarterly meeting in Boston last week. The assembled union presidents found time to join the Harvard protesters, and also to attend an amnesty rally organized by immigrant rights groups on Boston Common. That probably wouldn't have happened in the dead years of labor statesmen.
Just when grass-roots politics looks moribund, it revives in unexpected places. Isn't that what democracy is about?
