The Little Union That Could … Shut Down This Week’s Democratic Debate

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E.J. Flynn/AP Photo

Maria Elena Durazo, then president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union Local 11, in February 1997, with Richard Trumka, then secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, left, marching to protest anti-union activities at the New Otani Hotel in Los Angeles.

Anyone who doubts that Los Angeles is now officially a militant union town hasn’t been following the course of the Democrats’ next presidential debate, which is scheduled for this Thursday. Initially set to take place at UCLA, the Democratic National Committee was compelled to move it to Loyola Marymount University when an AFSCME local of UCLA employees threatened to mount a picket line there in protest of the university’s failing to come to terms with them over their next contract. So the DNC moved the debate to LMU, only to encounter a similar threat from UNITE HERE—the appropriately acronymic name for the union of hotel and restaurant employees.

More particularly, UNITE HERE Local 11, which is the Los Angeles local of hotel and food service workers.

Roughly 150 members of Local 11 are employed at—but not by—LMU. Their employer, the food service behemoth Sodexo, has also failed to come to terms with LMU’s food service workers, who are seeking higher pay and better benefits.

As was the case at UCLA, all the Democratic debate participants and the DNC itself have vowed not to cross the workers’ picket line, thereby, we can only assume, forcing LMU to suggest to Sodexo that it would be well if the company could reach some accommodation with the union, lest LMU’s day (actually, night) in the sun (well, moon) be canceled.

Most media coverage of UNITE HERE’s pressure tactics has emphasized the crucial role its giant (60,000-member) Las Vegas local will play in the upcoming Nevada caucuses. But that assessment overlooks the decisive role the much smaller Local 11 has played not just in local Democratic politics, but in the incalculably larger transformation of the American labor movement and the broader movement for economic justice. If ever a union punched above its weight, it’s Local 11.

The saga of the modern Local 11 begins in the late 1980s, with a rank-and-file revolt against an entrenched leadership that did virtually all its business behind closed doors—and only in English, despite the fact that the majority of the local’s members, mostly new immigrants, were primarily Spanish speakers. One of the dissident staff members, Maria Elena Durazo, ousted the previous president in an election whose results were ultimately upheld after intervention from the national leadership.

A longtime radical, one of whose mentors was veteran Latino organizer Bert Corona, Durazo began the process of transforming the local—and the local labor movement as well. Within a few years, workers were taking to the streets to win public support for their contractual demands from the city’s hotels. They also played a leading role in the emerging immigrants’ rights movements—by the mid-1990s, persuading the hotels to guarantee their members who were deported the right to return to work in their hotel if they were able to come back within two years (and the right to get their old job back, complete with seniority, if they were able to return in one year). The local’s strong pro-immigrant stance coincided with a shift in the national union’s leadership, and helped prod the union (then just called HERE) to push the national AFL-CIO to reverse its long-standing opposition to legalizing undocumented immigrants, which it did at its 1999 convention—held, appropriately enough, in Los Angeles.

When HERE sent national staff members to ensure the local’s transition to a democratic, Durazo-led union, one of those staffers was Miguel Contreras, whose career in the labor movement had begun when he went to work for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers when he was still in his teens. The only operational political genius I have ever known, Contreras soon became the political director, and then the head, of the L.A. County Federation of Labor—the omnibus local AFL-CIO umbrella organization, which claimed more than 300 local unions as members. He also became Durazo’s husband.

The labor movement which Contreras presided over and did so much to shape had as its spearheads and theme-setters both Local 11 and SEIU’s Local 1877—the union of the janitors who cleaned the city’s high-rise office buildings. Both unions were comprised chiefly of immigrants, both took to the streets with innovative protests, and both turned out more members, on a percentage basis, to walk precincts and work phone banks during election season than any other local unions (though they probably had the lowest percentage of members who were actually citizens). It was Contreras who realized that the local labor movement could mobilize and politicize L.A.’s vast new immigrant and Latino population, and throughout the 1990s, labor’s efforts flipped countless city council and state legislative districts from Republican to Democratic, from conservative to progressive, and cumulatively turned California from a purple state to a deep-blue one.

At the same time, working together, Contreras and Durazo established new institutions that won gains not just for union members, but also for the vast majority of L.A.’s largely non-union, low-wage working class. They established and funded the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, which did the research and advocacy that persuaded the L.A. City Council to enact the nation’s first living-wage ordinances and community-hiring agreements, which became models for such ordinances in cities across the nation. (The most persuasive advocacy came from Contreras’s AFL-CIO, which worked hand in glove with LAANE to develop and promote these proposals.) In its early years, LAANE, then headed by Madeline Janis, a longtime friend and associate of Durazo and Contreras, received the bulk of its funding from Local 11, was chaired by Durazo, and was headquartered in Local 11’s office building.

(In 2018, Durazo was elected to the California State Senate. Contreras died of a heart attack in 2005. Janis now heads Jobs to Move America, which leverages the purchasing power of cities to bring bus and rail manufacturing back to the United States.)

Now that LMU is confronted with the demands of Local 11, it would do well to consider how Local 11 dealt with a larger local university with much stronger links to the L.A. power structure: the University of Southern California (USC). In the mid-1990s, Local 11 represented approximately 300 food servers at USC—a workforce that was entirely nonwhite, heavily immigrant, and mostly female. Fearing that the university would hire a contractor (like Sodexo) to provide its on-campus food service, the union sought a guarantee from the university that its workers could retain their jobs if such a switch was made. The dispute dragged on for four years, and with its patience exhausted and its apprehensions heightened, in 1999 Local 11 decided to make the case for its workers in characteristically more dramatic fashion. Durazo went on a well-publicized hunger strike to bring attention to the workers’ cause; then the local initiated a rolling hunger strike of notable Angelenos who’d fast for one day, then pass on the fast to the next public figure, to champion the justice of the food servers’ demand.

When none of these protests moved USC, Local 11 moved their campaign to the political arena. LAANE director Janis—a brilliant lawyer and political strategist—noted that the city already had enacted (after prodding from LAANE and the AFL-CIO) a worker-retention ordinance that protected the jobs of workers on city contract work when a new contractor became their employer. It occurred to her that that law could be amended so that it also applied to workers employed by the largest recipients of the city’s economic-development grants. Coincidentally, the single-largest recipient of the city’s economic-development grants was USC.

The measure was placed before the city council, then chaired by the venerable John Ferraro, who 50 years earlier had been an All-American tackle on USC’s football team and had attended every single USC home game during the subsequent half-century. On the other hand, the measure was strongly backed by Contreras’s local AFL-CIO, which over the past two years had seen 13 of the 14 candidates it had backed for local office go on to victory.

The measure passed the council unanimously, with Ferraro voting Yes.

That’s what Local 11 can do when it’s riled that its members are getting a raw deal. LMU, if you want that debate, take heed.

UPDATE: On Tuesday morning, Local 11 and Sodexo reached a settlement that, according to the union, includes “a 25 percent increase in compensation, a 50 percent drop in healthcare costs, and increases [in] workers’ job security.” A number of the Sodexo employees at LMU had made less than $15 an hour.

DNC Chair Tom Perez was instrumental in negotiating the settlement.

(December 17, 2019)