L.A. becomes guiding light of U.S. labor

By Ruth Milkman

A century ago, Los Angeles proudly proclaimed itself an “open shop” city. Wages were low, unions were weak, and employers were determined to keep it that way. Today, the opposite is true: The L.A. labor movement is a national model.

While unionism has declined nationally, in Los Angeles it has held steady for the past decade. Southland unions’ organizing strategies are state-of-the-art, and local unions have an especially strong record organizing immigrant workers.

Three factors explain why Los Angeles has become the shining star of the American labor movement.

The first is the region’s exceptional labor history. The industrial unions that emerged in the 1930s with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) were always relatively weak in L.A., where the occupationally based unionism historically associated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) dominated the labor movement.

In 1955, when unionization peaked on the eve of the AFL-CIO merger, only 16% of L.A. union members were in CIO affiliates, compared with 29% of union members nationally.

Back then, this was a sign of L.A.’s backwardness because the AFL had a reputation for conservatism and sometimes corruption. But now the old AFL unions have made a national comeback. The manufacturing-based CIO unions are collapsing under the weight of deindustrialization and outsourcing, while most AFL unions are in non-mobile sectors like construction, transportation and services.

The AFL’s historical predominance gave Los Angeles, and California more generally, a comparative advantage in the late 20th century, helping make the region into a crucible of labor renewal.

That advantage was reinforced by a second factor underlying L.A. labor’s dynamism: the massive influx of immigrants to Southern California after 1965.

Early on, union officials and employers alike presumed that these newcomers were easily intimidated and thus “unorganizable.” But by the early 1990s, it was clear that immigrants were more receptive to organizing efforts than most U.S.-born workers, eventually becoming a significant political force.

The third factor shaping L.A. labor’s recent rise was the city’s unusual political culture. The virtual absence of Tammany Hall-style political machines, relatively few political offices and the high cost of electoral campaigns created a vacuum in L.A. politics that the labor movement was destined to fill.

Both L.A. labor’s innovative workplace organizing and its newfound political clout have strong roots in the immigrant community, whose groundswell of protest against anti-immigration legislation last spring was the largest in the nation. Although organized labor cannot claim credit for those marches, in Southern California, it was nevertheless ahead of the curve, tapping into its potential for organizing immigrants.

In the aftermath of those marches, it does not seem farfetched to imagine the labor movement — the nation’s only organized force opposing the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots — once again fulfilling its historic mission as a vehicle of social mobility for impoverished first- and second-generation immigrants.

Unions did precisely that for southern and eastern Europeans in the 1930s and 1940s. This time, the beneficiaries could be working-class Latinos and Asians. And if history repeats itself, L.A.’s AFL unions will be leading the way.

Milkman is professor of sociology and author of “L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement.”