L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement

4. "Si, Se Puede": Union Organizing Strategies and Immigrant Workers

CHAPTER 4 “SÍ, SE PUEDE”: UNION ORGANIZING STRATEGIES AND IMMIGRANT WORKERS Unions in southern California have launched numerous organizing drives among low-wage Latino immigrant workers in recent years, some of which were spectacularly successful.1 This chapter compares two of the best-known success stories with two high-profile campaigns that did not achieve their goals, with the aim of developing a deeper understanding of the elements that generate effective union strategies. The two successful cases we examine are: the L.A. Justice for Janitors campaign that began in the late 1980s, achieved an initial victory in 1990, and was consolidated and expanded over the course of the next decade; and the five-month 1992 strike among drywall hangers in the region’s residential construction industry that secured union recognition , along with improved pay and benefits, for thousands of previously unorganized immigrant workers. We also consider two unsuccessful cases: the mid-1990s effort to organize garment workers employed at Guess, Inc., which was at first energetically pursued but then abandoned after a few years; and the drive to organize truckers servicing the Los Angeles–Long Beach port, which culminated in a highly effective strike in 1996 but failed to achieve union recognition. On the basis of this fourway comparison among immigrant organizing campaigns that took place over a decade-long period, we assess the conditions that have facilitated , and those that have impeded, efforts to unionize immigrants in 145 the region, focusing particularly on the role of union commitment and strategy. As previous chapters have documented, in all four of these cases, as in most manual and service occupations in contemporary Los Angeles, the workforce is overwhelmingly made up of foreign-born Latinos. Thus, the presence of an immigrant workforce is a constant, not a variable, in our analysis. All four cases also share (even as they contributed to) the other comparative advantages of being located in southern California—advantages that first became widely apparent in the 1990s as the national labor movement launched efforts to jump-start a major phase of revitalization. As figure 4.1 shows, nationally the long-term erosion of union density continued relentlessly in the period after 1988 (the year the L.A. Justice for Janitors campaign began), falling from 17 percent that year to 13 percent by 2004. Although there were two brief plateaus when it held steady (from 1989 to 1994 and then again from 1997 to 2001), throughout this period there was not a single year in which union density actually rose in the United States as a whole. However, that feat was achieved (albeit briefly) in the state of California during the late 1990s, and once again in the opening years of the new century. Nevertheless, over the full sixteenyear period, union density fell from 19 percent to 17 percent in the state. The L.A. metropolitan area fared better: there, density increased slightly in the late 1980s, and did so once again in the opening years of the twenty- first century, with a net loss of only one percentage point in union density over the full period shown in figure 4.1. In quantitative terms, the four case studies discussed here had little impact on this larger tableau, which was shaped by a variety of influences. Organizing unorganized workers is the main way in which unions themselves can act to increase density, but it is only one of many factors influencing the overall unionization rate. If employment declines in a unionized sector or expands in a nonunion (or weakly unionized) sector, union density will decrease. Given shifting employment trends, combined with normal labor market growth and turnover, unions must recruit large numbers of new members each year just to maintain the existing level of density. Indeed, to increase density by one percentage point nationally over a yearlong period requires organizing an estimated one million new members (Freeman 2004). Considered in this light, the episodic increases in union density shown in figure 4.1 for Los Angeles and for the state of California are all the more impressive. Analyzing the dynamics of recent organizing in the region highlights some of the forces shaping the relative success of the L.A. labor movement as a whole in this period and il146 L.A. Story luminates the conditions under which individual organizing campaigns succeed or fail. Our first case is the now-legendary Justice for...