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EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION The dynamism of the southern California labor movement in the late twentieth century was the product of a combustible mix of ingredients —a vast immigrant working class strongly predisposed toward collective action; an imaginative and committed cadre of union leaders buoyed by the comparative advantages that flowed from the region’s exceptional labor history; and just enough geographical distance from organized labor’s old guard to open up a political space for organizational innovation. Nowhere in the United States is there more palpable evidence of the potential for today’s working-class immigrants to reenact the drama of union upsurge that brought earlier generations of newcomers to the United States into the economic mainstream in the 1930s and 1940s. Paradoxically, the late development of Los Angeles in the early twentieth century—in both its trajectory of industrial growth and the evolution of labor unionism in the region—produced its antithesis at the century’s end, when the region emerged as a rare bright spot in an otherwise gloomy labor scene in the United States. But is Los Angeles a model for labor in the rest of the country or an anomaly? Is the recent emergence of immigrant unionization there a forerunner of changes that will spread more widely, or is it an exceptional product of the peculiar political economy of the region? Although the obstacles are formidable, there is nonetheless potential for the embryonic labor movement revitalization now evident in southern California to burst forth onto the national stage as the maverick unionists who pioneered such efforts as the L.A. Justice for Janitors campaign pursue the elusive goal of reproducing their successes on more spacious ground. In seeking to explain the recent trajectory of the L.A. labor movement, I have presented evidence in support of three key claims. One of them involves the region’s exceptional labor history, discussed in detail in chap187 ter 1. The critical factor here is the long-standing predominance in the regional labor movement of former AFL affiliates generally, and of the SEIU in particular. This gave L.A. unionists an edge in both facilitating the wave of immigrant organizing that emerged in the 1990s and pursuing the broader process of union revitalization. Labor market transformation came sooner and was more extreme in the region than elsewhere (my second claim), but at the same time the historical legacy of the local labor movement left the unions favorably positioned to challenge the new regime of casualized, deregulated, and, all too often, sweatshop-like employment . Ironically, Los Angeles’s historical marginality to the national labor movement and the relative weakness of old-guard unionists in the region also proved advantageous, opening up a political space with unusual freedom to experiment. A second claim about Los Angeles’s recent emergence as a center of labor movement revitalization involves the role of the region’s employers. As chapter 2 showed, they took the lead in the national (and ultimately global) process of labor market restructuring and workforce casualization that has characterized the late twentieth century. Managerial efforts to weaken unions in the 1970s and 1980s found especially fertile ground in southern California, in part because the economy and population of the region expanded so rapidly in this period. Growth provided a safety valve, neutralizing one major potential obstacle to change: namely, labor opposition. Although some native-born, high-wage unionized workers would leave the region entirely (especially former aerospace industry workers whose jobs evaporated in the aftermath of the cold war), others were able to move laterally into still-desirable positions in the local labor market when their old employment niches suffered precipitous deterioration in wages, benefits, and working conditions as a result of deunionization . With their membership thus cushioned against the impact of labor market restructuring, the unions involved mounted little or no resistance to it. And employers simply turned to the vast supply of recently arrived immigrants to fill the resulting vacancies—blissfully oblivious to the possibility that these new workers would themselves soon strive to restore unionism. My third claim is predicated on southern California’s status as the premier destination for recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America , including vast numbers of undocumented persons. No other region of the nation has experienced such an intensive and homogeneous immigrant working-class influx. Contrary to expectations, the newcomers not only turned out to have a keen desire for economic advancement but also 188 L.A. Story [18.227.48...

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