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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is a valentine to Los Angeles, the city so many love to hate. Almost all of the research for it was conducted in southern California , and my perspective on the material is the product of an extended engagement with the vibrant labor and intellectual communities of the region . But as I argue in the pages that follow, Los Angeles is of interest not only in its own right but as a window into a wider set of developments . The nation’s second city has emerged in recent years as one of the few bright spots for the beleaguered U.S. labor movement and a unique proving ground for strategic organizing innovations. The successful experiments that took place there in the 1990s gave Los Angeles a special role in the ongoing process of national union revitalization. My research began as an effort to document and analyze those experiments . Both on my own and with Kent Wong and other collaborators, I spent countless hours roaming greater L.A. to talk with the organizers who planned and carried out campaigns like those analyzed in chapter 4. We also interviewed union officials, rank-and-file workers, and labor attorneys , as well as managers, contractors, and the occasional government official. No sampling frame or other systematic methodology guided this research; we simply began by interviewing the readily identifiable leaders of key campaigns, and they helped us identify other informants. In a few cases, the individuals we approached did not make themselves available for interviews, even after repeated requests, but such refusals were surprisingly rare. Nearly all of the interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed . Some of our informants shared copies of documentary materials they had collected in the course of the campaigns; I also mined online databases for journalistic accounts of the campaigns and related developments . At some point in this process it dawned on me that I should investigate ix the earlier labor history of Los Angeles—especially in relation to the four industries that are the book’s focus—in order to better understand how the region came to be a nodal point of union revitalization in the late twentieth century. Surprised to find that this history had attracted relatively scant attention from scholars, I then extended my interviewing to include retired union officials and others with some firsthand knowledge of the past; simultaneously I set about collecting primary and secondary historical documents (including some extraordinary archival materials on the SEIU housed in the Wayne State University Labor Archives in Detroit). In reconstructing the contours of what I came to understand as the exceptional and largely unexplored labor history of Los Angeles, I found Carey McWilliams’s prescient books and essays on the region, although written many decades ago, to be especially helpful. Another line of inquiry led me to examine U.S. census data to reconstruct the evolution of employment patterns and the impact of immigration on the four industries that are the book’s focus (see appendix B for details). I completed this manuscript during a period of intense debate and upheaval within the U.S. labor movement, culminating in mid-2005 with the disaffiliation of several major unions from the AFL-CIO and the formation of the Change to Win (CTW) Federation. Although the bulk of the research for this book was done before the debate that led up to that dramatic schism, these recent events highlight the importance of the L.A. case and my interpretation of it. Because the unions that now make up the CTW Federation have been disproportionately influential in southern California, my own thinking has been greatly influenced by the CTW perspective on organized labor’s current dilemma—a perspective that both helped shape and was shaped by the successful organizing efforts in Los Angeles that are analyzed in detail in this book. In the course of producing this book, I incurred many debts. I am especially grateful to Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, who generously shared with me his virtually limitless access to key union organizers and officials in and around Los Angeles. During the mid- to late 1990s, we jointly conducted dozens of interviews with L.A. unionists and organizers that became a key source of data for this book, and particularly for chapter 4, which Kent and I coauthored. I have two major institutional debts to acknowledge here as well. One is to the University of...

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