Moving in the Labor LAANE

The frontal attacks waged against unions in Wisconsin and many other states in early 2011 have put the labor movement front and center in the national debate. While some see these battles as the beginning of the end for organized labor in the U.S., others believe that conservatives have given unions the spark they need to stage a comeback.

There’s no doubt that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s assault on the collective bargaining rights of public employees has energized the rank and file far beyond Madison. But anger and outrage aren’t enough. For all its passion, labor’s fight in Wisconsin and other states dominated by anti-union politics is mostly defensive. Indeed, it is hard to find a place anywhere in the country where the labor movement is playing offense.

For labor to make a comeback, it needs a broad strategy that combines workplace organizing, community alliances, and political mobilization. One place where unions are making headway is Los Angeles. Due in large measure to these successes in Los Angeles, California is the largest state to have increased labor density in the past decade. Since 2000, while union membership has declined nationwide from 13.5 percent to 11.9 percent (in 2010), in California it has increased from 16 percent to 17.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Moreover, the state’s labor movement—anchored by over eight hundred thousand members in Los Angeles County (about 18 percent of the workforce)—waged effective electoral campaigns last November so that every statewide office is now held by a Democrat, including the governorship (now held by Jerry Brown). The L.A. County Federation of Labor has an impressive political mobilization apparatus that puts thousands of working people into the streets during election cycles to support pro-labor candidates.

L.A.’s success story, while impressive, is no miracle. It is the product of two decades of painstaking coalition building, electoral work, community organizing, and policy innovation. And while Los Angeles differs significantly from other metropolitan regions in its demography, politics, and culture, much can be learned from what has been achieved there.

The story of L.A.’s transformation into a hotbed of labor activism has many strands. The commitment—of the County Fed and several key unions—to organizing unorganized workers has been a key element. So, too, has been its commitment to forge alliances with community, ethnic, and religious groups. One of the groups primarily responsible for knitting together the workplace-and-community strategy has been the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), an advocacy organization whose mission is to rebuild L.A.’s dwindling middle class, clean up the region’s environmental pollution, and change the definition of a “healthy business climate” to include prosperity that is widely shared.

Founded a year after the city’s devastating 1992 civil unrest, LAANE was the brainchild of reformist labor leaders who knew that a new model was needed to advance a pro-worker agenda. Maria Elena Durazo, then the head of the local hotel workers union, and Miguel Contreras, the political director of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, understood that the city’s labor movement was too narrow and parochial. They tapped Madeline Janis, an attorney and activist who had led a key Central American refugee rights organization, to establish a nonprofit group that would bridge the gap between labor and L.A.’s liberal community and environmental leaders, elected officials, clergy, and academics.

Working closely with Local 11 of the hotel workers union, LAANE had its first major success in 1995 with a pioneering worker retention law that saved the jobs of hundreds of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) workers whose jobs were threatened by privatization. Two years later, LAANE shot to national prominence with a landmark living wage campaign. The L.A. law covered thousands of low-wage workers at LAX—including janitors, airline service workers, retail clerks, and food service workers—as well as several thousand workers at other locations around the city whose employers had municipal subsidies.

In the years that followed, LAANE has led...