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  • Making Labor and Working-Class History in Los Angeles
  • Tobias Higbie (bio)

In November 2019, Los Angeles labor unions, immigrant community organizations, and Democratic elected officials gathered to celebrate the political transformation of their state. Twenty-five years earlier, California voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that aimed to deny social services, healthcare, and public education to undocumented immigrants. Embraced by the faltering reelection campaign of Republican governor Pete Wilson, Prop 187 generated ugly and xenophobic campaign rhetoric that anthropologist Leo Chavez dubbed "the Latino threat narrative."1 Although a federal judge struck down the law, Prop 187 soon generated a progressive backlash. California's growing number of Latinx voters swung hard to the Democrats, driving the GOP into the political wilderness. As of 2020, prolabor and pro-immigrant Democrats hold all statewide offices and proudly claim the mantle of the anti-Trump resistance.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 may yet prove to be the nation's Proposition 187 moment, galvanizing scattered progressive forces and compelling swing voters to take sides. If so, it will be helpful to understand that California's political transformation hinged on a strategic relationship between organized labor in Los Angeles and southern California's immigrant working class. The year 1994 was a turning point in this relationship, but activists had been laying the groundwork since the 1970s. At a time that many union leaders considered undocumented workers to be labor's mortal enemies, a network of community activists, progressive lawyers, and pragmatic union organizers charted strategies for organizing in the postindustrial city. After the 1986 federal immigration reform, unions in Los Angeles organized legal aid to help undocumented Californians gain legal status, and then launched the California Immigrant Workers Association, which supported organizing campaigns in manufacturing, construction, and building services. In the 1990s, the Justice for Janitors campaign of the Service Employees International Union and Local [End Page 6] 11 of the hotel workers union (HERE and later UNITE HERE) anchored a resurgent movement in Los Angeles that carried out a decade of strikes, nonviolent civil disobedience actions, and coordinated municipal lobbying campaigns. When Miguel Contreras—the child of immigrant farmworkers—took the leadership of the County Federation of Labor in 1996, he drew on the membership of these unions to develop a campaign apparatus that made Los Angeles's multiethnic voters the key to winning statewide elected office.2

This story is probably familiar to many readers of Labor and members of LAWCHA. But until recently, these campaigns were not well documented in archival and oral history collections. With colleagues at the UCLA Labor Center, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), and the university library, I have been part of a wide-ranging community collaboration to gather records and firsthand accounts of this formative period in US labor history. Here are some highlights of our recent work.

UNITE HERE Local 11

In the 1970s and 1980s, the predominantly Spanish-speaking membership of what was then HERE Local 11 fought the leadership of their own union to win the right to have contracts and meetings translated, and then elected María Elena Durazo as the first Latina to head a major union local in Los Angeles. Durazo (now a state senator) reoriented the union toward membership participation and mounted a series of successful confrontations with employers. To support the wider fight for worker and immigrant rights in Los Angeles, Local 11 launched what would become the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), and the two organizations collaborated with other unions and community organizations, notably to win a citywide Living Wage ordinance. Longtime activist Vivian Rothstein was a driving force behind this campus-community collaboration that drew in a number of volunteers to gather interviews. The interviews are available online (https://calisphere.org/collections/27173/), and the records for both Local 11 and LAANE are held by the UCLA Library Department of Special Collections.

Justice for Janitors

Along with HERE Local 11, the SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles is the stuff of labor movement legend (and even movie stardom). Like Local 11, SEIU Local 399 was losing power in the 1980s. An injection...

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