Immigrants Forming
Backbone
for Labor
Service workers, Typify the New Face of Organized Labor in the South Bay and Los Angeles.
Daily Breeze - September 04, 2006
By Nick Green
Service workers like Hawthorne resident Patricia Simmons typify the new face of organized labor in the South Bay and Los Angeles.
The Peruvian immigrant and mother of three is the main breadwinner for her family, including her disabled husband, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm.
But after 19 years as a waitress at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport, the 45-year-old Simmons makes just $6.75 an hour. She works up to 16 hours a day at two jobs to pay her $1,400 a month rent and other bills.
So, after six months of attempting to unionize workers at the county's second-largest hotel against a backdrop of what she described as management harassment and intimidation, Simmons joined a rally Thursday calling for a boycott of the LAX Hilton.
"They don't want to think about it, they want to ignore the whole thing," she said of hotel management. "Organizing means better wages, free medical insurance and dignity and respect."
Simmons sits at ground zero of a renewed effort by organized labor to push for better wages and benefits, particularly for immigrants who make up the bulk of workers in the poorly paying, rapidly expanding service industry.
Even as union membership declines nationally, a reflection of the loss of manufacturing jobs to overseas, that trend is bucked in Southern California.
Unions are zeroing in on fertile organizing territory they have traditionally ignored, including airline janitors, hotel workers and home health-care workers.
And with job growth weak and wages stagnating despite five years of economic prosperity among union and nonunion workers alike, a broad coalition of unions, community leaders and politicians pushing for improvements in wages and working conditions is making steady inroads.
Conditions mirror 1930s
Vivian Rothstein, deputy director of the Los Angeles Alliance for A New Economy, sees parallels between the labor organizing of the 1920s and 1930s and today.
Back then, immigrant workers worked in the steel and automobile industries for poverty wages until unions won improvements. Today an explosion of low-wage service sector jobs and thousands of immigrant workers provide a fertile ground for organizing.
"The labor movement of the last 25 years has been slipping because it hasn't really been wanting to address the conditions immigrant workers were dealing with," Rothstein said. "For a long time the labor movement saw immigrant workers as competition -- there was a protectionist approach.
"We're having to rebuild the labor movement from the ground up. There is a new resurgence of organizing energy in the labor movement."
A sign of that energy was two simultaneous demonstrations Thursday in the South Bay at the LAX Hilton and the Tom Bradley International Terminal, where airline janitors demonstrated for better pay and benefits.
Meanwhile, union allies and activists see a relationship between common urban social ills and the quality of jobs available to working people.
"We know that poverty, high crime rates and overcrowding in our community are linked to these low-wage jobs," said the Rev. Teresa Santillana of Hawthorne United Methodist Church, who spoke at the LAX Hilton rally.
Studies released by two left-leaning think tanks over the Labor Day weekend make the labor argument.
The California Budget Project releases a study today that examines economic trends in the state, while the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute released a report Sunday titled, "The State of Working America 2006-2007."
Among the reports' key findings:
• Real wages of low-wage workers in California declined by 3.7 percent from 1979 to 2005, while typical workers' wages rose by 2.3 percent and high-wage workers' pay soared 20.3 percent.
• From 2001 to 2004 corporate income in California leaped by almost 369 percent, yet Californians' personal income rose slightly more than 13 percent.
• A 33.4 percent increase in corporate productivity nationally from 1995 to 2005 hasn't translated into higher benefits or wages for workers. Employee benefits grew less than half as much as productivity and wages by only one-third as much. Moreover, the typical worker has seen no wage improvement despite the productivity gains since 2001.
"We're not seeing the purchasing power of ordinary families keeping pace with inflation," said Jean Ross, founding executive director of the California Budget project. "People aren't feeling good about their economic prospects right now -- there's a lot of uncertainty."
State has high union rate
Both reports zeroed in on two factors as primarily responsible for the stagnant income growth among workers: significant shifts in the labor market, including declining union representation and the globalization of the economy.
A study released Friday by the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations put union representation in Los Angeles at 15.5 percent, below the 16.5 percent for the state as a whole, but above the national average of 12.5 percent.
Unionized workers earn higher wages than their non-union counterparts, are 18.3 percent more likely to have health insurance and are 22.5 percent more likely to have paid leave, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Last year when the Service Employees International Union, Local 1877, targeted organizing service workers in the aerospace and defense industries, only about half had union representation. Today, the union says it is 97 percent and workers have won a three-year contract specifying wage increases and health care.
Globalization and the failure of unions to respond to the changing workplace have contributed to the decline in union representation, said Edward Lawler, a professor of business at USC's Marshall School of Business' Center for Effective Organizations.
In part that contributed to a split in the national labor movement, although that hasn't been felt in Southern California.
The SEIU, which is organizing hotel employees and other service workers, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which is organizing independent truck drivers at the port, wanted to concentrate on organizing workers rather than spending money on politics as the national labor federation, the AFL-CIO, desired.
"If you think of unions as a business, which in many ways they are, their market in the manufacturing sector has almost disappeared," said Lawler, co-author of the recently released book The New American Workplace. "On the other hand there's a real need for a union movement to speak for hospital workers, maintenance people in hotels, cleaning people in hotels. In essence, what you really have is the 'haves' and the 'have nots' in terms of the future. The haves said we no longer want to be associated with the 'have nots.' "
That's reflected locally, too.
The county lost 327,400 manufacturing jobs from 1990 to 2004, once a mainstay of middle-class employment -- and union power. In contrast, six of the top 10 occupations for job growth in the county over the next half dozen years pay less than $10 an hour including waiters and security guards, so it makes sense for labor organizers to target those industries.
Service sector targeted
A major campaign is under way, for example, to unionize 5,000 security guards, who make an average of $8.40 an hour and have no health insurance.
"We know we have to organize the service sector -- that's where the growth is, that's where the industries are for the future," Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which has 800,000 affiliated unionized workers.
Union organizers are stepping up the pressure locally.
In support of workers at the LAX Hilton, two major clients, the California Teachers Association and the Los Angeles Episcopal Jubilee Ministries, announced they were pulling their business meetings from the hotel.
A mass civil disobedience with hundreds of people willing to get arrested is scheduled Sept. 28 in front of the Century Boulevard hotel.
Kent Wong, director of the center of Labor Research and Education, said the tide may be turning for the local labor movement.
Southern California is already home to "some of the most successful and high-profile union organizing campaigns in the last decade," he said.
For instance, a drive to organize hospital workers has seen union representation increase from just 6 percent in 2000 to 55 percent today.
"The fact that labor here in Los Angeles has been in the forefront of organizing immigrant workers and the fact immigrant workers identify with unions as supportive institutions I think bodes well for organized labor here."
Still, Lawler observes the United States has some of the world's weakest labor laws among developed countries, so the battle will be an uphill one for labor.
Simmons, the LAX Hilton waitress who was suspended seven days without pay after a Mother's Day rally, understands "it's going to be a sacrifice." But uphill battles are nothing new to her.
"Most of us are immigrants who came to this country to work and provide a better life for our families," she said.
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For over 20 years, Isabel “Segunda” Brentner has worked at the LAX Hilton, keeping her focus on her family and her job. “My priorities [were] to help my family,” says Brentner, who, along with raising her own children, cared for both her father and grandmother when they were ill. 
Enedina Alvarez, a 54-year-old single parent, says she must be both mother and father to her teenage children. Yet, with two jobs, she has barely enough money to house, feed and clothe them—and precious little time to spend with them. Although she receives health insurance through her job, she cannot afford to insure her children. Alvarez says, “I pray to God that my kids do not get sick because I cannot pay the medical bills.” 
Nearly all hotel housekeepers are women. The majority are women of color and immigrants.
