LABOR/22″/mike1st/mark2nd

By HOWARD FINE

Staff Reporter

After years of unrelenting decline, organized labor is flexing its muscles and achieving impressive results. Labor pushed the state’s first and largest living wage ordinance through the L.A. City Council last year, defeated Proposition 226 on the this year’s June ballot, and was a vital force in the victories rung up by Gov.-elect Gray Davis and Democratic legislators in the November elections.

The ambitions for 1999 are even bigger including organizing efforts for 80,000 home health care workers, 3,000 airline contract workers at Los Angeles International Airport, and 1,600 more workers at Catholic Healthcare West.

Then there’s politics. Next year, labor is expected to play a major role in elections for the L.A. City Council seats now held by Richard Alarcon and Richard Alatorre, as well as for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education.

There also are plans to push the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to adopt a living wage ordinance similar to the one passed last year in the city of Los Angeles. The target date would be late 1999 or early 2000.

The Living Wage Coalition will be pressuring employers subject to the living wage ordinance to choose the option of providing health care. City contractors currently have two options: They can pay $7.50 an hour with health benefits or $8.75 an hour without benefits. Many employers are opting for the higher wage because, with health costs rising again, it is seen as the cheaper option.

Ironically, L.A.’s labor movement as a whole may sit out what looks to be the biggest political battle next year: charter reform. The Service Employees International Union, which represents most city workers, is opposed to measures that would make it easier for union members to be fired by the mayor or his appointed managers, as the Elected Charter Reform Commission initially proposed. That puts it at odds with Mayor Richard Riordan.

On the other hand, the building trades have backed Riordan and his efforts to cut red tape by giving managers more power over their departments.

“At the end of the day, labor probably will stay out of the race,” said Fabian Nu & #324;ez, political director for the L.A. County Federation of Labor.

Looking into the next decade, labor has even more ambitious goals, such as organizing up to half of L.A.’s workers, extending the living wage to every jurisdiction in the region, and requiring employers to give more generous health plans to their union employees.

“We are shifting our focus from strictly servicing union members to organizing and political activism,” said John Barton, organizing director at the County Federation of Labor.

As part of this push, unions also plan to pressure local jurisdictions to tie approvals of development projects to commitments to pay the living wage and allow workers the right to organize.

There are substantial obstacles to achieving these goals, especially on the organizing front. Los Angeles has never been a strong union bastion like older Eastern cities, and the new entrepreneurial economy that has emerged in the ’90s is not exactly friendly to organized labor. Many of the strongly unionized manufacturing jobs especially those in the aerospace industry have left the region, while much of the new growth is taking place in industries that have virtually no union representation, like new media.

And while labor plans to take on some of these non-union industries, like health care, employer opposition is certain to be stiff.

“There is tremendous opposition from employers to unions, which means there will be some long, drawn-out battles that will consume huge amounts of resources,” predicted Kent Wong, director of the Center for Labor Research and Education at UCLA. “There is a real debate about whether it is even possible to organize in some of these areas.”

In the garment industry, for example, union pressures could prompt companies to move to Mexico or other Pacific Rim countries, where the cost of labor is often less than 1 percent of what it is in L.A.

“Industries today are not like the old industries, which had heavy, fixed assets that needed to be amortized over time,” said Ezunial Burts, president and chief executive of the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce. “They have to be more flexible and more nimble. And if the labor situation doesn’t allow that in Los Angeles, they will go to regions of this country or the world where they don’t face the labor pressure. This is something that all parties have to watch, especially with tactics of direct confrontation. There is the potential for losing everything.”