With more than a quarter million members in the county, the Los Angeles locals of the Service Employees International Union have emerged as powerful forces within the parent organization.
There are nine SEIU chapters here, and three of their leaders are vice presidents of the parent international: Mike Garcia, president of SEIU Local 1877, which represents 25,000 building service workers statewide; Tyrone Freeman, president of SEIU Local 434B, with 120,000 home care workers in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties; and Annelle Grajeda, general manager of SEIU Local 660, which represents 50,000 Los Angeles County employees.
Freeman, 35, leads the largest local in L.A. County. He was raised by his grandparents in Pittsburgh, where his grandfather was a steel worker. After earning a degree in political science and sociology from Allegheny College of Liberal Arts, he became a community organizer in Atlanta.
Freeman was named executive director of SEIU Local 1985. A year later, he was elected to the international executive committee of the SEIU, becoming the youngest leader in the union’s 90-year history.
An energetic organizer and public speaker, Freeman said he was tapped by SEIU President Andrew Stern to become general president of SEIU Local 434B in Los Angeles just after it won the right to represent home care workers in 1999.
He was a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 2000 and 2004 and is a member of the Los Angeles Fire Commission and a board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Under his guidance, 434B has become one of the fastest-growing locals in the nation, increasing its membership by 62 percent since 1999.
Garcia, 53, gained attention in 2000 by leading a three-week “Justice for Janitors” strike in downtown Los Angeles and is now trying to organize non-union security officers.
Garcia grew up in the San Fernando Valley and earned a degree in Chicano studies at Cal State Northridge, where he took a job as a janitor and became a member of SEIU Local 399. After receiving a master’s degree in social work from San Jose State University, Garcia joined the union in San Jose and rose through the ranks by organizing janitors in San Diego and Denver.
He returned to L.A. in 1996, and became president of the first statewide building services union, which represents 25,000 janitors, airport, racetrack and stadium workers from Sacramento to San Diego.
Annelle Grajeda grew up in Los Angeles and decided in college that she wanted to work for social justice. After graduating from Cal State Long Beach, she joined the AFL-CIO in 1971 and worked as an organizer at the International Garment Workers Union. In 1984, she joined SEIU Local 660 as a business agent and director of arbitrations and grievances. Grajeda became general manager in 1996.
Local 660’s mixed constituency of county librarians, court reporters, maintenance, clerical and animal care workers has made it a difficult to build consensus. Grajeda’s tenure has been marked by fights with the County Board of Supervisors, who have proposed privatizing parts of the county workforce and rollbacks to the health care system.
“What’s facing us is this attack on public service and public employees,” said Grajeda. “We stop bad things from happening but we want to raise standards of living.”
