LARRY KANTER
Senior Reporter
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney has been spending more time in Los Angeles lately, and the warm weather has little to do with it.
Instead, the nation’s top labor leader has been drawn here by a string of union triumphs, most recently the Service Employee International Union’s drive to organize some 75,000 home health care workers scattered throughout L.A. County the largest union election victory in U.S. history.
That election came on the heels of a number of other successes the passage of the living wage ordinance by the L.A. City Council, the defeat last June of Proposition 226, which would have forbidden labor unions from using dues for political purposes, and the generally strong showing by labor-backed candidates in the November election. The net effect, Sweeney says, has been to transform Los Angeles into one of the nation’s labor hotspots.
Sweeney, in town recently to support efforts to organize 8,000 service workers at Los Angeles International Airport, took time to talk with the Business Journal.
Question: You’ve been spending quite a bit of time in L.A. recently.
Answer: I try to get here about once a month. There’s a lot of good action here. The organizing campaign at LAX is an impressive campaign and has a lot of potential. California is a very important state and we’ve been having some real good success here. We were at the airport today, and you could feel the sense of excitement the building trades union walking along with restaurant workers, the Teamsters and public employees. People are energized, they are enthusiastic.
Q: How inspiring has the success of the home-care workers campaign been to the labor movement as a whole?
A: The fact that that story went on the front page of so many newspapers, that it was compared to the General Motors organizing campaign of the 1930s, makes people feel good, reminds them of the organizing of the early days. There’s a lot of organizing going on and it’s building momentum. It’s not going to change overnight, but it’s putting us on track.
Q: Why has L.A. been so successful in recent months?
A: A lot of work and a lot of effort is going into it. And the issues are the right issues. We couldn’t have a better economic period in terms of focusing on workers’ issues. We see the pursuit of profit having more influence on corporate America than the pursuit of justice. Everything is up the stock market, CEO salaries, profits, productivity and yet wages are not keeping up. There are more than 40 million Americans without health insurance. Workers are facing the reality that they can’t fix things by themselves, they have to come together.
Q: It seems that most of the recent efforts here have been among some of the lowest-wage workers. Is that by design?
A: We’ve had a lot of successes with the low-wage workers, but the focus is not just on low-wage workers. That would be crazy Benefits, I think, are crucial, because workers across the board find (health care) costs so prohibitive, especially for families. The changing pattern of how long people stay in jobs is making them more conscious about what’s going to happen to them in retirement. What good does it do to go from one employer to another if there is no portability? The only way they can get real portability is by being in some kind of labor-management pension plan where the benefits carry from one employer to another in a particular region of the country.
All of these things are for the long term. But the bottom line is, we have to continue to focus the resources we have on organizing. We have to continue to give workers a voice in decisions that affect their lives. We also have to take some risk. We just can’t use the same methods and techniques if they work, great, if they don’t, let’s try some new things.
Q: Such as?
A: It’s just how you approach organizing. When I was in my own union (the SEIU), we wanted to organize office workers. So we worked with groups of workers, bringing them to the point where they came together in an association. They weren’t ready for a union. But we brought them to the realization that the only way they could address their issues whether it was sexual harassment or equal pay was by becoming a union. You have to try out these different things.
Q: How high is the LAX campaign on labor’s agenda?
A: It’s got tremendous potential. There are thousands of unorganized workers there. It’s also a model. The same airlines that you’re dealing with here, the international carriers, are the same crowd that you’ll meet in other major airports.
Q: L.A. is one of the most expensive towns to do business in. Can’t additional expenses, like living wage laws, lead companies to pick up and leave altogether, taking their jobs with them?
A: They say that in every major city. They’re saying that in New York, they’re saying it in Chicago. The bottom line is that (employers) are doing very well, and half of the new jobs being created have wages below the poverty line. There’s no sense of fairness. How low do you go?
