[Between several massive strikes, democratic socialists getting
elected to city council, new union organizing campaigns, successful
ballot measures to tax the rich, and the ouster of several reactionary
political figures, it’s a good time to be a leftist in Los Angeles.]
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IN LOS ANGELES, THE LEFT AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT ARE SHIFTING THE
CENTER OF POWER  
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Abe Asher
February 7, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Between several massive strikes, democratic socialists getting
elected to city council, new union organizing campaigns, successful
ballot measures to tax the rich, and the ouster of several reactionary
political figures, it’s a good time to be a leftist in Los Angeles.
_

United Teachers of Los Angeles members, students, parents, and
community leaders rally in front of LAUSD headquarters on December 5,
2022 in Los Angeles, California. , Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles
Times via Getty Images

 

In 2006, Hugo Soto-Martinez was just weeks away from becoming the
first member of his family to graduate from college when something
happened that changed the course of his life.

Soto-Martinez grew up
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in South Los Angeles as the son of two immigrant parents who worked as
street vendors. When Soto-Martinez was sixteen, his father hurt his
back and became unable to work, forcing Soto-Martinez to drop out of
high school and get a job at a hotel in downtown Los Angeles to help
support his family.

Soto-Martinez kept the hotel job for years. He worked shifts as a food
runner as he made his way through high school and then college, after
which he planned to attend law school. But by 2006, things at the
hotel had taken a turn for the worse. Working conditions had quickly
deteriorated under new management, and eventually one of
Soto-Martinez’s colleagues asked him if he wanted to try to unionize
the place. He did.

“When we went to the boss and said we wanted a union . . . and then
we won, the confidence, the knowledge, the strategies that I gained
from that very short experience — that was a rebirth in that
moment,” Soto-Martinez said. “I was a new person. I saw the world
differently.” Suddenly law school was no longer in the cards.

“My mom was pissed,” Soto-Martinez said. “I was prepping for the
LSAT exam, the classes that people take, and I was like, ‘I’m
going to be a lawyer.’ And then all of the sudden, I was like,
‘I’m going to be a union organizer.’ She was not very happy.”
But Soto-Martinez wasn’t looking back.

Now, nearly two decades later, others in Los Angeles are having
similar experiences of awakening in the resurgent local labor
movement. The movement is building knowledge from strike to strike and
campaign to campaign — learning what is required, and what it feels
like, to take on and win big fights. In the process, it’s creating
new leaders like Soto-Martinez, who is a member of the Los Angeles
City Council as of late last year.

Movement Knowledge

Last winter United Auto Workers (UAW) 2865, the academic student
employee union representing workers in the massive University of
California system, walked out of classrooms in the largest higher
education strike
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in American history.

Several Los Angeles–based members of the union said they were
inspired to strike when over thirty thousand teachers represented by
United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) went on strike
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in January of 2019. During the teachers’ strike, members of UCLA
graduate student Michael Dean’s UAW local adopted a nearby school,
Clover Avenue Elementary in West Los Angeles, where they delivered
food, water, and ponchos. They also walked the picket line with the
teachers and showed up to rallies.

“It showed you what could happen when you took the time to build a
really broad and strong structure in your union that was rooted in
mass action and one-to-one organizing,” Dean told _Jacobin_. “You
could get fifty thousand people into the streets of downtown Los
Angeles, and you could get Mayor [Eric] Garcetti to force the
superintendent to give into the union’s core demands.”

Three years later, UAW graduate workers won 50 percent base pay raises
and a host of other contract improvements after a five-week strike
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Unions for Housing

One of the items that UAW workers did not win, at least directly, was
extra money to help offset the cost of exorbitant rent in California
cities — the foundation of a housing crisis
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that has become the state’s most animating political issue
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“When we’re in a membership meeting and we talk about housing, it
might be the most boring meeting ever, but you mention housing, people
come alive,” said Kurt Petersen, the copresident of
Soto-Martinez’s union UNITE HERE Local 11. “Because everyone is
struggling with it.”

That includes the California Democratic establishment, which has thus
far been unable to get its arms around the extent of the crisis.
Governor Gavin Newsom has signed legislation limiting rent hikes and
making it easier to build
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duplexes and fourplexes, but his administration has fallen
dramatically short
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of his goal of building 3.5 million units of new housing. Meanwhile,
cities like Los Angeles have leaned on sweeps of encampments to try to
shield the worst of the crisis from the eyes of the city’s more
privileged residents.

Soto-Martinez has seen the consequences of the housing crisis for his
neighbors. He pays $1,700 per month for his rent-controlled apartment
in East Hollywood, while across the street, a one-bedroom apartment in
a new building is going for $3,400 per month — or 77 percent of the
neighborhood’s median household income.

Soto-Martinez’s campaign was first and foremost a broadside against
the city’s abject failure to deal innovatively or humanely with the
housing issue, and it was backed to the hilt by a coalition of
progressive unions that saw Soto-Martinez not just as a staunch union
ally but a proponent of a pro-worker housing agenda. Just a month
after taking office, Soto-Martinez announced
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that a chain link fence around Echo Park Lake — a symbol of the
callousness of the city’s response to the housing crisis — will be
removed.

“We’re starting to see unions enter into fights that traditionally
are not theirs, because their members are affected so much by it,”
Soto-Martinez said of the Los Angeles labor movement’s growing
interest in tackling the housing issue.

As evidence of that shift, Soto-Martinez pointed to the fact that the
push to pass Measure ULA
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a tax on real estate sales of more than $5 million, was led in part by
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 2015 and the Los
Angeles/Orange County Building Trades. When the Americas Lodging
Investment Summit came to town in January, UNITE HERE workers marched
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downtown and put up billboards demanding that the city and the hotel
executives build new housing.

Meanwhile UTLA, in the midst of another contract battle, is also
talking about housing. “What we’re seeing is an actual wave of
people demanding better of their employers — in regards to working
conditions, in regards to learning conditions for our students, as
well as living conditions [for] not only our students but the
community at large,” UTLA president Cecily Myart-Cruz told
_Jacobin._

Local unions are also seeking to address the abuses of the criminal
justice system. In June 2020, Andres Guardado, an eighteen-year-old
Salvadoran-Angeleno who had just graduated from high school, was shot
in the back and killed by a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff. The
killing sparked outrage in the city. Within UNITE HERE, that outrage
was personal — Guardado’s father Cristobal is a member who worked
with Soto-Martinez years ago as a cook at the Marriott hotel.

After Guardado’s killing, Petersen told _Jacobin_, the union had to
act. UNITE HERE was the first union to call for the resignation of the
county’s notorious sheriff Alex Villanueva, and it was Soto-Martinez
who cochaired the union’s campaign to oust him. Last November,
Villanueva lost his reelection bid to a progressive challenger by more
than twenty points in the same election that put Soto-Martinez on city
council.

“That’s another example of where we’ve tried to learn from and
follow and support movements that obviously impact our members,”
Petersen said. “[These issues] aren’t the bread and butter of the
labor movement, but we want to do more of that.”

The Labor Left

November’s election marked a potential turning point in Los Angeles
politics. Between Villanueva’s ouster, the passage of measure ULA,
and the election of two democratic socialists to the city council
—Soto-Martinez and fellow Democratic Socialists of America member
Eunisses Hernandez — it looks like labor unions and the organized
left are on the rise, joining together and posing a real political
threat to the city’s entrenched powers.

In few circles was that threat revealed more candidly than it was in
the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor in October of 2021, where
federation president Ron Herrera, then councilmembers Nury Martinez
and Gil Cedillo, and still-current councilmember Kevin de León were
recorded discussing in overtly racist
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terms how best to keep their grip on political power
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in the city. The setting of that meeting was not lost on organizers
like Soto-Martinez, nor was the meaning of the change in leadership at
the labor federation after the recording was leaked.

“It’s a new thing,” Soto-Martinez said of the burgeoning
alignment between labor, progressive nonprofits, and the Left.
“We’re still figuring out how we work, how we strategize, but I do
think that the potential of those three big blocs coming together is
going to be amazing.”

Victories like those won by Soto-Martinez and Hernandez, as well as
the progressive new city controller Kenneth Mejia, have Petersen
convinced that the city’s “labor left” is poised to establish
itself as a new power base in local politics.

For Soto-Martinez, it all connects back to his formative experience in
2006. “It’s continued to be a sort of defining moment as to who I
was as a person,” Soto-Martinez said of his first taste of union
power. “And everything I’ve done since then, including this
election that we won, was the same blueprint — the blueprint of that
union fight.”

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* The Left in Los Angeles; Labor and Politics; Housing;
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