An L.A. Story: Unions Show Signs of Life

Gabriela Ochoa is a vivacious woman who buses tables at the Landings Restaurant at the Holiday Inn near Los Angeles International Airport, a job she has held since 2001.

This year has been a good year for Ochoa, 45, and her husband, who is a supervisor at a vegetable packing company. They have two adult children, a teenager and 6-year-old twins, and they can afford to give the twins treats. “I can take them to IHOP or to the aquarium,” she said. She hadn’t seen her family in Mexico for years, but this summer Ochoa, her husband and the twins took a two-week vacation to Michoacán to visit them.

She can get herself a new pair of sneakers without worrying about the money. The family owns its house. “My older children joke that they didn’t have what the kids have now,” she said. “Now the twins have more food in the fridge, a gallon of milk instead of a small carton, more toys. I take them to Chuck E. Cheese.”

Ochoa can do these things because in 2006, the City Council passed a law mandating a $10.64 hourly wage and health benefits for hotel workers on Century Boulevard, the corridor of 13 large hotels just outside the entrance to LAX. After legal squabbles, it went into effect in 2008.

Ochoa’s salary has gone up to $12.16 an hour, plus tips shared by the waiters. The living-wage law, however, isn’t as important to that increase as unionization has been. Last year, Unite Here Local 11, a union of hotel, restaurant and airport workers with about 20,000 members, unionized the Holiday Inn. Now she also has a guaranteed 40-hour workweek and health insurance for her family.

A few years ago, her situation was very different. She started work at $7.15 per hour, and when the law was passed had been making $9.15 — plus tips, but work was scant. “Sometimes we’d go in and after three hours, they’d say, ‘O.K., we have no more work today, go home.’

“We hardly ate. We bought what was on special — rice, pasta, beans, milk a tiny carton at a time.” Sometimes she went to her church for food packages. They owned a house, but couldn’t keep up payments, and lost it. “I was always anxious — the money is going to run out.”

What happened to Ochoa is starting to happen all over the United States. Not unionization: The decline of organized labor is accelerating. It used to be that a third of private sector workers belonged to a union. Now one in 20 does.  The unionization rate has not been this low since 1916.

Unite Here is growing in Los Angeles, however, especially in the LAX zone, where it has unionized five hotels since 2007. Ochoa is enthusiastically active in the union, and I met her on a picket line outside the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel. About 60 hotel workers were on a one-day strike with signs and bullhorns, marching back and forth chanting the classic labor slogans in Spanish. It seemed like a throwback, a relic of the past.

But this week, four states passed new laws raising the minimum wage: Arkansas, Alaska, South Dakota and Nebraska. You could call it one of the few bright spots for Democrats — except that it’s really not a Democratic issue any more. These laws passed overwhelmingly even in Republican states — because they bypassed state legislatures and went straight to voters.

More than 120 cities, including conservative ones like San Diego, have living-wage laws, most of them affecting workers in businesses that contract with or receive subsidies from the city. Los Angeles was one of the first, in 1997. Mayor Bill de Blasio just expanded (pdf) New York City’s law to cover more workers in September.

Also in September, the Los Angeles City Council approved a minimum hourly wage of $15.37 for workers at all big hotels in Los Angeles — it will take effect next year. Mayor Eric Garcetti wants to raise the minimum wage for all workers in the city to $13.25 per hour over the next three years.

Los Angeles has focused on hotel workers because hotels get lots of city help and benefits. But it’s also because hotel workers are among the poorest in the city — the new law’s preamble says that 43 percent of hotel workers in Los Angeles earn wages that put them “far below the federal poverty line.” And hotel workers in the LAX corridor earned 20 percent below the average hotel worker in Los Angeles County.

What is happening in the airport zone is an intersection of unionization and rising wages for all that used to be commonplace. In the 1940s, when unions were at their peak, they lifted wages not only for their members, but for workers who didn’t belong to a union. Jake Rosenfeld, the author of the new book “What Unions No Longer Do,” writes that nonunion workplaces would often match the wages and benefits of union shops. One reason they did it, of course, was to keep out the union. But Rosenthal, who is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington, argues that other companies copied the practices of industry leaders — and those leaders tended to be unionized.

The decline of unions has led to lower wages because fewer workers now make union scale. But Rosenthal says that unions have lost their ability to influence whole industries. Companies still mimic industry leaders — but those leaders are not unionized.

Organized labor is still a force for raising wages — it’s happening now largely through its support of living-wage laws. A small part of this is self-interest. Despite their low salaries, for example, big hotels pay considerably better than small ones, and offer more opportunities for advancement. But almost everywhere, living-wage laws apply only to big hotels — the new Los Angeles citywide hotel living-wage law will apply next year only to hotels with more than 300 rooms. It will expand to hotels with more than 125 rooms in 2016.

The obvious reason is that big hotels are more able to absorb the impact of paying higher salaries. Less obviously, big hotels are the plum targets for unionization, and many of the laws contain clauses allowing workers to waive the wage increases as part of collective bargaining agreements. The $15 living-wage law covering Seattle’s SeaTac airport region which passed last year was “an incentive for employers to collectively bargain with their employees,” according to the Union of Food and Commercial Workers’ newsletter. The LAX living-wage law may be one reason Unite Here has been so successful in the zone. Once, the labor movement created higher wages for all. Now higher wages for all are helping to keep the labor movement alive.

Some opponents of unions use this to try to discredit living-wage laws. But these laws are far more than an organizing tool. Unions have provided the ground troops and often the financing for living wage campaigns around the United States — even though their members are usually making above that line and don’t benefit — because these laws have the potential to make life a little better for millions of workers. As this goal becomes harder and harder to achieve through unionization, organized labor has found other ways.

I met more people on the picket line. One was Regla Soto. She came from Cuba in 1980 and has been cleaning rooms at the Westin for 27 years. Her husband, now retired, worked in housekeeping at the Hilton. She used to arrive at home vomiting from anxiety. The family ate meat once a week. The children would ask for clothes and toys their friends had, and Soto could only shake her head. She went to church to get food packets.

They managed, with difficulty, until one of her three children died of cancer. “I had to choose between burying him and paying for the house,” she said. “I had to give him a Christian burial.” The burial cost $14,000, she said. She took out loans, fell behind on payments, and lost the house.

Since then, the living-wage law was passed and Unite Here unionized the Westin. Now Soto makes $14.11 an hour, with time and a half for overtime, and health insurance for the family. They own a house in Compton. After her son’s death Soto and her husband formally adopted his daughter. She is now in college, and Soto is able to pay for her books. She has auto insurance now and has plans to send her granddaughter to Arizona for a graduate degree and buy a new living room set. She still goes to church — now only to pray.

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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”