The Roots of a Union City: The Los Angeles / Orange County Organizing Committee

Here's a little history of an important joint organizing committee that I am sharing with the AFL-CIO for their upcoming convention in Los Angeles:

The Roots of a Union City: The AFL-CIO Los Angeles / Orange County Organizing Committee

by Lane Windham

Jimmy Hoffa didn’t believe it. He charged that the new AFL-CIO Los Angeles / Orange County Organizing Committee (LAOOC), launched in 1963, would “not organize 50 people…it’s all propaganda and hot air.” In fact, this joint organizing campaign organized nearly half a million workers over its more than 20 years in operation, making it the largest such joint effort in the labor movement’s history and helping to forge Los Angeles as a 21st century pro-union city. The LAOOC offers several lessons to today’s union movement, including the importance of broad solidarity over narrow organizational interests, the need for big vision coupled with long-term investment, and the missed opportunity of community engagement.

In the early 1960s, Southern California’s workforce was booming as companies moved to the Sunbelt, but those jobs were increasingly non-union. Since 1950, union density in the LA metropolitan area had dropped from 37 to 30 percent, with no end to the slide in sight. The leaders fretted about the challenges ahead of them - - challenges that ring familiar to unionists today. They blamed the laws, the anti-union companies and the young people in the “space age” who seemed to see no need for unions. Inter-union rivalry was a big problem - - too often unions fought one another in big organizing campaigns rather than branching out into new territory.

The AFL-CIO itself was still a freshly-minted organization in 1962 and it was carving out its relationship on organizing with its affiliate unions. UAW President Walter Reuther had only agreed to the 1955 merger if the new AFL-CIO established the Industrial Union Department (IUD), a free-standing, autonomous department for industrial unions that would be a seat for much of the work of the former CIO. Reuther headed it and pushed the new federation to take a lead role in organizing. When Reuther started to put together an IUD organizing effort in Southern California, the non-industrial unions wanted in, too.

Thus the Organizing Committee of the AFL-CIO Executive Council established the new LAOOC in 1963, with Reuther’s support, and it originally included 57 unions. The level of coordination was impressive. Each union submitted to the AFL-CIO a list of its current locals in the two county area, and a list of potential organizing targets. The unions then divided themselves into five divisions: hard goods (lumber, steel, glass, etc.); soft goods (textiles, oil, chemicals, etc.); retail; government; and hotel and restaurant. Each union agreed to contribute money and organizers, according to their size. The original budget was for $230,000 a year, half of which the AFL-CIO paid, including for a director. The unions in each division then sat down and hashed out the acceptable organizing targets. Unless the group agreed to the target, the unions would not organize there. Unions would sometimes agree to petition jointly, or to confer with one another, but they would not oppose one another.

It worked. After five years, by 1967, the joint effort had helped hold union membership in Los Angeles at 30% density, even as national density slid from 30% to about 28%. There were over 1100 union elections in that same period, a whopping 98% of which only had one union on the ballot (compared to 89% nationwide.) They also counted 800 voluntary recognitions, many of which were card check agreements, and a number of new government units. By 1967, they’d organized about 110,000 new members in the two counties. Many of the elections were in traditional manufacturing, like UAW at Cadillac Gauge and USWA at Harvey Aluminum. Others were in newer industries, like the Machinists’ win at Scientific Data Systems or the Chemical Workers’ wins at Shell Chemical Division and Bio-Sciences laboratory, the largest privately-owned clinical lab in the world.

But it wasn’t perfect. Many of the unions backed out - - by 1965, the group had shrunk from 57 to 39 unions - - and the project was constantly having to harass unions to pay their share of the costs. One of the great tragedies of the project was that it dropped retail entirely as one of the original five divisions when the Retail Clerks and Amalgamated Clothing Workers union could not settle their differences over who should organize in retail. This was a very bad choice. Retail would end up driving the 21st century economy, and it would largely be non-union. In this case, the union movement would have done better to have a big vision for retail that pushed the bounds of what was acceptable by the jurisdictional unions, and insist on a plan that worked - - even if feathers were forever ruffled.

The project also did not have a seat for community groups, despite the fact that there were
contemporaneous models it could have emulated. For example, by the late 1960s Walter Reuther was driving through the UAW and IUD what he labeled a “socially-conscious” unionism which sunk resources into organizing the poor, such as through backing tenants’ unions. The LAOOC did not have this level of engagement. It stuck to traditional organizing, sometimes supported by ministers and community groups, but which was designed to lift wages and working conditions through traditional collective bargaining only. Such a narrow view later helped divide unions from the larger community, an issue that late 20th century Los Angeles labor leaders would be forced to tackle.

However, what the project did have was longevity. A core of about 35 unions stuck with the project for over twenty years. They’d meet each quarter, banging out those approved targets. The project served to not only coordinate organizing, but to spur it, for organizers routinely had to go sit next to their peers from other unions and talk about the state of their campaigns. By 1978, they’d organized 358,000 workers, 217,000 of whom came through board elections, and about 114,000 of whom came through new organizing in governmental sectors. By 1984, they’d organized nearly half a million.

The leaders who formed the LAOOC in 1963 had no idea that they were enriching the soil in which the LA County Federation of Labor - - under the leadership of Miguel Contreras and Maria Elena Durazo - - would grow a new kind of union movement after 1996, rooted in immigrants and deeply intertwined with the community. The 21st century Union City that is Los Angeles rests on the willingness of these early union leaders to think beyond their narrow institutions, to challenge their organizations’ cultures, and to invest in a geographically-targeted, long-term, joint organizing effort.



Sources:
Based on various memos, statistics, newspaper articles and meeting minutes surrounding the LAOOC, found at the George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, MD, RG28-002, Organizing Department, Boxes 1, 52, 53 and RG95-009, Alan Kistler papers, Box 6, Box 12.
Bernstein, Harry. “AFL-CIO Drive Here Will Fail Hoffa Says,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1963.
Murphy, Michael J. “Developing Communities: The UAW and Community Unions in Los Angeles, 1965-1974.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Vol. 6, Issue 4, 19.
National Labor Relations Board Annual Report, 1965.