LA City Council Debacle - Some Labor Leaders Need to Take a Class in Solidarity 101

By Jim Miller

The scandal surrounding the release of recorded conversations filled with ugly racism and homophobia between prominent Los Angeles City Council members and the head of the LA County Labor Federation quickly turned into a national storm with media coverage from coast to coast and even President Biden calling on the councilmembers to resign.  

Ron Herrera, who initially signaled more concern over the leaking of the secret recording than its contents, resigned after a wave of condemnation in labor circles that included his own Executive Board, the California Federation of Labor, and the national AFL-CIO.  Locally, the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council also chimed in with a statement.

As of this writing, LA City Council President Nury Martinez has stepped down while the other two council members involved in the scandal, Gil Cedillo and Kevin DeLeon, have yet to do so despite being effectively driven out of a public meeting in the wake of the story breaking.  Given the wave of public outrage, surely it won’t be long until they all must quit if they have even a shred of decency left.  

Much ink has been spilled elsewhere about the specifics of the comments, so I won’t belabor them here, but there are a few aspects of this utterly depressing spectacle that are illustrative of deeper problems, not just in Los Angeles politics, but, more specifically, in the labor movement.  

It should go without saying that the cherished labor motto “An injury to one is an injury to all” doesn’t easily translate to “An injury to one is an injury to all unless you are Black, white, gay, Jewish, Oaxacan, Korean, Armenian or anybody but people like me.”  But sarcasm aside, what the LA scandal reveals is that there are still too many labor leaders who have not learned a single relevant lesson from their own history.    

If you took my American labor history class at San Diego City College, one of the key things that you’d learn is that the traditional American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) narrow, bread and butter, exclusive unionism of old all too frequently marched in lockstep with a bias towards skilled crafts dominated by white, Anglo Saxon, Protestant, male workers.  

Even when this was not married to overt racism, it was still a structural hindrance to the union movement’s ability to organize workers across craft, race, gender, and other barriers that have divided the multiethnic American working class for ages.  It remained that way for much of the union movement’s early history.  Labor’s greatest gains in membership and political power only occurred after the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) led the way by organizing an inclusionary union movement that was both more diverse and stronger.  

It has taken much of the history of American labor to shift toward a more truly egalitarian movement that lives up to its old motto, and now, with labor finally on the upsurge, Herrera’s involvement in the LA scandal is not just a disgrace but a potentially serious blow to labor’s rising popularity with the larger public.  

Good on much of the LA union community along with its state and national allies for quickly condemning Herrera and pushing him out the door, but those in the house of labor need to take heed that lowest common denominator ethnic group and/or trade power politics devoid of any larger sense of solidarity, no matter who it’s driven by, is no better than the exclusionary AFL unionism of the past was for most workers who were left out in the cold.  

Indeed, one of the revelations from the leaked recordings was that Herrera was deeply committed to creating a council district favorable to Gil Cedillo by preventing the solidification of a “renters district” that would be more friendly to the interests of most working-class Latinos but less advantageous to developers.  As Fidel Martinez pointed out last week in the Los Angeles Times, “It’s worth mentioning that Cedillo’s opponent in the 1st Council District race in June, eventual winner Eunisses Hernandez, painted him as pro-developer and anti-renter. The audio suggests it was a fair attack.” 

Thus, by engaging in transactional insider politics that would reward political allies and perhaps some unions that might benefit from more development in the short term, Herrera’s narrow vision was at odds with the interests of the majority of the working-class residents he should have been looking to lift up.  Aligning with what Herrera called his “Latino caucus” of Councilmembers, he also pitted labor against the LA left on a variety of other issues as well, such as homelessness.   

And at a time when Trumpist right-wingers are playing to white working-class grievance and “replacement theory” nonsense with a kind of reactionary white identity politics, the last thing we need is a brain-dead essentialist identity politics of our own  

To grow into a real force for progressive change in America, labor needs a larger sense of solidarity than back-room power politics, petty horse trading, and blatant racism allows. At this point in our history, it’s dismaying that this even needs to be pointed out, but, sadly, it does.