By the late 1950s, with something of a post-war truce between capital and labor, L.A.’s auto plants (GM, Ford, Chrysler, Nash, Studebaker, Kaiser) were second only to the Detroit area in car production. We had large branches of all the major tire companies, the major steel companies, aluminum, shipbuilding and ship repair, and of course most of aerospace. These had almost all been unionized in resolute CIO drives in the late 1930s and 1940s, the old CIO headquarters is still there at 5833 S. Avalon. Look for a three-story brick warehouse with a tower on the roof.

It was the last time the 1% were smart enough or pressured enough by their smarter members to realize that the labor truce benefited everybody (except the Communists of course, who were driven out of the CIO unions they helped build—thanks to the cold war and “liberal” organizations like the Americans for Democratic Action, ADA (Here and Here).

The GI Bill educated a generation, and good union wages meant American workers could afford homes and decent lives–like my own ex-GI working class dad. And the economy expanded regularly with only the usual short recessions, 1953 for ten months, 1958 for eight months, etc. (This is capitalism, after all.)

The Second Great Black Migration (Here and Here), from 1941 to the 1960s, attracted hundreds of thousands of southern African-Americans to south L.A. for good industrial jobs, and the CIO unions–influenced by the Communists and other radicals who had built them–in general welcomed blacks in.

But the oligarchs, let’s use that wonderful Russian term, like the Kochs and their 1% ilk wanted something else. (Their dad Fred C. Koch was a co-founder of the John Birch Society (Here and Here). These rich people play a very long game, involving foundations and PACs, secret financing and invite-only forums of CEOs, Supreme Court Justices and Republican senators and governors. They’ve been organizing hard since at least the Goldwater era to undo the New Deal and gerrymander Congress.

First, many L.A. factories were moved to the non-union South and then overseas. Not really a conspiracy. Just a way to increase profits, break unions and boost stock prices, and, oh yeah, boost executive compensation obscenely.

By the late 1970s, virtually every car plant, steel company, tire company and much of aerospace in L.A. was gone, with only a few holdouts. A persistent union struggle at Bethlehem Steel–Lady Beth–in Vernon helped keep the furnaces going until 1982. And GM-Van Nuys held out until 1992, making only Camaros there, and then they ran to Canada. (Remember the TV ad for the Camaro–after 1992: “What you’d expect from the country that invented rock n’ roll.” When did Canada invent rock n’ roll?)

Into the 1970s, L.A. also had strong building-trades unions, with their own training programs. L.A. carpenters were proud they could frame a house three times faster than anywhere else. Most of the huge housing tracts built in the post-war boom were union made. If a contractor tried to bring in non-union labor for anything, the workers would down hammers.

Then in the late 1960s along came the Associated Builders and Contractors, well known and hated in the building trades even today as ABC. This front group never enrolled more than 1% of the actual licensed contractors anywhere, but they had vast finances from the anti-union movement and its strategists, yes, including the Koch brothers and their sub-rosa ALEC right-wing task force.

The official ABC philosophy was, and is, to promote a “merit shop.” You can guess: just another euphemism for non-union shop with no security or seniority rights. By 2011, construction in L.A.–once almost entirely building-trades unions–was down to 14% unionized, and much of what remained was only because government contracts often require unions. The ABC also founded their own “Decker College” to replace union schools and apprenticeships. But Decker was such a for-profit sucker racket that the FBI shut it down in 2004.

Even with building-trades unions crushed and the big unionized factories gone, there are still thousands of small factories, warehouses and assembly shops in eastern LA County. When I worked in a mid-size factory in the 1970s the older union people called these smaller non-unionized factories “bucket shops.” According to Wikipedia the terms origin is: “from England in the 1820s. During the 1820s, street urchins drained beer kegs which were discarded from public houses. The street urchins would take the dregs to an abandoned shop and drink them. This practice became known as bucketing, and the location at which they drained the kegs became known as a bucket shop. The idea was transferred to illegal brokers because they too sought to profit from sources too small or too unreliable for legitimate brokers to handle.[9] The term bucket shop came to apply to low-class pseudo stock brokerages that did not execute trades (fraud)

Until the explosive growth of Chinese capitalism in the 1980s and the export of millions of US jobs, the two largest light industrial areas on the planet were eastern L.A. County, and mid Orange County (the Costa Mesa-Santa Ana-Irvine-Newport complex) where I once worked in a unionized (United Rubber Workers) factory called Voit that made high-quality basketballs and footballs. It was bought up by AMF, eventually moved to Mexico and China, and the balls became trash. The top Voit lines had once been used by the pros, but no more.

Los Angeles County, if it were a nation, would be the 20th largest economy in the world. There are still plenty of low-skilled workers, mostly Latino now, but most of the bigger unions are gone.

Latinos staff 100% of the farming labor in L.A. (there’s still quite a bit in outlying areas), 100% of the cement finishing, 90% of shuttle truck driving from the port and most of the janitors, food-service workers, and garbage-truck workers, and roughly the same for many other small industries like electronics assembly.

Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine, an experienced union and political organizer, worked with a group of community organizers, immigrant rights advocates and university people on a plan called LA MAP (Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project). They worked out a detailed and realistic organizing plan that might have worked. The unions would all co-operate on community-based “drives” down the Alameda corridor—the heart of Latino working class southeast L.A. County–using every union and church and community organizer they could recruit.

Those who signed on would be funneled into the appropriate unions. Others would help in their own way. Mexicanos are not shy about unions. Mexico has plenty of militant ones. And the Justice for Janitors movement has worked wonders, as has UNITE-HERE for sewing and hotel workers—even though many of them bravely had to take part without a green card.

Okay, LA MAP might not have worked out–who knows? It got lukewarm union support, mostly from the Teamsters, which was later withdrawn. For most of the aging second-tier leadership of the bigger unions, it just wasn’t what they knew. They knew big single-shop organizing like the 1930s. Hot-target organizing, but not community organizing or anything else innovative. Pity.

This is the situation migrants step into in L.A., looking for work.

Next week Migrant Labor-4 of 4

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