As an estimated 1.8 million travelers pass through Los Angeles International Airport this holiday weekend, they will hear a sound now nearly as familiar at the airport as the roar of jumbo jets: the chants of unions.
This year, LAX and the neighborhoods around it have emerged as the leading hot spot for labor organizing in California, and perhaps in the western United States. Three major international unions are seeking to represent workers who toil at the airport or nearby businesses. In the last six months, airport janitors and the drivers of hotel shuttle buses have been organized by union locals.
The reasons for the airport's growing importance in labor organizing range widely, and include a shift in the national labor movement's strategic focus, and unions' enormous clout in Los Angeles politics.
But LAX also is attractive to the labor movement for some of the same reasons that many travelers have come to despise it: In a sprawling city, it is a compact, cramped world apart, full of workers and people. Those characteristics make it a relatively cost-effective place to organize workers and attract public attention.
"This is the frontier of unionism," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a UC Santa Barbara professor and leading labor historian. "You can leverage quasi-governmental entities such as airports to make the environment neutral if not necessarily favorable for organizing.... LAX will be a model around the country for this kind of thing."
In the run-up to the Thanksgiving holiday, when news about LAX was certain to gather attention, some unions stepped up activity around the airport.
The Engineers and Architects Assn., which represents technical and professional employees in the Los Angeles city government, the airport and other locations, has declared a one-day strike of some of its workers at LAX for Sunday. Essential workers who toil on runways and airport operations are required by court order to show up for work, however.
Labor organizing at LAX also has benefited from official actions by the city this week. On Wednesday, the City Council gave formal approval to an ordinance that would apply the "living wage" to workers at a dozen hotels near the airport -- a clear victory for Unite Here, the international union for hotel workers.
On Monday, the city attorney's office announced that the city's living wage ordinance, which guarantees wages and benefits of at least $10.64 per hour, applies to a group of about 300 janitors who clean planes at the airport. That reversed an earlier legal opinion that exempted them.
