When Barack Obama set out to choose his secretary of Labor, his top priority was probably not recruiting an emblematic Angeleno. But in tapping Hilda L. Solis, a Democrat who represents a portion of the San Gabriel Valley in Congress, that's just what he's done.
The Latina daughter of immigrants, a product and champion of the labor movement, a staunch environmentalist, an ardent feminist and one of the gutsiest elected officials in American politics, Solis personifies the best of the new Los Angeles.
In some ways, her appointment harks back to Franklin Roosevelt's selection of Frances Perkins as his Labor secretary, not least because Los Angeles today -- like Perkins' New York a century ago -- is a city defined in large part by its huge immigrant working class.
In 1911, Perkins, then a young social worker, watched in horror as the young Jewish and Italian immigrant women who worked as seamstresses for Triangle Shirtwaist Co. leaped to their deaths rather than burn in the fire consuming their factory.
A quarter of a century later, as FDR's Labor secretary, Perkins helped write and steer to enactment the first federal minimum wage and worker protection laws, as well as the National Labor Relations Act, which gave legal protection to workers seeking to form unions.
The lives of the working poor have been a central concern for Solis as well. In 1996, as a first-term member of the California state Senate (and its first Latina member), Solis did something elected officials just don't do: She took money out of her own campaign treasury to jump-start an initiative campaign to raise the California minimum wage.
At the time, Republicans had controlled the state's Industrial Welfare Commission for 14 straight years, and the minimum wage it set was in no way a livable wage. Solis provided seed money for a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.75, and Californians passed it overwhelmingly.
In the state senate, Solis brought her distinctly working-class perspective to environmental issues. She focused on getting the carcinogens out of the air in neighborhoods where refineries made breathing risky; she worked to spruce up the L.A. and San Gabriel rivers where they ran through park-poor communities. She also crusaded against domestic violence in communities where it had been a taboo topic.
