Miguel Contreras

During state budget deliberations each year since 2003, Republican lawmakers have tried to scuttle funding for a University of California institute dedicated to studying organized labor and workplace issues. And each year labor leaders and Democratic lawmakers have rallied to the program's defense. But this year, the fight is different. This year it's personal. In January, the UC Institute for Labor and Employment was renamed the Miguel Contreras Labor Program, after the late labor leader.

When Miguel Contreras arrived in Los Angeles in 1987 to fix the battle-scarred hotel employees union, the young national organizer worked out of the large two-story union hall at 4th and Bixel streets. "We didn't know what to think of him," recalled Maria Elena Durazo, then a local organizer who was challenging union leadership. "I was suspicious of his real intentions."

When Los Angeles County labor chief Miguel Contreras died of a heart attack in May 2005, some news reports said he had been stricken in his car after a long day of meetings. But according to an LA Weekly cover story published Thursday, Contreras was found unconscious at a business that purported to sell herbal medicines on Florence Avenue in South Los Angeles.

It was the first day of hearings on a controversial $11-billion plan to modernize and expand Los Angeles International Airport. In the gilded chamber of the Los Angeles City Council, airline representatives, residents and business leaders bustled around the marble columns. One man stood out. It wasn't just his demeanor -- the contented look of someone anticipating a big victory.

A nonprofit organization founded by Los Angeles labor chief Miguel Contreras and other union officials has successfully tapped Hollywood studios, energy companies and other large corporations for hefty donations to finance its activities over the last eight years. Through the Voter Improvement Program, union officials have found a legal end-run around a federal law that prohibits employers from giving money to organized labor.

Miguel Contreras, the son of migrant farmworkers who grew to be one of Los Angeles' most powerful labor leaders and a dominant force in city politics, died late Friday evening of an apparent heart attack. He was 52. Contreras, who worked the arid fields of the Central Valley as a boy, re-energized a sputtering Southern California labor movement struggling to regain relevancy.

When word of Miguel Contreras' death spread Friday night, top members of California's labor and political world flocked to Daniel Freeman Hospital in Inglewood in a show of respect. Presidents of unions representing truck drivers, homecare workers, city employees, janitors and supermarket checkers made their way to console relatives of the longtime Los Angeles County labor leader.

Organized labor in Los Angeles was in the doldrums last summer after a long, high-profile supermarket strike ended in humiliating defeat. Making matters worse, prominent reformers in the national labor movement were calling for the elimination of regional councils like the one headed by local union chief Miguel Contreras. It would have been a fine time for the top officer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor to go on the defensive.

California's most powerful politicians and some of its least empowered laborers crowded elbow to elbow in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on Thursday to bid farewell to Miguel Contreras, the son of migrant farmworkers who grew up to be one of the nation's strongest labor leaders and a dominant force in Los Angeles politics.