Truck Drivers

This chapter examines the monumental campaign to raise labor and environmental standards in the trucking industry at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. Building on the blue-green coalition launched in the CBA and big-box contexts—and incorporating central lessons from a decade of community–labor organizing in Los Angeles—the Campaign for Clean Trucks emerged as a fight over air quality but ultimately advanced as a local policy struggle over working conditions for roughly sixteen thousand short-haul port truck drivers. For these drivers, the central problem was their misclassification as independent contractors. Misclassification forced drivers to bear all the costs of operation—contributing to poorly maintained dirty diesel trucks causing air pollution—while depriving them of the right to organize unions to improve labor conditions. Restoring drivers to the status of employees was the mutual goal bringing together the labor and environmental movements in this campaign. It rested on a novel legal foundation: The ports, as publicly owned and operated entities, had the power to define the terms of entry for trucking companies through contracts called concession agreements. The campaign—led by LAANE, the Teamsters union, and NRDC—leveraged this contracting power to win passage of the landmark 2008 Clean Truck Program, which committed trucking companies seeking to enter the Los Angeles port to a double conversion: of dirty to clean fuel trucks (thus reducing pollution) and of independent contractor to employee drivers (thus enabling unionization). However, the program’s labor centerpiece—employee conversion—was invalidated by an industry preemption lawsuit that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. As a result, the policy gains from a blue-green campaign built on mutual interest were split apart and reallocated, resulting in environmental victory but labor setback. Why the coalition won the local policy battle but lost in court—and how the labor movement responded to this legal setback through an innovative strategy to maneuver around preemption—are the central questions this chapter explores.

Day Laborers

Day laborers are immigrant men who seek daily employment on street corners, often next to home improvement stores and other venues trafficked by contractors and do-it-yourselfers. The combination of a strong construction market and rising undocumented immigration powered the growth of day labor through the 1990s. Although part of the underground economy, day laborers were some of the most visible immigrant workers, standing on the corners in affluent communities to find jobs. Over the next decade, they became the target of legal backlash, with more than forty cities in the greater L.A. area passing anti-solicitation ordinances making it a crime for day laborers to solicit work from the street corner. This chapter examines the coordinated legal and organizing campaign to challenge these ordinances led by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). The campaign challenged local jurisdictions in the greater L.A. area that actively enforced anti-solicitation ordinances. The strategy developed by MALDEF and NDLON focused on organizing day laborers at enforcement hotspots into committees that served as plaintiffs in federal court lawsuits claiming that ordinances violated laborers’ First Amendment right to seek work. The campaign thus adopted a libertarian, rather than an anti-discrimination, legal frame. This frame was used to build precedent toward the end goal of invalidating the most aggressive ordinances: those modeled after Redondo Beach’s pioneering 1987 law banning solicitation in any public right-of-way, including sidewalks. The chapter charts the trajectory of this test-case strategy, which culminated in a seminal 2011 federal appellate court decision striking down Redondo Beach’s ordinance and thereby clearing the way for day laborer solicitation in public space regionwide.

From Riots to Recession

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s goals, methods, and contributions. It sets forth the book’s central aim—to deepen scholarship on lawyers and social movements by closely attending to the richness and complexity of contemporary practice at the local level—and then describes the L.A. low-wage worker organizing campaigns through which this aim is pursued. The campaigns are situated within theoretical perspectives on movement lawyering, labor studies, and local government law, and then placed in historical context. Tracing the history of Los Angeles’s economic and political transformation—from the postwar era to the 1992 civil unrest sparked by the Rodney King verdict through the 2008 recession—the chapter shows how the campaigns grew out of trends producing greater inequality while also creating the organizational foundation of community–labor activism to challenge it. The concluding section provides a demographic overview of the industries targeted by the L.A. campaigns—garment, day labor, retail, hospitality, grocery, and trucking—and a road map of the chapters that follow.

Retail Workers

This chapter charts the Los Angeles community benefits movement, launched at the turn of the millennium to strengthen low-income communities by transforming local redevelopment. The movement was built on an emergent partnership between community-based organizations promoting “equitable development” in the face of gentrification and labor movement groups, led by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), challenging the city-sponsored proliferation of low-wage jobs, especially in the multifaceted retail industry. The legal instrument used to codify campaign victories was the community benefits agreement, or CBA—a contract under which a developer agreed to provide specific levels of living wage jobs, affordable housing, and other benefits in exchange for community support for project approvals and public subsidies. Because CBAs offered a proactive response to redress negative development externalities through contractual compromise, they rested on a distinctive model of community organizing—leveraging the power of broad-based coalitions to extract benefits through negotiation—and thus enlisted a particular role for lawyers focused on strategic counseling and contract drafting. This chapter traces the evolution and outcomes of Los Angeles’s seminal community benefits campaigns: from the nation’s first CBA with the developer of a transformational downtown sports and entertainment complex anchored around the Staples Center, through a $500 million CBA centered on environmental mitigation in connection with the expansion of the L.A. International Airport, to the Grand Avenue CBA, which focused on affordable housing production in a proposed upscale development on downtown’s Bunker Hill. Following this arc, the chapter shows how the CBA movement conferred significant benefits on low-income communities and institutionalized pro-labor policy in the city—while also revealing tensions in the community-labor alliance at the movement’s heart and the limits of contract-based solutions to inequality.

An Equal Place?

This concluding chapter considers how local movements to make Los Angeles a more equal place—one in which marginalized workers have greater protections, better wages and benefits, and a larger voice in the workplace and politics—have depended on a new generation of lawyers, embedded in local networks and committed to local action, who have negotiated an equal place of their own in advancing economic justice campaigns. It does so by exploring the larger contributions of the book’s five case studies: assessing what they teach about the meaning of equality both as a process and an outcome of legal advocacy in the contemporary American metropolis. To do so, the chapter offers two perspectives on local legal mobilization, one empirical and the other theoretical. First, from an empirical perspective, it synthesizes evidence from the case studies to evaluate the central role that lawyers have played in the struggle for economic justice in Los Angeles—and how their leadership has contributed to regulatory change strengthening workers’ economic rights and political representation. Second, from a theoretical perspective, the chapter reflects on the book’s lessons for the study of lawyering, labor, and local government law, drawing attention to how the L.A. campaigns inform critical normative aspirations within each field—the possibility of reviving progressive lawyering to address the challenges of neoliberalism, rehabilitating federal labor law to contest economic inequality, and reimagining local government law as a catalyst for national reform.

Garment Workers

Launched in 1995 with the discovery of more than seventy enslaved Thai workers in a suburban apartment complex surrounded by barbed wire fence, the movement to end garment sweatshops—led by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center—pioneered the integration of strategic litigation and worker organizing to challenge inequality in Los Angeles. The sweatshop regime was built upon a legal foundation of subcontracting, which insulated retailers and manufacturers from the contractors actually producing clothing. At its most ambitious, the campaign sought to make legal responsibility follow economic power, rupturing the fiction that protected retailers and manufacturers from labor abuses such as those uncovered in the Thai worker case. Chapter 2 shows how lawyers built a powerful alliance with labor and grassroots organizers, won important legal victories in court, and achieved passage of a landmark state law creating manufacturer liability for contract labor violations. It then traces the campaign through the fierce battle against retailer Forever 21, which showed the power of industry countermobilization and ultimately marked the end of the litigation campaign. This outcome underscored a central lesson of legal mobilization in the new economy: Individual enforcement and litigation strategies, even when paired with innovative organizing and media campaigns, faced long odds challenging abuse enabled by extensive contracting and—crucially—the threat of global outsourcing. However, in fusing law and organizing, the anti-sweatshop campaign marked a new beginning in the movement against low-wage work—one that would deploy the tools honed in the garment manufacturing context to target Los Angeles’s immobile service industries.

Grocery Workers

This chapter analyzes the labor movement’s challenge to retail giant Wal-Mart, which in 2002 announced plans to open forty Supercenters in California—threatening to undermine labor standards, and union strength, in the grocery sector. It focuses on the confrontation with Wal-Mart in the separately incorporated city of Inglewood, a historically working-class African American community in South Los Angeles. There, a community-labor coalition, led by LAANE, organized to stop Supercenter development through legislative and legal challenges—a technique known as a “site fight” because it aimed to block Wal-Mart at a specific location. The chapter examines three phases of the fight, tracing how the coalition mobilized law to defeat the Inglewood proposal, design innovative policies to limit Wal-Mart’s entry into the Los Angeles market, and thwart Wal-Mart’s effort to bypass those policies by opening a small-format grocery store in historic Chinatown. In evaluating the campaign, the chapter suggests that the outcome was, in part, a product of Wal-Mart’s political miscalculation: The company’s drive for a Supercenter in Inglewood failed despite evidence of public support, in large measure because of an ill-conceived attempt to gain voter approval through a city initiative that would have completely circumvented the local planning process. Yet Wal-Mart’s defeat was not merely self-inflicted. The company’s miscalculation of the local response to the initiative was politically consequential precisely because there was a sophisticated team of activists and lawyers who used Wal-Mart’s disregard of public input to successfully mobilize community opposition to the Supercenter and build new anti-big-box policy. In that sense, the presence of a political-legal support structure, with experience mounting development-oriented campaigns from the community benefits context, was essential to Wal-Mart’s defeat—strengthening grocery labor standards in Los Angeles going forward.