In the Spirit of MLK LA Labor Holds Breakfast in Honor of those Fighting for a Living Wage

(Commerce, CA) – The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO held its annual MLK Breakfast last Friday. Held for the eleventh year in a row, the breakfast is a labor tradition where working families honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by highlighting African American labor activism in Los Angeles County. Both the Stand for Security and the Hotel Workers Rising Diversity Campaigns were honored for their efforts in moving African Americans out of poverty and one step closer into the middle class. Assemblywoman Karen Bass was also honored for becoming the first African American woman to hold the post of Majority Leader in the California State Assembly.

SEIU and UNITE HERE are working on some of the most exciting worker campaigns of our day,” said Maria Elena Durazo. “They are fighting to create good jobs, with living wages, health care and respect for their work – jobs that we can all be proud of.”

Currently, SEIU is working to organize thousands of private security officers who protect office buildings across Los Angeles, a majority of whom are African American and reside in South Los Angeles. These workers have been trying to organize since 2002 for living wages, health care and better training and, until recently, were the only building service workers in commercial buildings who had been denied the right to form a union.

The reality is that we protect lives and multi-million dollar properties, but we go home to our city’s most impoverished communities and earn poverty wages,” said Security Officer John Wilson. “The poverty line for a family of four in Los Angeles in 2002 was 18,390 a year and still our average annual wages as security officers at commercial office buildings is $18,720 a year, or $8.44 an hour.”

Last spring, UNITE HERE launched the Hotel Workers Rising campaign to lift thousands of hotel workers out of poverty in cities across North America. In Los Angeles, more than 3,500 hotel workers fought to lift themselves out of poverty by fighting for legislation signed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that granted them the right to a living wage. Now, the hotel industry is vowing to fight this new law by seeking to add a referendum on the May 15th ballot that would take this right away. Also, as part of the Hotel Workers Rising Campaign, UNITE HERE is including the demand that the unionized hotel industry commit to hiring more African-American workers. Several hotels in Southern California have already agreed to do so.

It’s no secret that the hotel industry used to hire far more African American workers but today a very small percentage are African-American,” said Donald Wilson, Community Organizer for UNITE HERE. “It’s vital that we bring these African American workers back so they too can take advantage of the worker gains in the industry.”