Union leaders and activists from around the country in Los Angeles on Sept. 8 for the AFL-CIO Convention will get a close look at a regional labor movement with membership numbers holding steady or even slightly increasing.

Compare this with much of the United States where the percentage of workers represented by unions is dropping rapidly and persistently.

Ask Los Angeles Times reporter Alana Semuels why union membership in California rose by 100,000 in 2012, and she’ll give you a simple answer:

“Latino workers.”

To explain the contrast between the trend in California and the United States as a whole—where union membership dropped last year by 400,000—Semuels turned to some credible sources, including Steve Smith of the state labor federation who cited “an appetite among these low-wage workers to try to get a collective voice to give themselves opportunity and a middle-class lifestyle.”

California’s second-largest city has a progressive mayor, former Democratic U.S. House member Bob Filner, who beat his Republican rival by three points in November.

The 70-year-old Filner spent 20 years in Congress. A reliable and articulate liberal—with high marks on his AFL-CIO, ADA and Sierra Club scorecards—he’s a founding member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and was a “Freedom Rider” during the early 1960s civil rights movement, spending two months in jail for “disturbing the peace and inciting a riot.”

This is a cross-post by Labor Lou. 

A neighborhood on the eastern edge of the L.A. basin and shorthand for the movie and television industries, Hollywood had its own city charter for fewer than 10 years before being annexed by Los Angeles in 1910. By joining L.A., it gained access to the water supply then beginning to flow by aqueduct from the Owens Valley, 233 miles to the north.

D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille and Charlie Chaplin filmed there but now, in fact, studios and related businesses are situated throughout the Los Angeles metropolitan area, with particular concentrations in Culver City, Burbank, the San Fernando Valley and—of course—the part of town known as Hollywood.