Maria Elena Durazo is the executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. The organization represents more than 800,000 workers in 300 unions, ranging from hotel employees to entertainment industry professionals. In recent years Durazo has become an outsize voice on issues that will shape California's economic and environmental future. The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Durazo grew up in California as one of nine siblings working in the fields. Crop-dusters frequently flew overhead, spraying insecticides as her family labored. Durazo spoke about her work with Wade Graham, whose spring 2007 OnEarth story, "Dark Side of the New Economy," looked at diesel pollution at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

What perspective did your childhood give you about the links between labor and environmental issues?

There were times when we would get ill. Now, looking back, of course it had to be connected to all the insecticides that were used at the time. But I did not really make the connections until very recently, when a friend reminded me that it was César Chávez and the United Farm Workers union who were the first to demand restrictions on the use of pesticides. It was through unionization that the issue of environmental justice was first taken up in California. We lived it. It's very real to me.

So it makes sense that workers' health has been a prominent part of your work.

I think it's a very natural way of looking at environmental justice issues. I saw that when I went into other industries as an organizer. For example, what kind of toxic materials are housekeepers handling in the hotel industry, where they are often asked to use stronger cleaning fluids? We're trying to make those connections as we go into big union campaigns. Now we instinctively ask: Is there an environmental issue on the job? Does it affect consumers? Is there a broader community issue? Is there a moral issue, so that the clergy can be more involved? Is there an immigrants' rights issue? In order to win, we need to understand those connections.

The union movement has been steadily losing workers. Can the shift to a green economy reverse that trend?

Can the creation of green jobs and green technology by themselves reverse the trend? No. Should we take advantage of the fact that new jobs are being created by the expansion of green industries? Yes. But our work is cut out for us, because green jobs are not necessarily good-paying jobs. Unfortunately, we've seen many ways in which employers, through contracting and subcontracting, try to avoid paying workers what they deserve -- and without unionization, without the proper worker-protection standards.

How do you prevent the export of jobs because of lower labor costs overseas? For example, most solar panels and wind turbines are being made in China.

Certainly we are not going to be able to compete in the manufacture of some products. But I think, first, that there is a growing public awareness as to the use of our tax dollars. We want them to be invested in this country to rebuild our middle class. There is a lower tolerance now for saying, "Let's make it cheaper somewhere else." Second, we have the capacity in this country to make products in a quality way, and unions have a long history of apprenticeship programs that are very dedicated to quality.

Los Angeles used to be a major manufacturing area, but now it's a kind of Sunbelt rust belt. What are the chances of bringing serious manufacturing back to the city?

We just got approval for a project we think is pivotal to bringing back manufacturing along the lines of green technology: producing light-rail cars that will be used right here, including on the Gold Line extension to East L.A. [In September, an Italian company contracted with the city to build 100 light-rail cars on a 14-acre site in a blighted area in East Los Angeles. The contract is now up for bid again after the company's recent withdrawal.] A couple of decades ago, a prison was going to be built on the site. The East L.A. community rejected the prison and said they wanted something productive there. Well, it took a long time, but it's going to happen, with a green factory that will create a large number of permanent jobs as well as construction jobs.

 
But isn't that what we were talking about? How do you justify building rail cars in downtown Los Angeles rather than buying them from Italy -- or China, for that matter?

We need the jobs here. And producing light-rail cars for public transportation will be good for the environment. What better way of connecting the dots and making sure that the taxes paid by people who work hard every day are brought back home? If all we want is cheap, cheap, cheap, then we end up with the economy we have today, where everybody is suffering.

There's been a history of resistance to environmental regulation by companies and unions -- for instance, autoworkers resisting fuel economy standards. Has that changed?

The labor movement certainly has not moved as quickly as it should have. It has to realize that opposing regulations just for the sake of saving some jobs is not going to give us a win-win. There is a much greater awareness now of the damage to our environment, as there is in the rest of the population. We are competing with the rest of the world for jobs, and you get those jobs by looking for places where there is an overlap in the interests of unions and environmentalists. I know on the national level there are very strong green-blue alliances, with the construction unions and the steelworkers in the forefront.

I heard that the steelworkers in Los Angeles County are campaigning to organize car-wash workers.

Yes, it's a great campaign. We started with a checklist of our potential allies. Can we get the clergy? Can we get the other unions? How about the environmental issues? What kind of toxics are used in car washes? Are there any protections for the workers? Are those toxics going into the water? When you multiply the number of car washes and the number of cars in Los Angeles, what's the larger impact? So a campaign for justice for car-wash workers, when we win it, will have a much broader impact on the health of the community. I bet you the majority of us never think about what's in the cleaning fluids we use when we wash our cars, or where they're going to end up.

So it isn't necessarily the environmental community that raises the environmental concerns.

Exactly. Another good example would be the campaign to clean up air pollution from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

I know that one problem there was regulating the emissions of independent truck drivers who couldn't afford to buy expensive new trucks that met environmental standards.

The Teamsters' approach to organizing the truckers was completely different from previous attempts, when they just said, "How do we get them into the union?" and that was pretty much it. This time, they said, "Look, there's a real problem with these trucks. They're old or beat-up, they spew out pollutants, and 99 percent of them are owned by immigrant workers from the local community." Just recognizing the breadth of the issues immediately set us off in a different direction from the past, talking to the immigrants' rights community, then starting the conversation with environmental justice leaders.

Where do you see an especially urgent need for green-blue cooperation in California?

The one we started with: migrant farmworkers and the growing of food. Progress in that industry has been too slow. Part of that may be that the farmworkers' union is a very, very poor union. And other efforts at reforming agriculture have been too slow to recognize the connection with the workers. Instead, they start by saying the food has to be organically grown, and that's about it. There's got to be a deeper understanding that without the workers at the table on these environmental justice issues, you can go around and around without solving the problem.