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05/23/06
Anne McDermott>> Tonight on Life and Times --
They took to the streets after a coworker's firing, but what were they really protesting?
Paulina Gonzalez>> These workers have decided that they've had enough of these poor working conditions, of the poverty wages, of the high injury rate. So workers along the Corridor have decided that they wanted to raise their standard of living.
Anne McDermott>> And then, they made their reputation by taking theater to places it had never gone before. We profile Los Angeles's Cornerstone Theater.
These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.
Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Val Zavala>> In the 1990s, Los Angeles labor unions were at the forefront of organizing janitors and hotel workers. Well, now a new union effort is underway and it's happening along Century Boulevard, the gateway to LAX. Not one of the thirteen hotels there use union workers. Could this be the next major battlefield? Sam Louie has the story.
[Film Clip]
Sam Louie>> Hundreds of hotel workers and their supporters rallied against the LAX Hilton on Century Boulevard. They marched daily for a full week to protest the recent suspensions of seventy-five employees. Patti Simmons, a waitress at the Hilton for nineteen years, was one of those suspended without pay.
Patti Simmons>> Supporting my family and being the one suspended is very hard. My husband was really kind of, you know, "Patti, what are we going to do?" I worry about it, you know. This suspension is almost six days. It's many people like me that, you know, we have to support our families, send money to families in other countries, and we're not going to be able to it. It's very hard for us to support your family when they cut your salary completely.
Sam Louie>> The suspensions came after the workers demanded to know why a fellow employee was first disciplined and subsequently fired earlier this month. They believe the man was fired because of his vocal support for a union at the hotel.
Paulina Gonzalez>> They heard that the worker was suspended. They responded by trying to get a meeting with the manager of the hotel so that they could ask him questions and say that they felt this was an unjust disciplining of their coworker. When they asked to meet with the manager, they were rebuffed and denied and, at that point, they were suspended.
[Film Clip]
Sam Louie>> Paulina Gonzalez is with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union. She's here to highlight not only the injustice she feels is happening now, but also the injustice hotel workers have endured in all their years on the job.
Paulina Gonzalez>> One worker earlier told me that, in the fifteen years she has been here, she's gotten a ten cent raise every year, which basically means that she's been kept in poverty. Workers along the Century Boulevard, there are thirteen hotels and there are thirty-five hundred workers, and these workers have decided that they've had enough of these poor working conditions, of the poverty wages, of the high injury rates. So workers along the Corridor have decided that they wanted to raise their standard of living.
Sam Louie>> Sixty-one year old Rosa Martinez is a housekeeper at the LAX Hilton. She's been doing this for twenty years and says that the workload has gotten so hard that she rarely has time to take a break during her eight-hour shift.
Rosa Martinez>> Let me show you my worksheet. Now I have one, two, three, four, five floors and have two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten rooms. Don't finish. My supervisor give me more.
Sam Louie>> Martinez says that she supports a union, believing it could lighten her load and give her better benefits such as free health insurance.
Rosa Martinez>> Less rooms, more money, twenty years working. They pay me $10.60.
Sam Louie>> Not enough.
Rosa Martinez>> Not enough. The insurance I have to pay for half.
Sam Louie>> Half your paycheck.
Rosa Martinez>> Um-hum. Vacation? Now I don't have vacation.
Sam Louie>> No vacation?
Rosa Martinez>> No. They take out.
Marc Grossman>> In the case of franchises, and most of our hotels are franchised hotels, the decision whether or not to unionize is something we have no ability to influence one way or the other. That is completely up to the owner.
Sam Louie>> Marc Grossman is the Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs at the Hilton. He says he can't speak directly about the suspensions since that Hilton Hotel is independently owned. But Grossman tells us that the Hilton Corporation is not against unions.
Marc Grossman>> First of all, we're the most unionized hotel company there is. Over twenty percent of our United States employees are represented by some sort of labor union, so we're absolutely accustomed to negotiating with organized labor on things like wages, benefits, work rules, all of that.
Sam Louie>> Grossman feels workers at the LAX Hilton are wrong in rejecting the traditional way of voting on a union by secret ballot.
Marc Grossman>> What the union wants to do is circumvent this process and what the union wants to do is simply hand out cards. Here, sign this and, voila, if they get most of the employees to sign the cards, then the union wins the right to bargain.
Sam Louie>> Labor experts tell us that what the union wants to do is legal, but only if both the employer and the union agree to it, and management at the LAX Hilton have not agreed, claiming it would prevent them from telling workers their side.
Marc Grossman>> Just as we do in America when we're voting for president or voting for governor of California, we get the facts. We listen to both sides. We listen to Candidate A. We listen to Candidate B. We put it through the sausage grinder. We determine who we think would do a better job for us. We go into a voting booth and we make that choice.
Sam Louie>> Union supporters believe that allowing the hotel to talk to workers leads to abuses like intimidation and suspension.
Paulina Gonzalez>> A lot of them are immigrant workers, many from Mexico and Central America. Oftentimes, employers feel that they can use these kinds of tactics to scare these workers and that they won't have the courage to stand up and declare this as an injustice or file any charges with the federal government.
Janice Hahn>> "International visitors know them by name. International visitors stay at this hotel because of the excellent care and the excellent level of service that these employees give them."
Sam Louie>> Los Angeles Councilwoman, Janice Hahn, chairs the city's Tourism and Commerce Committee. She considers these workers as the face of hospitality for the city.
Janice Hahn>> I think the first point of contact, the first impression of Los Angeles, many times is these hotels along the Century Corridor. Millions of people fly into LAX every year and, a lot of times, they stop at one of those hotels along the Century Corridor.
Sam Louie>> Hahn believes that, if their working conditions improve, tourists will have a more favorable view of Los Angeles.
Janice Hahn>> Many of them are working paycheck to paycheck. They're trying to raise their families and I think we as a city can do a lot better by taking care of the very people that serve this tourism industry that means so much to the city of Los Angeles.
Sam Louie>> But she also realizes that increased wages and benefits cannot come without allowing the hotels to also increase their rates.
Janice Hahn>> We'd also like to see these hotels be allowed to raise their room rates. There is the highest occupancy rate on Century Corridor, but they have the lowest room rates. So some of the other places in the city of Los Angeles have higher room rates, but they have lower occupancy. So we want to work together with these business owners.
Sam Louie>> These protests at the LAX Hilton could be a sign of more to come across the country as tens of thousands of hotel employee contracts are set to expire by the end of the year.
Marc Grossman>> This is something that, again, we're absolutely used to and have no problem with as long as the employees can make a fully informed decision.
Sam Louie>> But when it comes to decisions about unionizing, many of these workers say they've made up their minds and know what they want and that's change.
Patti Simmons>> We need a big change. We need to make a better living for our families, for the community, you know. I'm tired of working for a long time and not seeing the light.
Sam Louie>> I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.
Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".
Val Zavala>> Have you heard the latest nickname for the Prius? Some have dubbed it the Prius-saurus because it's so slow. Could this be the beginning of a backlash against hybrids? For some opinions, we brought three people together in a kitchen conversation over the future of hybrids.
Dan Neil is the Pulitzer Prize-winning automobile writer for the Los Angeles Times. Bill Patzert is a climate expert at the Jet Propulsion Lab in La Canada. And Joe Hicks moderates their conversation. He's Vice President of CommUnity Advocates, Inc.
Joe Hicks>> Okay, guys. We're paying lots of money for gas. A lot of people seem to think hybrids are the answer. Maybe they are and maybe they aren't. Sales on some models, seemingly the larger hybrids or expensive hybrids, aren't doing well. The smaller ones apparently are. Are hybrids the answer or not?
Bill Patzert>> Well, you know, I think, myself, my conscience, I war with my environmental conscience and I also war with my love of my personal car. As I look out into the future right now, I think that the hybrid satisfies in the long run both of those needs. So myself, two thumbs up for the hybrid and I definitely see one in my future.
Joe Hicks>> As a technology, what are the up sides and down sides? Give us the answer as a car expert. You're the Times car guy. What's the up side and what's the down side of this heavy technology?
Dan Neil>> Well, there are some people who will run an analysis that says, you know, dust to dust, they require more energy to build, to recycle, etc., etc. than a regular car. I'm not persuaded that these analyses are accurate. For me, the up side is that this is really the first generation of hybrid cars. They're going to get better. Investment and technology is going to be amortized. Right now, they pay for themselves and, when gas is five bucks a gallon -- and it's going to be real soon --
Joe Hicks>> -- Oh, man, don't say that.
Dan Neil>> Oh, it's going to be more than that. You know, brace yourself. I mean, this country has got some major remodeling to do when gas reaches seven, eight, ten bucks a gallon. I mean, oil is over, right? You know, we're on the other side of peak oil. So it's inevitable. As a nonrenewable resource, you know, we're going to have to cope with oil going away.
Joe Hicks>> But is it a transitory --
Dan Neil>> -- Well, I was going to say, this technology is going to get better. We're going to have plug-in hybrids which means we're going to charge off the grid. It makes that transition to an electric car which is really the most sensible architecture for the future.
Joe Hicks>> So this is the technology that has legs on the way to somewhere else to better, more efficient hybrids. Is there something else that also might hold some promise for us in helping us out here in terms of both the environment as well as our pocketbooks?
Bill Patzert>> Well, in certain parts of the country, like in the Midwest, people are talking about ethanol and there are some pros to that definitely. We hear in the news what the Brazilians have done with sugarcane to make themselves foreign oil independent.
Dan Neil>> Yeah, except they don't grow any sugarcane in Iowa and Kansas.
Joe Hicks>> Lots of corn. Not much sugarcane.
Bill Patzert>> But answering Joe's question, myself, I think that a lot of the problem is the infrastructure. Right now, there's tremendous infrastructure in this country for me and my car and you and your gas station, all right? Now the real question is how to make that more efficient and make it cleaner so it will be better for the environment not just the local air quality, but the global environment. When I look out into the next couple of decades, myself, I see a hybrid revolution.
Joe Hicks>> But Americans have a love affair with cars, particularly here in southern California. We love this sort of various choices. People, you know, say "For my needs, I need a big Suburban or I need a big, huge pickup truck" or whatever. So it's kind of a democracy of choice, but, you know, is the marketplace going to finally drive us whether we like it or not?
Dan Neil>> I have doubts that the marketplace is going to make a good smart decision because of the inequity in income in this country. You know, you're still going to have a large number of people who can afford to drive whatever they want regardless of that vehicle's social or ecological impact, which is going to set a bad example. Now, we're going to have a diversity of choices because not all -- you're not going to run semi tractor trailers on electricity, okay? It's just impractical. Not in the short term anyway.
So you're going to have diesel, you're going to have biodiesel, you're going to have ethanol, even though, by some calculations, it takes more energy to make ethanol than it returns as a vehicle fuel. But the trick is, you know, we need liquid fuel because liquid fuel has the energy density for a lot of our needs. Electric vehicles will take care of the rest.
Now the bigger issue as a driver, for me, emotionally is carbon. You know, we've got a major problem with carbon output. We've got to address that and, if people don't do it by choice and if we can't bring social opprobrium to bear on people with big carbon footprints, we're going to have to do it by government fiat. I don't believe that that's a bad thing.
Joe Hicks>> So we should have the government force us into our --
Dan Neil>> -- Well, CAFE regulations are exactly that. CAFE says, you know, this vehicle, there's a certain range that is listed that cars have to get in terms of fuel economy. I don't think it's like, you know, the ministry of car choice. It's just a sensible public policy.
Bill Patzert>> Well, you know, you guys, let's get right down to the facts here. In the past few administrations, we've had people actually given tax rebates for buying SUV super monsters.
Dan Neil>> Right. A hundred thousand dollars for buying an Excursion. How about that? That's a good plan. That'll work.
Bill Patzert>> You know, if we're serious about this, the government can turn that around and penalize low-mileage automobiles and trucks and give large tax breaks to the next generation and the generation beyond that of hybrid users. So, you know, I think it's a reasonable thing to do because it's good for the environment.
Dan Neil>> But can we do it to the economy?
Joe Hicks>> But do you really believe that, if we get to five, seven, nine dollars a gallon, you're still going to have people buying Excursion-level cars? Aren't they going to be driving like you see in Europe? More of these little tiny bubble cars?
Bill Patzert>> Here's the fact. At renewal time, automobiles in this country is four percent per year, all right? So a lot of what you see today is going to be here for a long time. So this revolution, this hybrid revolution, is going to take decades, all right? People, instead of buying used Corollas and Excursions, ten years from now, they're going to buy used hybrids.
Dan Neil>> That's if we have a decade or two.
Joe Hicks>> But even in the interim, don't you think that people will, you know, if you're recycling cars, if they buy used cars, they're still going to say, "I'm not going to buy a used Explorer. I'm going to buy a used Civic or Corolla."
Dan Neil>> Yeah, maybe they will, but, look, vehicle choice is dependent on what's available. The government has to do more. The House Energy Committee -- it was proposed yesterday or this week. I think it was yesterday -- thirty-three miles per gallon meets CAFE standards for combined fleet cars and trucks. That didn't stand a chance in hell, okay? You know, the government is letting us down because representatives can't take the heat.
Bill Patzert>> It's politically correct to be environmental and drive a Prius.
Dan Neil>> Well, it's politically correct and politically expedient to vote environmental, but the hydrogen thing is a total money waster and it's --
Bill Patzert>> -- the hydrogen car?
Dan Neil>> The hydrogen economy is a total net energy loser and it's going to cost billions and it's a complete cul-de-sac in terms of technology. We have to stop that in California.
Bill Patzert>> It's a diversion on the part of the present administration not to deal with this larger oil consumption issue.
Dan Neil>> Remember what GM said? They said, "We're going to have a working hydrogen fuel cell car on the road by 2010, but in the meantime, don't raise CAFE standards because we need that money to build that car." Well, that ain't going to happen.
Joe Hicks>> Anyway, guys, thanks for coming in. It's been a good conversation. We'll have to do more of this.
Dan Neil>> Thanks for having us, Joe.
Joe Hicks>> We'll be back.
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Val Zavala>> For those of us able to afford theater tickets, it's hard to imagine that, for thousands of southern Californians, theater is beyond their reach. Well, that's where the Cornerstone Theater comes in. It brings theater to the people and, for many of them, their first step is on stage. Vicki Curry has their story.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> A group of people are gathered in downtown Los Angeles. They come from different neighborhoods and range in age and ethnicity, but they have one thing in common. They're all here to put on a play.
Bill Rauch>> "So tonight is our first time to begin to work toward how the play is going to end."
Vicki Curry>> This is the Cornerstone Theater Company doing the same thing it's done for two decades, taking live theater to different communities and casting local residents to work with the company.
Bill Rauch>> We make plays that involve usually first-time artists alongside professional members of our ensemble and the plays are always set in or somehow about the community that we're collaborating with and that we're performing for.
Vicki Curry>> Bill Rauch is the Artistic Director of Cornerstone. Since 1986, the company has staged over fifty plays across the country.
Bill Rauch>> We wanted to do something that was not about doing work in kind of the cultural palaces, if you will, of theater around the country, but to deliberately go into, you know, the church basements or the social hall or, you know, the community space, and create the highest level, most innovative professional theater we could in very unusual community settings.
Vicki Curry>> Cornerstone has built a national reputation for reaching nontraditional theater audiences. It's a far cry from how it first began. It all started when Rauch, his co-founder, Alison Carey and a group of college friends from Harvard, talked about working in theater after graduation.
Bill Rauch>> We had read a very damning statistic that only two percent of the American population went to professional theater on any kind of a regular basis, so we were freaked out that we would, even if we were lucky enough to be successful, end up performing for a very, very tiny minority of the American people.
Vicki Curry>> They wanted to perform for people who normally didn't go to theater and decided to involve them to make their productions more exciting. They begged family and friends for donations and hit the road.
Bill Rauch>> We got in the van and we drove around the country and went to various small towns around the country, rural communities, and put on plays with people who lived there. We just picked regions of the country that we were interested in. Sometimes just places that we knew very little about.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> They went from North Dakota to Texas, Oregon to Maine, and plenty of other places in between.
Bill Rauch>> We would just move into a town and go out and meet people and it was always about -- and still is -- about building relationships with one person at a time and sometimes it takes incredible perseverance. Sometimes people just pour out of the woodwork.
Vicki Curry>> Cornerstone originally intended to stage classic plays, but in working with the communities, they soon realized their audiences might not relate to the classics.
Bill Rauch>> It was not until we were doing "Hamlet" in North Dakota that it suddenly dawned on us that we could make the theatrical experience even more immediate by adapting the text.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> The company spent four years on the road staging plays in twelve towns. It then created what would become a trademark of Cornerstone: the Bridge Show.
Bill Rauch>> We brought people together from all twelve of those communities and we created a new show that went on a national tour back to everybody's hometown.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> In 1992 after five years of traveling, Cornerstone Theater Company was ready to settle down. The members felt they would have more impact if they moved to a big city.
Bill Rauch>> Because we could work with communities that were incredibly different in terms of culture, language, socio-economics, any number of factors, but were geographically very close to each other and we could work with these different communities and then encourage them to come together.
Vicki Curry>> But the company members couldn't decide which city. Alison Carey pushed for Los Angeles.
Bill Rauch>> She wanted Los Angeles because of how much Los Angeles was the United States of the twenty-first century. The complexity of the landscape of Los Angeles, all of that was daunting and really enticing at the same time.
Vicki Curry>> Cornerstone's first local production was with the Angeles Plaza Senior Housing Project.
Bill Rauch>> Our auditions were on the Monday after the Friday of the Los Angeles uprising, and it was a very grim confirmation that we'd come to the right city just in terms of anything that we might offer as artists in terms of building bridges between and within communities. It felt like, okay, we're where we need to be.
Vicki Curry>> After two more projects with other communities, Cornerstone put on its first Los Angeles Bridge show.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> Several other projects and Bridge shows followed. The Central Avenue Chalk Circle with residents of Watts.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> Broken Hearts with different B.H. neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and Beverly Hills.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters with representatives from ten communities of faith.
[Film Clip]
Bill Rauch>> And now we don't even conceive of doing a community collaboration without thinking about how is it leading to a Bridge show? How is it part of a cycle? And we try to think about the work very holistically that way. We've even done a Bridge show that bridges previous Bridge shows.
Vicki Curry>> As Cornerstone's reputation has grown, so have the opportunities. Large established theaters began asking the company to stage productions, but the members hesitated. They wondered if they'd be selling out, compromising their mission of community-based theater. They decided it wasn't a problem.
[Film Clip]
Bill Rauch>> It was very exciting actually because the community collaborators in the piece and community-based audience members who had never set foot in that theater felt ownership of that theater because it was their story happening on that stage.
Vicki Curry>> Cornerstone's status has also led the company into education. It now teaches other theater professionals how to stage community plays.
Bill Rauch>> We're influencing the field not only with our immediate circle and not only with people who happen to live in a community, but with theatre professionals from all over the country who want to learn how we do what we do, to take it back into their own communities.
Vicki Curry>> It's been twenty years since a bunch of kids created Cornerstone Theater Company. They never dreamt they would come this far.
Bill Rauch>> We were blessed with an idea that really inspired people from the very beginning, so I think we are around and we're as strong as we are twenty years later because of the mission and we're all here to serve this mission of bringing people together through theater. People who would otherwise never meet suddenly are creating something together and it does change peoples' lives.
[Film Clip]
Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.
Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Sponsored in part by:
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