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Madeline Janis-Aparicio, the mother of Los Angeles' "living wage" movement, felt exhausted and angry.
She felt exhausted from spending five years creating and monitoring the city ordinance that requires L.A.'s municipal contractors to pay their workers far above the minimum wage.
She felt angry because a longtime adversary was involved in an initiative campaign to block the Santa Monica City Council from adopting its own living wage ordinance. To her dismay, the campaign was calling itself "Santa Monicans for a Living Wage."
This squabble, plus the years of confronting employers and their lawyers, plus the responsibility of raising three children, finally forced Janis-Aparicio to stay home for several weeks. Before retreating, she quickly raised tens of thousands of dollars from sympathetic foundations to try to prevent the initiative from qualifying for the November ballot. It was not enough: Voters in Santa Monica will now make the final decision.
That's not front-page drama, particularly in this era of renewed labor fervor in Los Angeles. Yet after a lifetime of work behind the scenes, Janis-Aparicio has emerged as labor's alter ego. Her ability to organize priests, community groups and workers has won wide admiration.
Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who introduced the living-wage ordinance, says: "She was the author of the movement that got it to happen."
The ordinance covers only a few thousand workers--airport baggage handlers, library janitors, parking-lot attendants--less than 1% of the city's work force. But to Janis-Aparicio it is a first step toward bridging the gap between the city's poor and affluent.
"That's how you create change, not thinking that you're going to have to change the wages of a million people at once but that you can have incremental goals . . . that build on each other."
Janis-Aparicio, 40, started filing suits on behalf of renters in downtown L.A. slums as soon as she got her law degree from UCLA in the mid-'80s. She went on to run a prominent Central American refugee center and then created the network behind the 1996 living wage law.
She earns $55,000 a year running Los Angeles Allied for a New Economy, a nonprofit group that was created by organized labor to rally community support for organizing drives. She and a staff of...