This Union Organizer is Running for LA City Council to Empower Working People
We spoke with Hugo Soto-Martinez, Los Angeles City Council candidate for District 13. Soto-Martinez is a 15-year veteran of union organizing with UNITE HERE! Local 11, running on a platform of increased workplace justice and progressive approaches towards issues like homelessness and policing. Here, Soto-Martinez talks about his experience as a child of immigrants who learned the benefits of organized labor at an early age, as well as how he plans to use these experiences to uplift working-class people on the City Council.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
RIFT Magazine: I usually start these interviews with a general question; who are you and what are you running for? In your case, I read your bio on your website, I think it’s interesting because your experience as a union worker seems to have really propelled you to the campaign you’re working on now. So just kind of introduce yourself, your campaign, what you’re running for, and also talk about the influence that being in organized labor has had on your development and getting to this point.
Hugo Soto-Martinez: Yeah, for sure. My name is Hugo Soto-Martinez. I am running for LA City Council District 13, and I’ve been an organizer for UNITE HERE! Local 11 for over fifteen years now. My development has a lot to do with my personal life. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, the second oldest of six kids, to immigrant parents who came from Mexico. My parents, for most of my life, were street vendors. Due to many different circumstances I started working at a hotel, a fancy, four-star hotel in downtown Los Angeles, when I was sixteen years old. And I worked there through high school, and also through college. I went to UC Irvine, but I commuted back and forth. I used to work Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and then I would drive back to school and go to school Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning. So I did that the whole time.
In 2006, it’s my last year of college. I've been there for seven years now. One of my coworkers came up to me and said, in a very interesting way, that they’re organizing the union, and I was very excited. At the time I was practicing my LSAT, I had multiple job interviews set up, because I was like six weeks away from graduation, and I decided to join the fight. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because I've learned a ton of amazing skills; first and foremost to empower people, to listen to people, to help people recognize their own strength, and what it means to be a part of a collective, and the power that comes with that collective. And most importantly to uplift their stories, uplift their struggles, not mine. And so it’s been a wonderful fifteen years. I’m very happy to have organized many members into the union. These are like life changing experiences; people have higher wages, health insurance, and many other benefits. And so I hope to take some of the many things that I’ve learned, that I’ve been taught from the workers, to City Council.
RIFT: And so why the decision to run for City Council in particular?
HSM: Yeah… like I said, I’ve been doing this for fifteen years now. Our members, they’re doing okay, I would say they’re doing okay. We’re a strong union, we’re a fighting union. For example, a room attendant in our industry can make, in many of the workplaces, $23 an hour. Family health insurance is, for the most part, either free or $20 a month. It’s an amazing health benefits package that we have fought to achieve. They have pensions, regular work schedules...but more and more I’m seeing that it’s just not enough. Even our members who have a better standard of living are falling behind, with gentrification and increasing rent. It’s just, the issues seem much more serious than just organizing a small amount of workers. I always think about how can you do more, how can you influence more in society. And so I think that’s the reason that made me think about doing this and why I eventually I did do it.
RIFT: I think it’s pretty clear from reading your platform that your experience as a union member, as a union organizer, is informing the policies that you’re running on. The priority of attempting to bring New Deal-style jobs to Los Angeles, or even the priorities of including job creation, and specifically union job creation, in solutions towards the environment, or towards homelessness, at the level you can in Los Angeles. Talk about that, and that first priority of increasing job security in LA. Talk about where you stand on that and what you see that being.
HSM: Yeah, you’re very correct. A lot of the platforms that we have up incorporate some sort of job creation, unionization, particularly with homelessness and the environment. You know, having a good union job is so transformative. From my own personal experience, when I was about 14 years old, my dad had a permanent injury to his back and he couldn’t work anymore. My mom and dad were both street vendors, and my mom for like a year and a half struggled to find steady work. And I remember she went to a union job in the airport, which, she’s still there now, she’s a janitor with the SEIU. And at the time, I remember just getting health insurance. She had Kaiser, which is good private health insurance. And I remember the memories of going to government or state clinics, and being there for … like seven, eight hours, just to be seen because of a cough or a cold. When you’re young you don’t really think about how that affects the parent, or like how disruptive that is, to have a sick child and be in a lobby for six, seven hours for just a simple medicine. But when she got that job, we had Kaiser. And I remember going to Kaiser for the first time and being like, wow, this is like a hotel, it’s so fancy, so nice, people have their own room, you get seen in like 15, 20 minutes. And that was very transformative for me, as an adolescent.
Then when we won the union at my place, for me as a worker, I saw the shift in power, the radicalization that a worker goes through when they engage in the struggle with their employer, the material gains that they get. All these things; higher wages, health insurance, all these things. It’s so transformative that you see workers living in like a one-bedroom, or like a studio apartment, and then all of a sudden they can afford a two-bedroom. They can afford to take their kids out to the movies. They can afford to go out and eat. It’s just like these very transformative things.
And so when I think about the ills of society, a lot of them are tied to income inequality. Obviously there’s tons of looking at the world in an intersectional way, there’s obviously systemic racism, ableism, and different types of discrimination. But one thing that the union has taught me is that as you’re creating a movement, regardless of where you are, you should never lose sight of the things that can have long-lasting change. And so when I look at the issues of society I think, well, how can we incorporate unionization? Because being part of a union structure gives you the ability to continue to struggle on a long-term basis. It doesn’t come and go. Every single member that we’ve brought into the union over the last fifteen years, they continue to engage with that struggle because they have the system, the apparatus, to continue to fight and continue to evolve. And even after people retire and new people come to work, they’re benefitting from fights that people used to have in the past. And so I think it’s one of the most important vehicles for changing the world, changing peoples’ conditions in life.
RIFT: And returning to that issue of homelessness that you touched on earlier, the district that you’re running to represent, council District 13, if I’m recalling correctly, in March there was a pretty public incident involving the sweeps that were taking place in Echo Park, and the handling of that by the current incumbent in the district, Mitch O'Farrell. As I’m sure you’re aware, there were clashes between protestors and police. It was not a good thing, to say the least.
HSM: No, it was not.
RIFT: So talk to me about your policy on housing and homelessness, and where you see yourself as particularly differing from the leadership that’s in the district right now.
HSM: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for bringing that up. Wow. The current incumbent, and I don’t want to focus on him so much, but his approach in Echo Park Lake was an abomination, to say the least. At the time, CDC guidelines said that you should not disrupt encampments, they didn’t follow it. And then when most of the unhoused people had already been put in mostly temporary structures, the few that remained and the people protesting — the right to protest, obviously I think that should be protected — he decided to send 400 police officers and do this really terrible thing.
I don’t believe in the criminalization of the homeless. You know, if we look at the history of modern-day homelessness, we can look back at the 80s and a lot of the policies that were created back then. And for forty years now, the city’s primary approach has been criminalization. The one thing that should be on everyone’s mind is in 2005, there was the Safer Cities Initiative, that was proposed by, at the time, Chief Bratton and Mayor Villaregosa and sought to cite and try to contain homelessness by criminalizing it. The result of that was people were cited for many different things. And at the end, because of their homelessness they got a ticket. Obviously they’re probably not gonna pay the ticket, they’re not gonna show up. Now they have a warrant, now they’re getting arrested for a warrant. All of a sudden, the criminal records they received through this process made them ineligible to receive many of the programs that are funded by the government, federal or state. And so now the majority of the homeless do not even have access to any of these programs. We know where criminalization leads, and so for forty years it's been an uninterrupted process of criminalizing the homeless. And so we have to look at the history of that and see that it just hasn't gotten us anywhere. The number one cause of homelessness is because people cannot afford their rent. That is about 60-65% of the unhoused in the city. And so if we’re gonna solve the issues, we have to look at building more affordable housing, building more permanent supportive housing, and looking at things that are gonna change over the long term.
I believe that housing is a human right, and that everyone should have a shelter, everyone should have somewhere to sleep. Taking this approach of criminalization is just absolutely wrong. It’s inhumane. And I will never do that.
RIFT: And tell me about your policy on policing. LA has a long and storied history with police violence. In the past year, we’ve heard the calls to defund the police. At the same time, LA has this enormous police budget. I think the number I’ve seen is something like $3 billion, which is an obscene number. Where do you stand on this, and where do you see yourself playing a role should you be elected.
HSM: Absolutely. So my first experience with the police as a young man in South Central was being stopped on the street. The police officer made some excuse to stop us, and his point was to try to humiliate me and my friends. And I remember standing up against that and saying “this is wrong.” And what he ended up doing was, he gave me a ticket for littering, which I was not littering, and wrote in the report that I was talking back to the officer. Months later, when I went in front of the judge to say, “Hey, I didn’t do that”, the judge was like, “I don’t care, I don’t like the way you responded to him.”
So when I think about this, I think about how the system of policing affects mostly working class people of color. Policing is used as a way to address things that have nothing to do with police, right, this is about poverty, this is about lack of jobs, lack of after-school programs, Pre-K, all these social programs. So if elected, my goal is to take money that’s being spent on police and use it in programs that are really going to address the issues of the community, whether that’s after school programs, jobs programs, things like that. I think those are the issues we need to be focusing on, not trying to police our way out of crimes of poverty or issues of poverty.
RIFT: Returning to that experience that you were speaking of earlier, of being a union member, an organizer. In talking to other people in that field, there is this idea of having momentum, of gradually building up momentum towards a labor action, or something like that. In a lot of ways I think that’s kind of analogous to a campaign like yours, building up that momentum towards an election. You’re in the early stages of your campaign, I understand you announced pretty recently. How has that momentum-building been going so far? Have you gotten a good response from the community? What’s the outlook?
HSM: Yeah, that’s a great analogy because our approach is very similar. In organizing you recruit, recruit, recruit, recruit, and then when you’re ready you make your move. It’s been no different. I think it started with a lot of conversations, without being public. As an organizer you’re taught to make decisions as a team, as a committee. And so my first steps were having just one-on-one conversations with a lot of my key friends, key leaders in the community. And when the response was positive, and people supported the decision of doing this, we went public. I was very happy. At this point, I think our campaign launch video has over 90,000 views on Twitter, which is an incredible response. We got 200-something retweets, from folks, from friends. And then we had our first campaign barbecue, and we had over 120 people show up from different networks. And right now we have over 180 people signed up to do volunteer shifts. The momentum has been incredible, the response has been overwhelming. And I think we’re still at the stage where we’re continuing to build our base, and in the coming months we’ll eventually let it loose on CD-13.
