A brief history of the rise of labor in San Diego

One afternoon a few days after Thanksgiving in 2018, five people gathered around a table at The Patio, the then-trendy Mission Hills restaurant on Goldfinch Street.

There wasn’t much holiday spirit — perhaps because the people there represented opposite sides of San Diego’s long struggle between owners and workers, capital and labor, unions and business. 

At the table: Tom Lemmon, who was head of the influential San Diego County Building and Construction Trades Council; Brigette Browning, then the president of UNITE HERE! Local 30 union representing hotel and hospitality workers in tourism-rich San Diego; and Carol Kim, at the time the political director for the Building Trades.

They met with Bill Evans, the hotel magnate whose company portfolio includes luxury spots like the Bahia Resort Hotel, the Catamaran Resort and Hotel on Mission Bay and The Lodge at Torrey Pines. Robert Gleason, the president and CEO of the Evans Hotels empire, joined him.

The meeting was held to discuss the long-running struggle over Evans Hotels’ desire to redevelop and expand the Bahia. For years, labor leaders had dug in, working with community groups to oppose the expansion because they said the project would eliminate a road that gave public access to Bahia Point.

But Evans contended that the union had a second and more important motive: to strongarm him to allow workers to form a union at his hotels.

In a lawsuit filed shortly after the restaurant meeting and amended several times over the next half-decade, Evans Hotels alleged that the unions use bribery and extortion to pressure businesses. At one point, according to the lawsuit, Evans asked why his hotels were being targeted — they were good employers who treated workers well, he said.

It has nothing to do with being a good or bad employer, Lemmon replied. Instead, he and Browning said, this was a new era in San Diego — for unions, for workers. 

“Mr. Lemmon summed it up by saying ‘we have a business just like you have a business’ and their focus was on increasing the number of members because that translates into increased dues,” Evans Hotels alleged in the suit. 

Browning said that the goal was to get 10,000 members, exert political control over the San Diego City Council and California Coastal Commission and unionize all hotels in the county, according to the account in the lawsuit.

The message from the trio was clear. This wasn’t personal. This was just business. 

It wasn’t so long ago that the idea of union leaders in San Diego giving a “There’s a new sheriff in town” speech to one of the city’s leading and most influential business leaders was a fantasy. For decades San Diego’s circles of power mostly revolved around the right-of-center, reliably Republican downtown business establishment and real estate developers.

But over the past two decades or so that has changed, as labor unions have become increasingly more powerful forces in local campaigns. 

They flexed their power at a time when the city underwent swift voter demographic changes, from being a stronghold of the Republican Party — Ronald Reagan called the place his “good luck city” and ended both of his presidential campaigns here — to a strong blue, majority Democratic outpost. 

Now, labor is arguably the dominant political force in San Diego, for many reasons. One little known source behind its success can be found at the intersection of D Avenue and 24th Street in National City, where the Building and Construction Trades Council built in 1968 what is now a sprawling apartment complex. 

The National City Park Apartments provide affordable living for hundreds of renters. But as an inewsource investigation found, the complex also provides something more: millions of dollars in campaign contributions to candidates and causes supported by the unions — funneled through nonprofit corporations the council set up decades ago to build, manage and now own the complex.

Those actions are now the subject of several complaints that Evans Hotels filed with the federal Department of Labor contending the flow of money between the apartments and the labor unions is illegal.

Evans did not respond to requests for comment. And his attorneys who filed the Labor Department complaint declined to comment. A spokesperson for the department said longstanding policy prohibits commenting on whether an investigation has been opened.

The battle between labor and business will be joined again this year, after a San Diego City Council committee last month cleared the way for a new ordinance that would require a $25 minimum wage for workers in the tourism industry — including hotels and other attractions. 

Building Trades, as with other unions, is supporting the proposal, even though it doesn’t impact its affiliated unions. Business groups like the San Diego Lodging Association — whose chairman is Gleason, of Evans Hotels — and the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce are weighing how to respond, including hinting that a voter referendum opposing the ordinance could be deployed.   

The impact that the money from the apartment complex has had in local races is hard to assess. It is one part of the larger story about the remarkable rise of organized labor from the outer precincts of power in San Diego, to its very center. 

Early gains — and setbacks

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the power shift occurred. 

But labor began enjoying the upper hand in local politics at least by 1998, when it backed Proposition MM, a $1.5 billion bond measure that voters passed for repairs at San Diego Unified schools.

By 2004, labor unions were flexing their muscles in the San Diego mayoral race. That year, incumbent Dick Murphy and county Supervisor Ron Roberts were facing each other in a classic, Republican-on-Republican matchup.

Then, Councilmember Donna Frye — whose campaign three years earlier was supported by labor — suddenly jumped in as a write-in candidate.

She nearly won. Backed by environmental groups and labor unions, she came within a few thousand votes of toppling Murphy — and only after a series of legal challenges that discarded thousands of write-in votes.

Frye’s near win marked the confluence of changing city demographics and a more assertive labor presence. Democrats had surpassed Republicans in voter registration at the turn of the century and had secured control of the council with five members. 

Public sector unions representing city workers, police and firefighters and teachers had also become more influential and that, too, coincided with the private sector unions becoming more effective. 

“That is when labor really got engaged,” longtime San Diego political consultant Tom Shepard said. “That was the first time I remember some different unions spending a lot of money to the point where it was a much more level playing field than it had been in the years before that.”

The rise of labor was not an easy glide path. There were setbacks, too. In 2008 Republican Jerry Sanders was re-elected as mayor, along with a Republican city attorney. 

In a 2008 post-mortem on the primary that year in the Voice of San Diego, Democrats complained the party was blowing it, with weak candidates and bungled strategy. There was a sense that labor was too influential and alienating some potential voters.

But that fall, candidates backed by the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council — now led by the savvy and effective Lorena Gonzalez — won three City Council races. And four years later Bob Filner won the mayor’s race, putting a Democrat in the top slot for the first time since 1992. 

“It wasn’t until 2012 with Filner being elected that you see the real culmination of all that effort to control the council and the mayorship,” said Carl Luna, a political scientist, director of the Institute for Civil Civic Engagement at the University of San Diego and a longtime observer of San Diego politics.

While the changing demographics of the city played a major role, Luna said “the labor unions have (done) that intelligent campaign with increased funding they could dedicate to it, to displace the business interests and getting pro-labor members on the council.”

Filner would resign in disgrace months after his win under an avalanche of testimonies from women who said he had groped and, in some cases, forcibly kissed them over the years.

Voters would also deal a blow to labor later that year, easily approving Proposition A, which called for banning union-friendly project labor agreements on city projects. Labor groups poured more than $1 million fighting the measure.

Still, labor was increasingly putting its stamp on city politics. The change in city demographics had benefited the county Democratic Party, but it was labor’s discipline and political acumen that bolstered that, Shepard said. 

“It was organized labor that kind of brought the Democrats around to being more sophisticated and strategic in their approach to these races. That whole process was led by organized labor.”

Scaling up 

The forces that had been accumulating since the Frye race arguably crested in 2018 in the District 2 election between incumbent Councilwoman Lorie Zapf and Democratic challenger Jen Campbell.

The Building and Construction Trades Council heavily backed Campbell via contributions to an independent committee. At the same time, a right-leaning independent committee backed by the Chamber of Commerce and Lincoln Club spent heavily for Zapf.

The stakes were higher than a single seat. With a Campbell win, Democrats would have a supermajority on the council, able to override any mayoral veto.

No incumbent councilmember had lost a race in more than 25 years, but Campbell went on to defeat Zapf.

It was in this environment that Evans Hotels filed its lawsuit, alleging that unions used extortion and bribery to block developments unless developers agreed to allow unions.

In addition to the restaurant anecdote, the lawsuit contended unions used a “playbook” of similar tactics to obstruct approvals of various projects. The lawsuit also said the unions leveraged their control over elected officials on the City Council to prevent consideration of approvals for projects, including Evans’ Bahia hotel.

The lawsuit has gone through three iterations, and in a series of rulings over the years has been whittled down to one major claim that’s tied to Evans’ attempt to build a hotel at SeaWorld. 

Evans argues that UNITE Here threatened to oppose any future developments at SeaWorld if the theme park continued to negotiate with Evans. In September 2018, SeaWorld ended its joint venture with Evans.

In the lawsuit Evans Hotels argues such a tactic is an illegal secondary boycott — an action by a union against a company, designed to pressure another company that the union has a dispute with.

Judges have thrown out large parts of the lawsuit since it was filed. The contention that unions were extorting concessions was rejected in a ruling in 2020 by U.S. District Court Judge William Q. Hayes, who concluded such actions were not crimes but protected under the First Amendment right to petition governments.

After that, Evans Hotels filed two more versions of the lawsuit, which were also largely thrown out on the same grounds. Yet one key claim has remained alive: The company’s contention that it lost $100 million when SeaWorld backed out the hotel deal under threats from the unions.

Just this past January, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld previous rulings throwing out most of the claims, but upheld the SeaWorld claim that the unions engaged in an unlawful secondary boycott.

Cheers for labor

While Evans has kept up the legal battle he started almost seven years ago, much has changed since. 

Browning now leads the Labor Council. Kim has Lemmon’s old job at Building Trades. Lemmon retired in 2021, after the leadership of the housing corporations running the National City apartment complex found he had received as much as $200,000 in “unintended compensation” over the years. The leadership at the time emphasized that his retirement was unrelated to the discovery of the extra compensation.

Four years after Campbell’s win, Kent Lee defeated another Democrat for the San Diego City Council’s open District 6 seat. Lee had been backed by a wide coalition, including labor unions.

His win gave the Democrats all nine seats on the council. 

And then last year, a dozen years after city voters had banned project labor agreements, Mayor Todd Gloria — who had enjoyed strong support from labor in past races — signed the first citywide PLA with the Building and Construction Trades Council. Voters had approved Measure D, which rescinded the 2012 ban, in an expensive campaign in 2022.

The seven-year deal Gloria signed sets wages and benefits for workers on city projects over $5 million and, in the latter years of the deal, any project over $1 million.

He signed it on the concourse outside City Hall, in the heart of downtown that was for decades ground zero for the city’s long impregnable power structure of business interests and developers.

The mayor was surrounded by a beaming contingent of union leaders and several city councilmembers, who had won their seats with the ample assistance of labor unions. 

As Gloria put down his pen, they erupted in cheers, their applause echoing off the buildings and walkways of the plaza. 

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Story illustrations by Steve Breen.

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Editor’s note: The late Anne Evans, who founded Evans Hotels with her husband William in 1953, financially donated to inewsource and hosted events for the nonprofit at The Lodge at Torrey Pines. Bill Evans, Anne Evans’ son, has never personally contributed to inewsource.

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