The Three-Headed Presidency of UNITE-HERE Local 11

The recent hotel strike led by UNITE-HERE Local 11 in Los Angeles got some attention due to the fact that it was the largest single strike in American hotel worker history. No, it didn’t last too long, but the point remains.

But what is super interesting about this union is their unique leadership structure. One of the biggest problems in American labor history is that entrenched leadership never goes away. On occasion (Walter Reuther, let’s say), having that entrenched leadership can be a very good thing. But so often–and this is especially true on the local level–what decades-long leadership around a single person leads is for that person to protect his (almost always) little kingdom and not focus on organizing or expanding the union’s political power. It’s one of the long-time problems in American history. We can look at John L. Lewis as one of the great union leaders in American history for founding the CIO and we should. On the other hand, he WAS the United Mine Workers of America and would expel anyone who challenged his leadership. Not surprisingly, that led to some pretty huge problems! I am ambivalent about union democracy movements, but there’s no question that the problems in any one person leading any organization for a lifetime are quite real.

So when Gustavo Arellano interviewed me about UNITE-HERE 11’s three-headed presidency, I was really amazed by the entire concept. I have literally never heard of anything like this in all of American labor history.

Briceño, Minato and Petersen have run Unite Here Local 11 — which represents over 32,000 workers in Southern California and Arizona — since 2017 and will be sworn in for their third term later this month. They head what is believed to be the only union in U.S. labor history to have more than one president at the same time.

“I don’t even know what to say about it, because it’s so unprecedented,” said University of Rhode Island labor historian Erik Loomis. He noted that American unions have historically relied on charismatic leaders “that stay in office forever. But however the three of them work and manage all of their egos — and I imagine there’s the occasional blowup — obviously it’s working.”

Under the watch of the triumvirate, Unite Here Local 11 has continued a tradition of fusing labor and political power kick-started by former president, now-state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo in the 1990s that transformed L.A. politics — and has arguably made it more influential than ever.

The union, which represents workers across 60 hotels in the Southland, successfully pushed for a 2018 ballot measure in Long Beach that required hotels with more than 50 rooms to provide so-called panic buttons to workers in case a guest tried to sexually assault them. It convinced politicians to raise the minimum wage for hotel workers in 2021 in West Hollywood and to reduce workloads for hotel employees in Los Angeles last year. In Anaheim, members gathered enough signatures to force a special election this fall on whether to raise the city’s minimum wage for hotel workers to $25.

Minato was part of the most recent Los Angeles City Council Redistricting Commission; Briceño is the chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County. Unite Here’s political action committee spent around $364,000 to support the successful L.A. council run of one of its organizers, Hugo Soto-Martinez, who attended the Tuesday rally.

As the leaders addressed the crowd, they offered glimpses into how they split up the work.

Briceño, as comfortable with the rank and file as she is with elected officials, spoke the longest. Minato, a former lawyer who spearheaded a Unite Here political campaign that helped flip Arizona to Joe Biden in 2020, offered short remarks. Petersen, looking like an uncle on vacation in a long-sleeved shirt, cream khakis, sneakers, sunglasses and a baseball cap, led the crowd in a call-and-response chant that name-checked the 19 hotels across Southern California whose workers had walked off the job Saturday.

“It’s a lot,” Petersen cracked, his voice hoarse from days of chanting. “It’s mucho.”

Hey, if it works, it works. And I very much imagine that three heads is better than two. In any case, UNITE-HERE 11 is one of the strongest union locals in the country right now, so maybe we should pay more attention to this leadership structure.