Harold Meyerson

WASHINGTON, DC — At the topmost ranks of American labor, the great game of chicken proceeds apace. Dissident unions threaten the AFL-CIO with dissolution in the immediate aftermath of the Federation’s late July convention. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney clearly commands the votes to win re-election, but in a Monday press......

“He’s more operational than anyone,” says one union staffer of Martin Ludlow, who announced Tuesday that he’s leaving the City Council to succeed the late Miguel Contreras as head of the L.A. County Federation of Labor. “He has a great feel for how to put together a political campaign —......

“Our polling said [my margin of victory] would be somewhere in the vicinity of 15 points, but I always believed it would be less than that,” said Antonio Villaraigosa last Friday afternoon, trying to come to grips with his landslide 17-point victory over Jim Hahn three days before. “Did you......

It may not always have been pretty, but it was goddamn important. The election of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor of Los Angeles, by a stunning 17-point margin, signals a civic transformation almost without parallel in modern American history. The leopard has changed his spots: This is not the city of......

We are, I know, electing a mayor of Los Angeles, but the real architect of the new Los Angeles died with terrible suddenness on Friday night, leaving behind a city that he more than anyone transformed into the only major American metropolis where working people have some real political power......

Just how wide a swath does Jim Hahn cut in the world? The question was posed, totally inadvertently, by a recent Sunday feature in the Washington Post. The Post’s pollster, Richard Morin, authors a Sunday column that looks at public-opinion surveys and other academic studies, and on the Sunday before......

The mayor of Los Angeles has his four-letter political dynasties mixed up. He’s not running like a Hahn — at least, not like his father, the legendary Kenny, elected 10 times as a county supervisor. Instead, he’s running like a Bush. Coming off his first debate with Antonio Villaraigosa, Jim......

Jim Hahn may be having trouble finding people to vote for him, but public endorsements, it seems, are less of a problem. Last week, we learned that the Hahn folks published a list of endorsers that included people who actually supported another candidate. The erroneous ad ran in the immediate......

Mr. Miguel Contreras Executive Secretary-Treasurer The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO Dear Miguel (or, in the parlance of labor salutations, Dear Sir and Brother): Now here’s a fine mess if ever there was one. The most profoundly pro-labor mayoral candidate in Los Angeles history is on the ballot......

So you think Miguel Contreras — leader of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, the city’s political powerhouse — is losing sleep over the mayor’s race, or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attack on unions? Think again. If anything troubles Contreras’ sleep, it has to be the prospect that half his Federation is......