Industrial unions flourished somewhat in the expansion that occurred during World War II and the immediate postwar era. California's aerospace plants, automobile factories, petrochemical complexes and other industrial facilities were largely unionized, as were the motion picture studios and utilities. But agriculture, retail business and other major components of the economy were mostly union-free.

California's industrial economy peaked and then went into a slow decline in the 1970s. The post-industrial economy that emerged -- centered on technology, communications and services -- was not amenable to union organization. Union membership had declined to a small fraction of the work force when Jerry Brown was elected to the governorship in 1974 and he, with a strongly Democratic Legislature, saved labor from fading into irrelevancy.
Brown and lawmakers enacted a series of pro-union measures, the most important of which created collective bargaining rights for farm workers, teachers and other public employees. Union membership has continued to wane in the private economy but has surged in the public sector, a sea change of major proportions.

Public employees, unlike those in the private sector, have a direct stake in politics since their salaries, retirement programs and other fringe benefits are totally dependent on officeholders' decisions. Thus, as public employees became an ever-larger component of California's labor movement, unions assumed an ever-larger role in politics, finally emerging as the core constituency of the California Democratic Party.

Union money and union bodies fueled the conversion of the party from a semiamateur collection of liberal ideologues, many of them refugees from the 1960s, into a powerful and highly professional machine in the 1990s -- a process abetted by the Republicans' unerring instinct for selfimmolation.

Gray Davis' capture of the governorship in 1998, after 16 years of Republican governors, was a huge victory for unions, which had strongly backed him against self-financed Democratic primary foes. With expanding legislative majorities of union-friendly Democrats, the past four years have seen an outpouring of pro-union -- and especially pro-public employee union -- legislation. Hundreds of measures making it much easier to organize employees, expanding salaries and fringe benefits (including pension systems for some workers that are historic in their scope), and making life more difficult for nonunion employers and workers have sailed through the Capitol.

Labor Day 2003 finds unions holding more political power than at any other moment in California history, with state AFL-CIO chief Art Pulaski and Los Angeles County labor leader Miguel Contreras wielding real world clout rivaling that of a governor or an Assembly speaker. But labor also faces the loss of that clout if Davis is recalled by voters on Oct. 7 and succeeded by Arnold Schwarzenegger or some other Republican. And ironically, labor's political victories have contributed substantially to the extremely low popularity that makes Davis highly vulnerable to the recall.

The many labor bills that Davis has signed have enhanced his image as a politician in thrall to major campaign contributors, and his favors to public workers -- especially teachers, firefighters, Highway Patrol officers and those who guard prison inmates -- have deepened the state's fiscal crisis, a major driver of the recall.

Labor, of course, opposes the recall, but its leaders are also hedging their bets by backing Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante as the preferred successor should Davis be ousted. Bustamante is closely allied with the unions, which have become a bastion of Latino economic and political influence. Pulaski reportedly played a key role in leveraging state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi out of the election.

Were Davis to survive or Bustamante be elected as his successor, labor would continue its political roll. But if it's a Republican victory, the ever-expanding union political agenda would go into stall mode.