James Wood, Labor Leader, Dies

James M. Wood, Los Angeles County’s top labor leader and an architect of the city’s downtown building boom of the 1970s and ‘80s, died Sunday evening of lung cancer. He was 51.

In an era when organized labor was losing its influence nationally, Wood made it an equal partner with bankers and real estate developers in one of the most ambitious urban renewal projects in the country.

“He caught the vision I had of rebuilding L.A. from the heart, from the center out,” said former Mayor Tom Bradley, who selected Wood in the late 1970s to run the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.

Over the next decade, the agency became the most powerful instrument of social change in the city. It gave the horizontal city a vertical skyline and ensured that downtown Los Angeles remained a regional center of law and finance.

Today, the Bunker Hill skyscrapers, Little Tokyo, the Central Library, the Museum of Contemporary Art, a revitalized Eastside industrial sector and thousands of units of low-income housing make up the legacy of that era.

An activist in union politics since his college days, Wood was a fixture on picket lines and at strike negotiations. He was elected last year to head the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.

But it was during his tenure as head of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency that Wood made his mark as a downtown power broker.

“Through a combination of humor, charm and toughness when he needed it, Jim was able to pull disparate groups of people together in order to get big things done,” said John Emerson, a former city official who is now deputy assistant for intergovernmental affairs to President Clinton.

“He was equally at home in a boardroom or on a loading dock,” Emerson said.

But Wood took his lumps running the agency. As it poured billions of dollars of tax revenue into private construction, it was accused of subsidizing powerful real estate interests while giving short shrift to the city’s poor and homeless.

Assailed by critics during the agency’s often raucous public meetings, Wood weathered these sessions with a jaunty stoicism that seemed to drive his antagonists to new heights of invective.

Wood never responded in kind, interrupting only if people spoke beyond their allotted two minutes by tapping his watch and dismissing them with a wintry smile and a sardonic “thank you.”

At other times, Wood argued that a revitalized downtown would mean a wealth of high-paying jobs for working people.

“Jim had a mission to help people,” Bradley said. “But he understood that everything we wanted to do was going to require a partnership of business, labor and community leaders.”

It was Wood’s skill as a negotiator that brought him to prominence in the administration of Bradley, a black mayor who realized that his own power depended on the ability of his team to build a network of alliances.

“Jim had the boundless self-confidence of someone who has pulled himself up by the bootstraps and knows his own resources and capabilities. He had a great flair for doing deals,” said Carlyle Hall, a Los Angeles lawyer and former agency board member.

At the end of the Bradley era, Wood returned to full-time union work. Instead of negotiating development deals with downtown hotel owners, he bargained on behalf of their employees.

“He was always willing to use his political and corporate relationships for our benefit,” said Maria Elena Durazo, head of Local 11 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union.

Wood was born in Lancaster and grew up in Merced. He went to work for Pacific Bell after high school and won a phone company scholarship to Cal State Sacramento. There he became a leader of a statewide drive to fight tuition increases at state schools. He moved to Los Angeles in 1968 and joined the staff of the county federation of labor in 1974.

Wood is survived by his wife, Janice; his mother, Virginia Wood of Merced, and a sister, Jean. A funeral Mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Thursday at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church in Culver City.

Memorial contributions may be made to the James M. Wood Memorial Trust Fund to benefit the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor’s crisis fund.