Ron Herrera, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, has resigned. The Los Angeles Times reported the move late Monday, citing that it happened during a meeting with the union’s executive board.
The news comes after leaked audio of a closed-door conversation was released Sunday in which Herrera and Councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León were heard in conversation with the then-City Council President Nury Martinez as she made racists, disparaging remarks about her colleagues and, in one case, a Black child.
Herrera follows in the footsteps of Martinez, who resigned from her post as city council president on Monday, saying, “I take responsibility for what I said and there are no excuses for those comments.” Several colleagues and constituents are still calling on Martinez to resign from City Council entirely, which she has yet to decide. “I hope that you will give me the opportunity to make amends,” her statement said.”
Herrera released an apology on Monday via the Federation of Labor for his complicit involvement in the leaked conversation.
“There is no justification and no excuse for the vile remarks made in that room. Period,” Herrera’s apology, released Monday, said. “And I didn’t step up to stop them and I will have to bear the burden of that cross moving forward.”
As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the audio captured a closed-door conversation from October 2021 between Martinez, Cedillo, de León and Herrera. The racist comments in question center around Councilmember Mike Bonin, who is white, and his young son, who is Black. Martinez, deriding Bonin for thinking “he’s f—ing Black,” accused the councilman of handling his son like an accessory while on a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade float, and then said of the son, “Parece changuito,” or “He’s like a monkey.”
“They’re raising him like a little white kid,” Martinez said. “I was like, this kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner and then I’ll bring him back.”
Elsewhere in the recordings, Martinez says of District Attorney George Gascón, “F— that guy, he’s with the Blacks.”
Protests and calls for the involved parties’ resignations – including from Bonin, who called the comments “vile, abhorrent, and utterly disgraceful” – have been ongoing since Sunday.
