Justice for Janitors: Organizing immigrant workers

"One industry, one contract, one union." —Justice for Janitors slogan

By Fred Glass

"One industry, one contract, one union."

—Justice for Janitors slogan

As the Trump administration continues to march up one of the many avenues it is taking toward full-on fascism—the one having to do with demonizing and terrorizing immigrant worker communities—it’s worth a look back at the Justice for Janitors campaigns of the last couple decades of the twentieth century. The energy, creativity, courage and power of this movement of immigrant workers reminds us that with the right strategies and tactics, backed by enough resources, even the most seemingly vulnerable working class populations can find their way to victory over their ruling class adversaries. My next few columns will be devoted to this story, excerpted out of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement.

As union density declined throughout the country in the 1980s, a few unions figured out how to move in the other direction. One of these, the Service Employees International Union, increased its national membership by 50% in the decade, reaching the million-member mark by 1991. Its success came from organizing the unorganized, and wholesale affiliation of other unions and employee associations.

Under the creative leadership of John Sweeney, elected national SEIU president in 1980, the organization boosted its national staff tenfold. It built on the pragmatic philosophy of earlier president George Hardy, which combined his belief in organizing with ongoing staff training. Sweeney maintained and extended Hardy's practice of hiring college-educated researchers, relying on them to compile employer data and industry analysis before and during campaigns. SEIU benefited from the United Farm Workers' decline at this time, scooping up many of its courageous and tactically seasoned former staff. Reminiscent in some ways of the CIO in its heyday, the SEIU culture at this time was an unusual but successful mix of New Left progressive idealism and modern organizational management practices.

Yet all was not well in SEIU's multiple jurisdictions. A hybrid union of private sector locals concentrated in building services and health care, and various public employee classifications, during the Reagan years it bled members out of its original janitorial division in a number of locations, including Los Angeles.

Here, in the nation's second largest city, SEIU Local 399 represented five thousand janitors in large downtown office buildings in the late 1970s. By 1982 these workers made a respectable $12 an hour, including health insurance and pension contributions, nearly triple the compensation for janitors in non-union buildings. But from this peak, within just a few years, Local 399 lost more than half its janitors, and failed to renegotiate its master agreements with International Service Systems (ISS) and American Building Maintenance (ABM), which controlled a quarter of the Los Angeles office building services labor market between them. Janitorial unionism seemed on the verge of extinction.

Deteriorating conditions

Several developments conspired to drive Los Angeles janitors' wages and unionization rates down after 1983. The downtown Los Angeles skyline underwent a radical makeover. As the worst recession since the 1930s forced millions of workers out of their jobs, capital investment poured into a building frenzy. Office construction sent glittering new glass-faced towers soaring upwards forty and fifty floors at a time in the old downtown and along Wilshire Boulevard on the west side. (Construction work remained mostly union on these commercial projects; but construction business leaders took the opportunity offered by the recession to push the city's residential construction industry into the non-union column). For Local 399 the good news should have been that the new corporate office centers, once built, needed cleaning.

But the union could no longer deal directly with the companies that owned these huge new buildings. The origins of the Building Services Employees International Union trace back to the 1920s and 1930s in Chicago, New York and San Francisco, when local capital owned local office buildings, and building owners hired their own workers. Organizing and representing these workers was a relatively straightforward process, especially after passage of the National Labor Relations Act. The union signed up the building's workers, called for a NLRB-supervised election if the company resisted immediate union recognition, and then sat down to negotiate with the employer.

As early as the 1950s, national and even international corporations began to scoop up local commercial real estate companies. These large building owners found it more economical to run things from afar by remote control; they hired building service contractors to assemble and manage custodial and other maintenance functions rather than employ their own workers. By the 1970s this arrangement had become the norm in large office centers.

Local 399 adapted to the new system, and throughout the 1960s and 70s its thousands of downtown office janitor members were covered by master agreements with the large building service contractors like ISS (international) and ABM (national). Smaller contractors outside these master agreements mostly went with the program.

Until, that is, Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981. At that moment what had been implicit in deindustrialization became common knowledge: organized labor was no longer a desired partner, either in the public sector with government employers, or with capital in the private economy. And anti-union employers had little need to fear government prosecution for labor law violations. As the president declared, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Labor law enforcement shrank. A previously modest-sized union-busting industry employing lawyers and consultants grew like weeds around the president's fertilizer.

In this atmosphere, a number of building service companies rethought past practices. Some offered lower prices to the building owners for their services, thanks to wage and benefit reductions with non-union labor. Other, unionized contractors pursued an increasingly common practice invented in the construction industry called "double breasting:" subsidiary companies, separate from corporate parents in name only, created simply to get out of collective bargaining agreements. The two largest contractors, ABM and ISS, went non-union in Los Angeles by the late 80s, despite operating under collective bargaining agreements in other cities. To keep its remaining contracts in downtown L.A., Local 399, now representing just 30% of the workforce, and shrinking fast, offered major wage and benefit concessions to the employers. Clearly a crisis was at hand.

The national SEIU couldn't do much, by itself, about the larger, structural problems faced by labor. But the difference between SEIU and other unions dealing with business attacks and declining unionization rates was simple: it analyzed the changes in the industries in which it represented workers, and organized on the basis of addressing those changes.

Immigrant workers

One of the most important changes was the flood of immigrant labor from Mexico and Central America into Los Angeles. Although not a new story in California, immigration from the south had waxed and waned in several cycles since the days of the Californios. In 1960, just eight per cent of southern California was foreign-born. By 1990, more than one third of Los Angeles's residents came from outside the country. As building service contractors severed their relations with unions, they transformed the composition of their workforce as well.

African Americans comprised a third of southern California janitors, and half of Local 399's membership, in 1970. The big presence of Blacks in the custodial workforce reflected historically restricted economic opportunities; but due to the union, the work meant decent compensation for steady employment as industrial job options disappeared. When conditions for building services slid downhill in the 1980s, Black janitors made an exodus from downtown janitorial work.

The immigrant labor pool provided replacements, and filled thousands more janitorial slots in the new office towers. Los Angeles became a major destination for Central American émigrés in the 1970s. The Central American population of Los Angeles more than tripled, to nearly 150,000. In the following decade refugees fleeing civil war in Guatemala and El Salvador quadrupled this immigrant influx. Most moved into the densely packed "Little Central America" Pico-Union area, a short bus ride from downtown.

The new arrivals went to work alongside Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, whose numbers had likewise increased over the years. Famously, more Mexicans called Los Angeles "home" than any place in the world outside Mexico City. By 1990 the number of office cleaning jobs had doubled in a decade; by far the largest proportion— more than sixty per cent—belonged to Latino immigrants, with Black employment down to one eighth, and Anglos at 11%. The gender composition of the industry changed, too, due to deterioration of wages and conditions. More than half of the Central American janitors were women by 1980, and nearly half of Mexican immigrant janitors in 1990.

For the building service contractors, their utopian vision for the workforce they offered to the building owners differed little from that of their earliest counterparts in 1850s Los Angeles, when Native American labor was sold and resold each Monday in an auction outside the city jail to local farmers for a dollar, or a bottle of aguardiente, for the week. The assumption of the latter-day straw bosses, as in today's central valley "factories in the fields," was that a largely undocumented immigrant workforce would put up no resistance to horrible pay and working conditions due to fears of deportation.

But it turned out that this sort of immigrant labor can be a two-edged sword. While some workers lived in fear of the arrival of la migra, others saw getting fired, and even deported, for organizing in the United States, as a relatively minor problem compared to memories of death squad execution for similar activities in their country of origin. Like Jewish immigrants fleeing the failed 1905 Russian revolution, many Central American workers had experienced class conflict, understood their own workplace power (or lack of it) rested on a union, and were ready to stand up for themselves given the opportunity.

[To be continued]

Fred Glass is a member of East Bay DSA, the former communications director of the California Federation of Teachers, and the author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (UC Press, 2016).