Justice for Janitors: Organizing Immigrant Workers (Part Two)
"One industry, one contract, one union." —Justice for Janitors slogan
As the Trump administration demonizes and terrorizes 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. Here is Part Two of this story, excerpted out of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement. You can read Part One here.
It came from Denver
The earliest efforts by janitors to employ the militant tactics that came to be known as the "Justice for Janitors" campaign occurred in Denver, Colorado, in 1986. SEIU president John Sweeney spent three days at the beginning of the campaign talking with the Denver janitors and observing the action, and he liked what he saw. SEIU national organizers and local members raised "enough hell in the downtown area that the industry caved." When this organizing model arrived in Los Angeles in 1988, it started by going after the non-union side of a small double-breasted company (one owning both union and non-union entities), Century Cleaning, which held a number of building cleaning contracts.
The goal in organizing Century was not a traditional union representation election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The service contracting system made it too easy for a building owner to switch contractors if one went union. In the view of SEIU organizers, what was needed was a "comprehensive campaign," targeting both owners and contractors. Building owners held the real power, since they hired the contractors who hired the building service workers. But NLRB rules shielded the building owners from direct responsibility to bargain with the contract companies' workers (since the contractors were the employers of record) and their union. The union's strategists knew that a stubborn contractor could be persuaded to unionize more easily if the building owners wanted that. The way to make that happen was through placing various forms of pressure on the building owners.
The Century Cleaning campaign allowed Local 399 to try out a variety of tactics that it would soon expand in a larger scale encounter. These included one-on-one organizing of the workers in the buildings and with house calls; bringing in Cal-OSHA and Labor Department inspectors to assess health and safety and wage and hour violations in the buildings; and bringing the conflict into the streets with marches and demonstrations. This first effort also staged a moment of guerrilla theater, memorably captured a decade later in British director Ken Loach's film, Bread and Roses, when organizers and janitors publicly confronted the company's owner in a fancy restaurant. Some of Century's contracts changed hands to union companies.
In the next battle, the union took on Bradford Building Service, a larger, non-union company owned by American Building Maintenance (ABM). Janitors and their supporters hit the downtown streets with high profile actions. Despite its president's hostility to unions, Bradford signed a master agreement with Local 399 in spring of 1989, the first in the city since 1983. This victory provided the launching pad for the effort to re-unionize another contractor, International Service Systems (ISS).
The Battle of Century City
Century City, a cluster of high rise buildings on the west side of Los Angeles near to Beverly Hills, was not really a "city;" no one lived there at that time. But plenty of people worked there at night, including four hundred janitors. 250 of them worked for ISS.
Beginning in the summer, the union mobilized the janitors in street protests outside the buildings, visible to the tenants. Some occupants of the buildings complained to building managers about the events; other expressed support for the janitors. Both responses made ISS uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough. The union continued to organize among the janitors, but also created a coalition with other unions, community groups, and college students.
In May 1990 the workers voted to strike. Thanks to careful preparations, everyone understood that that meant ratcheting up activities. One organizer reported,
We had daily actions, every morning we walked along the median strip with human billboards, traffic was really tied up. And on some days we had big actions. On the first big one, we stormed through every single building in Century City, every single one. We had a lot of community people, it was about three or four hundred people. We went marching through the buildings, chanting and banging on drums, saying, "What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!" Pretty simple, straightforward things. The LAPD called a citywide tactical alert that day. They just completely freaked out.
Not all the actions involved overt militancy, but many had a level of audaciousness that grabbed attention from the public as well as the building tenants. On June 4, National Secretaries Day, janitors passed out thousands of flowers to Century City clerical workers on their way in and out of work—an act of solidarity with other, mostly poorly compensated, employees within the buildings.
Eleven days later four hundred janitors and community supporters marched peacefully from Beverly Hills to Century City. At the intersection of Olympic Boulevard and Century Park East, the demonstrators sat down, blocking traffic. More than a hundred Los Angeles police officers in riot gear attacked the protestors with clubs. According to a Los Angeles Times report, "several officers ignored calls from supervisors to stop charging the demonstrators."
Dozens of janitors and friends required medical treatment, including children and a pregnant janitor, Ana Veliz, who miscarried shortly afterward. 40 protesters were arrested. An LAPD spokesperson informed reporters that the police "reacted with quite an amount of restraint." (In 1993 a jury disagreed, awarding the injured demonstrators $2.35 million payable by the Los Angeles City Council, one of the largest settlements of its kind.)
Although SEIU organizers worried that the janitors would be intimidated, the opposite occurred. The members insisted on continuing to press ISS until they had a contract.
The entire police riot played out in front of television news cameras. Lead organizer Jono Shaffer can clearly be seen and heard arguing with the police for restraint before the carnage began. The footage outraged the public, and rapidly circulated on videotape cassettes around the country and even internationally. Danish unions pressured homegrown ISS, headquartered in Denmark, to talk with SEIU in Los Angeles.
One viewer in New York was Gus Bevona, president of SEIU Local 32B-J, the largest SEIU local in the country. Bevona summoned the president of ISS, with whom his local had a citywide contract, to a meeting. He told the ISS official it was time to settle in Los Angeles, or else there would be a strike in New York. ISS signed the Los Angeles contract the same day.
The agreement won wage increases, and was scheduled to expire in spring of 1991. But at that time, ISS and ABM's Bradford subsidiary agreed to terms under a new master contract, covering more than five thousand workers in Century City, downtown, and other locations in the sprawling city. It included further wage gains, and dental and prescription drug coverage. However, in recognition that greater competition with non-union building service firms outside the main office centers drove down the price of labor, the agreement set up lower wage tiers for the non-Century City/downtown areas. Adjustment upward would have to wait until the union had extended its beachhead more broadly throughout the industry.
Despite such shortcomings, the Justice for Janitors campaign had much to show for its efforts. Combining mass mobilization in bold direct action tactics with the serious investment in planning and staffing necessary for a long term campaign, SEIU simultaneously demonstrated that, "si se puede," organizing was possible in the Reagan-Bush era, and that immigrant workers in particular were ready to move.
Equally importantly, Justice for Janitors made a strong case that union organizing strategies had to think outside the legal box. If the NLRA no longer worked the way it was supposed to, then it was time to go around the NLRA. Rather than focus on dead end elections, the goal of an organizing campaign should be to create the conditions—legal, political, public opinion—in which a company would see that economic considerations were not the only ones involved in the decision about union representation. There can be more than one way to understand the word "costly," as the JfJ campaign was about to show high rollers in the computer industry.
[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).