The Power of Disruption: Janitors Seize Victory in an Era of Union Decline
Harold Meyerson is executive editor of L.A. Weekly and a member of Dissent magazine's editorial board. His article "A Clean Sweep: The WEIU's Organizing Drive for Janitors Shows How Unionization Can Raise Wages," appears in the June 19-July 3, 2000, issue of The American Prospect.
Q: America is quickly becoming a nation of rich and poor, with the "middle" dropping out. Yet it seems as though janitors in Los Angeles may have found a way to fight back. What were the circumstances that led to the recent successful strike by the janitors and their union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)?
A: In the early 1980s, the janitors, or as the SEIU calls them, the Building Service Division, was under a real attack in most major American cities. In Los Angeles, you had an established union, largely African American in composition that had been unionized for a while and was making, for the kind of work at that kind of time, not a bad wage. But then you had a massive influx of immigrants into the L.A. area, particularly from Central America. And the janitorial contracting companies simply started discharging their African-American union employees, hiring these new immigrants, and paying them the federal minimum wage -- which was $3.35 an hour and was a lot less money than the $7.32 the union members got.
Union membership just plummeted. A whole sector got transformed. This was compounded by the growth of high-rise office properties in outlying areas. The union's share of control of the local market went down and down and down. The union hadn't organized in years.
It was here that SEIU started fighting back. They organized a famous march there in 1990, where the police didn't get the word that it wasn't an authorized march and just went berserk, sending a number of marchers to the hospital. The janitors then got their Century City contract and have been slowly, region by region around L.A., rebuilding the union ever since: trying to get back up to the level of pay and such that they had in the mid-1980s and the level of controls of the market.
Q: How did the SEIU go about using the contract renewal as an opportunity for change?
A: Their effort entailed being able to mobilize thousands of members almost daily on the streets to build momentum and to keep this in the public and to keep the pressure on in a public sense that way. And that worked. They got tremendous public response, increasingly from elected officials, the Catholic Church, and others.
Secondly, it involved having pickets at a whole lot of buildings at night, when the work, of course, gets done. It is easier to strike when you have a factory. There's one place you go to work [so] you put up a picket line there. You don't have a factory [in this situation]. You have 900 buildings covered under the contract. Staff cannot be out at these buildings. YouÕve got to have your own members who are able and adept enough to get out there and do this. So this was a union that had been training its members for years. They had a very extensive steward system.
Q: You mention [in your article] that this outreach to community groups was a new thing and a very important part of that. Is that right?
A: That has also been part of union building in places like L.A. The county Federation of Labor in particular is really the leading force in working-class Latino politics in L.A. It has become the major vehicle of registering voters and politically socializing them and getting them to the polls since the passage of Prop 187: Pete Wilson's immigrant-bashing measure of 1994.
In so doing, the most active part of the federation has been the janitors. And in election after election, they have turned out more people for causes and candidates than any other union in the county Federation of Labor; so when the strike began, they walked into the strike with a statement of support from 48 elected officials from the L.A. area. They walked into the last bargaining sessions with management; they had three or four members of the state assembly who just happened to sit with them on their side of the table.
Q: And this support has gone up quite high.
A: The janitors touched a nerve in the public that made this an almost irresistible strike from the point of view of public appeal. I think there was also this kind of relief that people felt that somebody was actually doing something about this problem that we know defines the city, but we don't have the slightest idea as to what to do about it.
It is impossible to live in Los Angeles now without being aware that you're living in a two-tier city. There's this vast amount of working poverty in a city that is immensely rich. There were living-wage ordinances; and the movement [advocating for wage increases], because of the peculiar configurations of the labor movement here, has moved further here than it has anywhere else -- but usually only touching a few thousand people and usually done legislatively.
Yet here are people putting themselves on the line, people who are clearly taking a risk, people who clearly don't have money socked away for a rainy day. And we're talking about 4'11" Spanish-speaking women. They are people who are clearly on the bottom of the L.A. socioeconomic totem pole. There's actually a Dickensian quality to it for the upper-middle-class people watching it. This was like a morality tale playing out in the streets.
Q: Talk briefly about John Sweeney.
A: Sweeney comes out of the New York janitor local many years ago. What's different about John Sweeney is that he's willing to entertain this Justice for Janitors as a route of addressing wage inequality. He was willing to say, Hey, we've got to do a lot more organizing. In the mid-1980s, Sweeney determined that he wanted to hire a bunch of organizers. That meant he had to hire a bunch of young people, which other unions weren't doing for one of two reasons, or for both.
Reason one is that they themselves weren't organizing. Reason two is that in the Meany-Kirkland era, a lot of unions thought of these groups as beyond the ideological pale. They did't want these people, who were insufficiently steeped in years of George-Meany-and-Lane-Kirkland-think, as part of the operation.
Sweeney said, To hell with it. We're dying, and we need to grow. Between the time he became president of SEIU in 1981 and the time he became AFL-CIO president in 1995, SEIU almost doubled in size from a little over half a million to a little over a million, at a time in which every other union in America was declining, some of them precipitously.
Q: And what significance do you ascribe to his organizing efforts over the past decade?
A: The notion that you do have to organize has been widely accepted throughout American labor intellectually, and I'd say about 10 of the major unions in the AFL-CIO are serious about this. It is not easy stuff. The amount of money unions are spending on organizing has risen dramatically.
Q: Has it helped these unions?
A: The union that is spending the most is Sweeney's old union, which is now headed by Andy Stern, who was Sweeney's old organizing director. They're continuing to grow. Other unions that are doing this to some degree are growing. AFSCME [American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees] is now doing major organizing with Head Start workers.
Now, it is obviously easier to do this in industries that aren't relocatable at a time of capital mobility. It is almost impossible to organize the little clothing sweatshops around L.A. because those things just close in a night. But last year was the first year since the 1950s that the rate of unionization did not decline in the overall U.S. work force. Unions lose jobs by attrition and by the continuing process of deindustrialization; unions have to organize about a half a million jobs a year to stay even.
Q: What do you think spurred Sweeney to go for disruption at times and also for active organizing? What was triggered in his head that [these were the strategies] needed?
A: Well, I would turn the question around. What was it that failed to trigger this [realization] in everyone else's head? It seemed to me that Sweeney was rationally looking at a problem and doing a trial-and-error thing to see what would work. The more astonishing thing for me is that for 40 years, most of the labor movement just fell asleep; so the percentage of the work force that's unionized has fallen from the mid-1950s, when it was at about 35 percent, to 14 percent today. Of course Sweeney's response was literally exceptional since it was unusual. But it was rational. So I'd say the questions are why everyone else's response was normal but irrational -- [and why] they weren't trying [harder].
Q: How would you answer that question?
A: Well, you have to reinvent the whole culture of unions. If the industry expands and you don't expand with it and your contracts begin to reflect it, then it gets to the point where you can't just convert your staff into organizers. In order to organize, you're going to have to teach members to service themselves. If there are grievances on the job, they've got to be trained to [handle them] so that your staff can organize. That's part of it. Another part of it is that generally, corporations start ignoring the terms of the National Labor Relations Act during the 1970s. The terrain turns very hard.
Given the immigrant composition of much of America's new proletariat today, it is obvious that you need organizers that are fluent in Spanish or other languages. That sounds simple, but some unions don't have them, even when they are actively organizing. I won't name names, but there are a couple of unions that are just notorious for being stupid on this score.
Q: What larger lessons come out of the Justice for Janitors [strike]? What does this say about the next 10 years of organizing?
A: I think you have to be a little brutal about it at this point and say there are unionizable sectors and there are sectors that are all but unionizable. The basic point is a question of leverage. Where do you get leverage? The only way to wage any of these campaigns these days is a full-fledged corporate campaign, looking at all the sources of ownership and influence and financial backing for whomever it is you are trying to unionize. As well, you have to wage a campaign actively involving your members as well as a campaign actively involving whatever political, religious, and community allies you can line up. So there's almost a kind of algebraic formula for doing this; but it is very difficult, and you need to be very good at every aspect of this.
Unionizing and getting good contracts in America is almost like drawing to an inside straight. It involves some good fortune, but you have to line up everything just right, and you never have the odds in your favor.
Q: Is that trend going to continue?
A: I would think unions will only grow smarter as to how to go about this. Either that, or they will die. There's a kind of Darwinian choice here. You either wise up, or you croak. Unions would obviously love to get labor law reform. The things that are most commonly talked about are tripling the amount of fines that employers have to pay when they violate the National Labor Relations Act by illegally firing workers involved in an organizing campaign.
And then there's a broader political climate. And I would argue this is actually one of the areas where the difference between an Al Gore administration and a George Bush administration comes into play. The ultimate reason most unions are there for Al Gore is that they are really concerned that the chief political, strategic goal of a George W. Bush administration would be to bust unions.
