SEIU
Jono Shaffer meets the LAPD in 1990 demonstration, moments before the cops went characteristically berserk.
Over the past four decades, there have been scores of gifted and dedicated union organizers who’ve done great work, only to see that work thwarted by labor law that now enables management to defeat nearly all efforts at unionization, as Amazon recently did at its Alabama warehouse.
So it’s particularly notable when one of those organizers actually leads efforts that end in historic victories, and more notable still when those victories lead to the unionization of entire sectors of workers.
One of those precious few organizers retired earlier this week: Jono Shaffer, the Los Angeles–based organizing genius of the Service Employees International Union.
In the 1980s, as refugees from Central American violence and Mexico’s sputtering economy began flocking to Los Angeles, companies that provided janitorial services to the city’s office buildings had a brainstorm: fire their existing workforce, which was represented by a dysfunctional local union, and hire the refugees in their place, at half the pay and with no benefits.
In the late 1980s, it was Jono, as he is universally called by both allies and adversaries, who began organizing that new crop of janitors, in the first real test of the fledgling Justice for Janitors campaign that SEIU’s Stephen Lerner was devising. This was a new kind of organizing, putting public pressure not so much on the janitorial services companies but on the wealthy individuals, corporations, and real estate trusts that owned the nation’s downtown office high-rises and picked up the tab for the janitors’ labors. To do that, the janitors had to be not only introduced to the advantages of union contracts, but motivated to take their fight to the streets, by banging drums, chanting, or disrupting traffic. That would bring the publicity needed to build support from both the public and elected officials, imposing real pressure on the building owners.
That’s what Jono did, culminating with a 1990 march in L.A.’s tony cluster of Century City office buildings. Despite the fact that the march had been officially authorized by the city and came complete with elected officials in the front ranks, somehow the LAPD didn’t get the word. With nightsticks swinging, L.A.’s finest proceeded to attack the marchers, resulting in numerous injuries, far greater publicity than the march would have otherwise received, correspondingly greater pressure on the building owners, and, shortly thereafter, a union contract.
Over the next decade, the union flourished, and when it went on strike in 2000 (complete with one parade down Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills in which some apparently guilt-stricken wealthy bystanders rushed into the street and handed cash to some very surprised janitors, an act of spontaneous redistribution never seen before or since), the janitors won so big that the real estate moguls who owned downtown L.A. acceded to demands to unionize the janitors in their Orange County high-rises as well.
Jono did not stop there. The janitors who’d been displaced in the 1980s had been disproportionately Black. By the early 2000s, while it was a Latino workforce that cleaned big-city office buildings, it was largely African Americans who worked as security guards in those same buildings. Because those guards also needed the benefits of unionization, and because he realized that having the guards and janitors in the same local unions was one way to build Black- Latino solidarity, Jono began organizing the guards into the janitors’ locals, and enabled them to win recognition. Just as the L.A. victories of the janitors had inspired similar victories in most big cities outside the South, so the L.A. unionization of security guards prompted SEIU to wage similarly successful campaigns across the nation. Today, the security guard sector is one of the nation’s most unionized.
More recently, Jono led the campaigns that unionized workers at the Catholic Healthcare West hospital chain, and this year, the joint effort by SEIU and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees to unionize California child care workers who are paid with public funds. What Jono will do now is anybody’s guess; he hasn’t provided much in the way of clues. But it’s likely he will continue to enlist his skills and energy on workers’ behalf in some capacity.
His successes have not gone unnoticed. In 2000, the British filmmaker Ken Loach made a fiction film, Bread and Roses, based on the L.A. janitorial campaigns, which starred Adrien Brody as an irreverent and driven organizer clearly modeled on Jono.
Cities don’t customarily grant awards to union organizers, even when those organizers have led efforts that have resulted in significant improvements in the lives of tens of thousands of their residents. But in the week that Jono Shaffer is retiring, nothing would send a clearer signal of L.A.’s commitment to economic and social justice than some recognition of the role he’s played in bettering the lives of so many Angelenos, and by extension so many Americans.
