Labor News Briefs

Janitors Strike in Cities Across the U.S.

by Charles Walker

A janitors’ strike may soon be coming to your city. Five years ago, the Service Employees Union (SEIU) leadership adopted a strategy of negotiating contracts around the country that would expire within a few months of each other. Now the time has come to test that strategy with, if necessary, nationally coordinated overlapping strikes. If successful, some 100,000 workers, including many women and foreign born, will see bigger raises and better benefits than they would otherwise.

The contract campaign was kicked off on April 5 in Los Angeles. There, SEIU Local 1877 (8,500 members) struck for a $1 an hour raise in each of the next three years. The Los Angeles Times reported April 6, “Union janitors earn $6.80 to $7.90 per hour, and won full family benefits last year.”

The union has mobilized thousands of protesters to take to the streets, marching, tying up traffic, and blocking freeway ramps. “A Department of Water and Power road crew stopped work to stand respectfully as the janitors passed. Even a police officer controlling the crowd briefly chanted ‘si se puede’ [yes we can], bobbing his head rhythmically as he waved the strikers on” (LA Times, April 7). The AFL-CIO reported that an anonymous donor gave $500,000 to support the cause. At this date no settlement is in sight.

On April 18, thousands of downtown Chicago janitors struck to speed up their contract talks. The next day the strikers ratified a new contract that includes “improved health benefits and a pay increase of 45¢ in the first year, with increases of 35¢ in subsequent years… In the Chicago suburbs, janitors are close to striking and both sides said the main issue is health insurance for the 4,500 suburban janitors, who make $6.65 an hour…Union officials say similar labor unrest could occur in other cities, including New York [where 10,000 marched April 12] Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia” (Associated Press, April 18).

The strikers, in view of their low pay and depressed standard of living, generally have received sympathetic press coverage. The April 18 New York Times carried a lengthy account of the tough lives janitors endure in the Silicon Valley, an area that claims it spawns 250 new paper millionaires a week. The paper reports that workers are living in garages and that “the rent that many janitors pay for garages usually exceeds half their monthly take-home pay… [M]any janitors are relegated to squalid situations; eight people from two separate families sharing a small trailer; nine adults living in a one-bedroom apartment; a janitor sleeping on the floor of a friend’s metal-working shop; a janitor who says the single small window in the garage she lives in makes her think she is living in a prison cell.”

The SEIU’s Silicon Valley local, with 5,700 janitors, “is asking for raises that would lift the cleaners’ pay to $12.50 an hour after three years, from the current $8.” The wealthy electronic companies whose buildings the janitors clean take no responsibility for the workers’ plight. The building owners say that the janitors do not work for them, but for cleaning contractors. “The janitors are not our employees,” one building manger told a reporter, “and we don’t comment upon other companies’ employees.”

A cleaning contractor “acknowledged that low wages hurt the janitors, but he said that if a unionized company like his granted large raises, then nonunion companies might underbid him.” Apparently the New York Times reporter didn’t ask why the building owners don’t require that the contractors’ bids include a minimum wage, such as the $12.50 an hour the union wants. That would allow the unionized contractor companies to compete with non-union outfits, even though that would reduce somebody’s profits. But what the hell — nothing’s perfect.

Besides, it’s for a good cause!

April 20, 2000

Some Unions Growing

Despite decades-old anti-labor laws put on the books by both Democrats and Republicans, labor unions in 1999 organized 600,000 new members. After subtracting losses due to downsizing and the like, the AFL-CIO wound up with a gain of 265,000, bettering its 1998 increase of 100,000. The increases of the last two years come after twenty years of decline.

Unions had three outstanding organizing successes: SEIU gained 74,000 Los Angeles home health aides; AFT and the UAW signed up 65,000 members in Puerto Rico; and UNITE unionized 5,200 Fieldcrest Cannon textile workers in North Carolina (which took 25 years and 5 elections).

Overall union membership increased by 112,493 in the private sector, while the gain was 152,788 among public workers. The AFL-CIO now has 16.5 million members, or 13.9 percent of the workforce.

40 Million Say They Would Vote Union

Those numbers could be higher still, but some “international” unions and many local unions spend little, if anything, on organizing. That’s a crime because, according to Business Week Online (January 19), “some 40 million employees say they would vote to unionize if an election were held at their employer.” The periodical says that many workers are pissed-off because bosses “aren‘t sharing the robust economy’s fruits enough with their employees.”

However, AFL-CIO head John Sweeney will be sharing the unions’ organizing successes with the politicians, mainly the Democrats. According to the January 23 Boston Globe, Sweeney promises that the nation is going to see “the largest and most significant activity that grass-roots workers have exercised in any political election.”

Paradoxically, the bottom-line result of that “significant grass-roots” activity will be to leave workers in the political grip of the two parties responsible for the decades-old anti-labor laws.

Surprise Auto Contract Clause Favors Democrats, Republicans Claim

A little-known clause in the UAW’s new inch-thick contract makes national Election Days in 2000, 2001, and 2002 paid holidays for 400,000 auto workers. Republicans are upset because they figure Democrats will benefit at their expense. Republican Gov. John Enger of Michigan told the New York Times (December 30): “That will be the biggest corporate contribution in American history.”

UAW President Steven Yokich says the union just wants to have more clout on election day and is not trying to elect more Democrats. However, Yokich said that a union poll showed that auto workers were more likely to vote Democrat than Republican. Some observers say that the numbers of auto workers who vote may not increase, but with the day off the union will be able to mobilize more get-out-the-vote volunteers. The auto bosses said they agreed to the days off in order to cut down on absenteeism, and “political consequences were not a major concern,” said the Times. Unlike the UAW tops, the auto bosses know they stay in the saddle, no matter which big-business party attracts the most votes. The falling number of workers who vote may indicate that on that score they agree with the bosses.

First Cabin Ships Pay Second Rate Wages

Luxury cruise ships treat their galley workers a lot like galley slaves. The New York Times of December 24 last year reported that thousands of “dishwashers, assistant cooks, cabin cleaners and brass-rail polishers” toil as long as 18 hours a day, seven days a week for as little as $400–$450 a month. “Most are from third-world countries, working for months without a day off, living in shared quarters…and told to speak to passengers only if spoken to first.”

“The Carnival Corporation, with 45 ships the world’s largest cruise company, is averaging $2.8 million a day, almost all tax free because the company, which is based in Miami, is registered in Panama.”

Though “most lines have their headquarters in the United States, the companies escape American minimum wage requirements, and other labor laws, the same way they avoid corporate income tax and many criminal and environmental laws,” they register the ships where “laws are lax and enforcement is weak.”

Some workers are victims of a vicious partnership between the lines and the Norwegian Seaman’s Union. One cabin cleaner caught the Royal Caribbean chiseling her over sick pay. She was told that the line had a contract with the union that allowed the company to avoid the maritime law that “says seafarers are entitled to sick pay equal to full pay… After the worker filed a suit, she learned that Royal Caribbean paid $300,000 a year in dues directly to the union, rather than deduct them from paychecks.”

According to this worker’s lawyers, “The non-Norwegian workers, who make up the majority covered by the agreement, did not have union cards, never attended union meetings, or voted for officers, and did not approve the contract terms…most workers did not even know they were in a union.”

Miners Union Scraping Bottom?

There was a time when the United Mine Workers Union (UMW) led by the world-famous John L. Lewis could force even the federal government to bend to its will. But since the 1950s, when the union, still led by Lewis, began collaboration with the mine owners to “modernize and consolidate” the coal industry, the course of the militant and powerful union has been downhill.

After five decades of “labor-management cooperation” the miners union reportedly doesn’t even release its membership figures. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal industry productivity — the amount of coal produced per worker per hour — more than doubled from 1986 to 1997, from 3.01 tons per man-hour to 6.04 tons per man-hour (Associated Press, March 6).

In March, 700 UMW delegates met in Las Vegas and voted to eliminate one of their three remaining national offices, leaving only a president and a secretary-treasurer. The union is too weak to protect the jobs of its members or combat the industry’s widespread union-busting. One delegate told the convention, “All over, we’ve seen locals having to merge with other locals, districts having to merge, all because of layoffs in the coal industry. I had to lay off my friends, and I even laid myself off to make sure that District 28 could survive” (Associated Press, March 7).

How much longer the 110-year-old union will survive is anybody’s guess. It recently organized about 150 public workers, perhaps an indication that it’s thinking about becoming a general union. While dues from miscellaneous groups of workers will help pay the rent, those new members will not be in a position to change the lopsided relationship of forces with the mine bosses, who are driving the union out of the mines.

March 25, 2000