LABOR'S RENEWAL?: Justice for Janitors
Erickson, Chris & Mitchell, Daniel J.B. & Valenzuela, Abel & Wong, Kent & Zeitlin, Maurice & Waldinger, Roger & Milkman, Ruth
On June 15, 1990, the Los Angeles police attacked a peaceful demonstration of janitors and their supporters in the tony Century City district of Los Angeles. Local 399 of the Service Employees...
...Bringing ISS to the table involved the expenditure of a great deal of political capital...
...suffered in the 1980s...
...In the summer of 1989, the campaign's focus shifted to Century City, a large west side office complex...
...Sometimes you found people who fought there...
...better a single day's raid on a factory with two hundred workers than a series of nights spent on sweeps of scattered buildings...
...I remember we did a Secretaries' Day demonstration where we brought huge boxes of carnations, thousands of them, and we passed them out as a sort of token of appreciation from janitors to secretaries...
...One of J4J's first targets in L.A...
...We had a lot of community people, it was about three or four hundred people...
...They just completely freaked out...
...Some employers claim that if they pay workers union rates, they can make any given workplace nonunion and that the "union will never know...
...Labor Economics and Industrial Relations (Harvard University Press, 1993), pp•512-41...
...As one Local 399 official told us, "People are always calling him [Bevona] up saying, 'I can't solve my own problem, you solve it for me.' He's a powerful guy in New York, but there is just so much he can do...
...For example, J4J filed complaints with the NLRB over unfair labor practices such as discrimination against union activists...
...The Ingredients of Success We can identify three key ingredients in J4J's dramatic success in L.A.: centralized union leadership...
...In 1970, service work was still largely the province of the region's African-American population...
...tenants often complained to building managers about J4J activities, indirectly intensifying the pressure on ISS...
...The Union Returns to Town While Local 399 was crashing, its parent was taking on a new form...
...4) Mobilizing the rank and file: Ultimately, the ability to pressure employers came from the union's success at inspiring the rank and file to action in ways that generated legal charges, caught the attention of the mass media, and forced the hands of other actors, including politicians and such SEIU leaders as Bevona...
...African-Americans made up 33 percent of the region's janitors, whereas Latino immigrants were a small presence, barely 7 percent.* But in the 1980s, immigrants were moving into southern California, and it was they who would supply the workforce for the emerging nonunion cleaning contractors...
...We called it 'acting union without a union contract.' That was what we tried to do with the workers of the nonunion companies...
...One observer reported that "a group of community activists became so attracted to the J4J cause, they formed a totally independent group," which ran its own meetings, did its own fundraising, and conducted its own activities to help janitors...
...The same tactics were used again shortly afterward in Denver, where the union raised "enough hell in the downtown area that the industry caved...
...Some of the friends of J4J turned out to be the usual suspects, namely students from U.0 .L.A...
...By 1970, there was already a significant Latino presence among the city's janitors...
...Notwithstanding the gains generated by unionization, wages remain very modest, too low to cement attachment to the industry, which means that the workforce will continue to turn over at high rates...
...For example, knowing that ISS was an international company based in Denmark, the union arranged for a visiting delegation of Danish trade unionists to meet workers involved in the organizing effort, and to witness firsthand the hostility of the employer...
...In this situation, there were many obstacles to union organizing...
...success: the role of immigrants...
...On the first big one, we stormed through every single building in Century City, every single one...
...The workers with whom we spoke had only a vague notion of who, if anyone, from "the community" was providing help...
...Use of such guerrilla tactics served two ends...
...This approach also permitted janitors to go on strike under certain conditions with legal protection against being permanently replaced...
...Another source of pressure involved identifying a key source of capital with both the motivation and the means to exert pressure on developers and owners...
...We couldn't have paid for a better experience than for these guys to go back home and meet with the head of the ISS and say, 'I don't know what you think you're doing in the U.S., but we don't like it,'" an organizer recalled...
...And with the union all but broken, wages plummeted...
...The convergence of ethnicity, residence, and occupational concentration made the union's task easier...
...those unprepared to "spend a fortune on lawyers .. . settled pretty quickly...
...And in New York, after seeing a video of the L.A...
...only when mobilization had reached a boiling point was he willing to intervene...
...When do we want it...
...Owners differ in their degree of exposure to the types of pressure that J4J can apply...
...The contract with ISS was 40 • DISSENT Justice for Janitors signed that day...
...Regardless of ties to relatives, the ethnic mix often proved combustible, as Central Americans and Mexicans did not always perceive the affinity that labor solidarity would prescribe...
...Most important, there was no expectation that the drive would result in an election...
...By 1982, total compensation in the union sector had risen above $12 an hour, as opposed to $4 an hour in the nonunion buildings...
...Nor is L.A...
...Sweeney doubled union dues, historically the lowest in the AFL-CIO, and increased the national staff from twenty to more than two hundred between 1984 and 1988...
...And as the pessimist would never have predicted the very considerable success that J4J has achieved so far, we suspect that one would do better to listen to what the optimist has to say...
...Organizers described community involvement in moraleboosting, not strategic terms...
...As one of our informants emphasized: The reason that L.A...
...And without that mobilization, pressure from afar would not have had much impact...
...Gus Bevona could have done this earlier...
...The legal prohibition against secondary boycotts means that "in-your-face" activities must be handled gingerly...
...J4J has frequently been exported through trusteeships, which were imposed on the San Diego, Atlanta, San Jose, and Santa Clara locals...
...One seasoned union source reported that local staff and leaders were frequently resistant to the J4J model, and often threw up roadblocks to organizing...
...Although it is true that workers in an industry like building services have to be continually reorganized, this was always true in laborintensive, small-establishment industries like restaurants, garments, and construction...
...since few unions were hiring staff during the 1980s, the SEIU "had its pick of these 'new' labor militants," in Michael Piore's view...
...In other ways, the game plan was different...
...So it was a knock-down drag-out battle...
...Spurred by the building boom of the 1980s, the industry grew quickly, employing 28,883 janitors by 1990, more than twice as many as in 1980...
...And it turned out to have a positive impact...
...Southern California hardly seemed a likely setting for this drama...
...Pretty simple, straightforward things . . . . The L.A.P.D...
...Other common experiences seem to have made that community particularly organizable...
...It is an integrated structure, self-consciously devised and instituted by Sweeney and his staff...
...the union has contracted with the American Management Association to provide it...
...Moreover, bad times make all owners concerned about occupancy: they may be more likely to succumb to union pressure when tenants are scarce and difficult to replace...
...But southern California once looked different—and not so long ago...
...For a while, it seemed that this new labor force would be extremely docile: as long as the newcomers compared a minimum-wage job in the garment center to an unyielding plot of land in Mexico's central plateau, employers could count on their workers' quiescence...
...Put the word out, we're going back on Monday, and we're going to be bigger, we're going to be badder...
...Frontline supervisors often oversaw their relatives...
...may well bode ill for janitorial unionism...
...Though the founding locals (Chicago, New York, and San Francisco) were still holding fast, the rest of the building services division was in deep trouble, losing ground to nonunion competitors and getting battered by unionized employers in search of concessions...
...Almost all of the new jobs went to Latino immigrants, whose share of employment rose from 28 to 61 percent...
...Since janitors work in small numbers, at night, and in buildings likely to be locked up after business hours, the industry was an inconvenient target for the INS...
...Their single most important source was probably the Harvard Business Review.' The institutional changes made the SEIU a more sophisticated and more militant union, and infused it with some of the spirit of the old CIO...
...There was concern that they would bail when things got hot...
...SEIU has generally been successful in walking the fine line distinguishing acts of free speech protected by the First Amendment from those activities that would trigger Board action to protect such "innocent" parties as building owners...
...Mayor Tom Bradley came under pressure to act...
...Turnover is an inherent source of union weakness, requiring the local to continually reorganize the workforce, lest the contractors supplant union members with nonunion workers and then go nonunion before anyone is the wiser...
...was like, `are we ready for this?' " The campaign began in the downtown area, taking responsibility both for representing the remaining union base and for organizing the nonunion buildings nearby...
...This proved a big advantage...
...It is not difficult to imagine why an incumbent leadership will opt for the status quo, especially in light of the political ramifications of a sudden infusion of new, possibly ethnically distinctive, members...
...They know what they are...
...Closer to home, San Francisco also saw an immigrant infusion, but wages and union membership did not take the battering they did in L.A...
...One victory in downtown meant one building...
...Among the Central Americans there was also a component of seasoned activists with a background in left-wing or union activity back home...
...The local pushed hard for further improvements...
...And you can't file an unfair labor practices complaint against the building owner, since he's not the employer...
...Increased turnover accelerated the African-American exodus...
...By 1985, janitorial union membership had fallen to 1,800...
...created the context in which Bevona was moved to cash in his chips...
...had been utterly transformed...
...Copyright 0 1997 by Cornell University Press...
...These changes were part of a new strategy, one that Piore characterizes as follows: The planning process the SEIU has instituted involves considerable staff and leadership training...
...and other schools...
...The janitorial workforce included both former activists and their old enemies—"You find other ones, 'I was the one who killed that trade unionist.' " But the organizers reported that "no matter what their political background in their country, here they were working class and understood the idea of sticking to your class...
...There is other evidence to suggest that Latino immigrant workers are demonstrating a new militance and commitment to labor...
...The whole thing is to get the people with power to feel the pressure...
...The plan involved targeting the nonunion wings of "doublebreasted" companies (firms with both union and nonunion operations under different names) and taking advantage of competition in the industry by letting the unionized companies pick up work at low rates, with the understanding that they would move to union standards once half of the market had been organized...
...far *See Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds , Ethnic Los Angeles (Rsssell Sage Foundation, 1996...
...The immigrant influx coincided with Local 399's troubles, but it would be misleading to suggest that it caused them...
...Everyone knows it...
...It didn't require a contract for them to redefine their relationship to their employer and to defend their rights...
...gravitated to the jobs where their kin and hometown friends were employed...
...Thus, "even though L.A...
...The leadership in 1987 was old school, conservative," reflected one of the lead J4J organizers...
...One industry, one union, one contract" is the slogan on a union leaflet...
...They were getting panicked calls from every building in Century City, which was the power center of the west side, and in some ways the power center of the city...
...Notable examples include a spontaneous, successful walkout by eight hundred Latino workers at a wheel factory and a similarly self-organized strike throughout Southern California by immigrant drywallers (see David Brody, "Criminalizing the Rights of Labor," Dissent, Summer 1995...
...3) Coalition-building: The campaign also targeted owners in the political realm...
...That it is, but it also has a crucial top-down component...
...The first two elements are typical of J4J nationwide, and indeed the campaign also succeeded in some cities where immigrants were not present in large numbers...
...Janitorial unionism took hold in L.A...
...Then the industry switched to Latino workers and disconnected the workforce from the union, because the union couldn't fire its reps the way management could change its workforce...
...Used by permission of Cornell University Press...
...But then the bottom fell out...
...By late spring, 1990, the union concluded that employer intransigence left it no alternative but to strike—and that it had the strength to take on that challenge...
...Understanding the industry also becomes a tool in the hands of the workers, allowing them to see that they have the potential to turn things around...
...From its inception, the L.A...
...Of the 400 janitors working there, 250 were employed by a single cleaning contractor, ISS...
...An extra weapon was being used against the company," a key organizer recalled...
...is the shining star of the union is that we've had the highest percentage of workers' participation, have the highest worker turnout, and the highest percentage of workers going to jail and getting arrested...
...And there, you were in a union they killed you...
...It was like, `Let's go back on Monday...
...The ideas that underlie it were drawn from the business management literature...
...The 1970s were the union's heyday, with membership peaking at about five thousand in 1978...
...Wages had more than doubled from those available a decade before, but still were only $3.75 an hour...
...In full view of the media, the police charged the crowd, injuring many, including children and pregnant women...
...Our economists know how to crunch the numbers...
...police attacked a peaceful march of J4J strikers and supporters as they walked from Beverly Hills to Century City...
...The Wall Street Journal reports that 25 percent of SEIU's budget goes to organizing, as opposed to an average of 5 percent for the rest of organized labor, and the J4J campaign indicates why...
...This set the stage for the events of June 15, when the L.A...
...The union seemed to benefit more from its ability to connect with local political leaders...
...The building services industry recruited immigrants in virtually 38 • DISSENT Justice for Janitors every city where they were to be found, but with widely varying consequences...
...Second, guerrilla tactics transformed the union into the de facto representative of the workers...
...J4J deliberately abandoned the traditional NLRB election approach to organizing, in part because of the peculiar structure of this industry...
...The J4J campaign also reached out to organizations in the immigrant community...
...Stable relations are aided by the presence of the large national, even international contractors, who live with unions wherever they must, and who have accommodated to janitorial unionism's return to L.A...
...First, as one management informant told us, they "beat down the contractors economically...
...A pessimistic view would suggest that the union's hold on the industry is precarious, and that the earlier collapse of Local 399 may be recapitulated in the future...
...County AFLCIO sat on the CRA's board...
...J4J marshaled a variety of tactics to put pressure on ISS...
...Institutions such as banks, insurance companies, and pension funds often found themselves vulnerable to the leverage J4J learned to apply...
...would have developed as it has...
...As one impressed management informant put it, SEIU had the ability to "ferret out the weaknesses" of the ownership/management structure in any particular situation...
...44 • DISSENT...
...Most of the key players on the industry side are attached to nationally or internationally operated firms that do business with the union where they must, and such firms are vulnerable to pressure from their unionized employees...
...Emblematic of this shift is the J4J campaign, which successfully re-organized the building services industry, bringing more than eight thousand largely immigrant workers under a union contract...
...unique in this regard...
...it also put the risks entailed in an union drive in a totally different light: With the Salvadorans, you find different attitudes...
...In the end, the battle took Century's owner "out of the fight," with the union redefining victory as "the owner bouncing Century Cleaning from the building"—a claim that was not entirely hollow, since some of Century's contracts were won by union firms...
...Local 399 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was seeking a union contract for the workers who clean the huge, glittering office towers that dominate this part of the city...
...For much for the twentieth century, these were environments in which unions thrived...
...But as Richard Mines and Jeffrey Avina note in a study of California's janitors published in 1992, "Neither the union leadership nor its militant labor force . . . [was] entirely satisfied with the job conditions that prevailed in 1975...
...One organizer reported a "high level of class consciousness," apparently rooted in the societies from which the immigrants came: One of the good things about organizing Latino workers is that there is a positive view of unions...
...With the decline of heavy This article is adapted from Organizing to Win, edited by Kate Bronfenbrenner, Sheldon Friedman, Richard Hurd, Rudy Oswald, and Ronald L. Seeber, to be published by Cornell University Press in the fall of 1997...
...Although this may be largely bravado, the union's internal preoccupations would suggest that it may be more than an idle threat...
...Between 1976 and 1983, union wages rose an average of fifty cents a year...
...The union soon learned that "it didn't take a contract to redefine the relationship with the company...
...In part, the importance of centralization comes down to a matter of dollars and cents...
...However, J4J's spectacular showing in L.A...
...effective organization has often meant taking matters out of local leaders' hands...
...indeed, the union's strategy began with a business-oriented understanding of the industry...
...But also it meant they had a lot more investment in fighting us...
...When janitorial unionism declined in L.A., 42 • DISSENT Justice for Janitors it remained strong in such traditional citadels as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco...
...Strategy and Tactics: J4J's basic strategy is to seek control over all the key players in a local labor market, with the goal of taking labor costs out of competition...
...police beating strikers, Gus Bevona, the powerful president of SEIU Local 32B-32J, previously unwilling to exert any pressure on ISS, was moved to lend a hand...
...This turn of events raises the possibility that Local 399's future may not be as bright as its recent past...
...But the tide has been turning, with militant union activity suggesting that the days of immigrant servitude are over...
...Bevona called the president of ISS into his office, and after making him wait in the front office for two and a half hours, threatened that if he didn't recognize the L.A...
...1) Intelligence: Along with its 1930s-style WINTER • 1997 • 41 Justice for Janitors spirit, J4J has brought 1990s-style techniques to the cause of janitorial unionism...
...This brings us to the third and final ingredient in J4J's L.A...
...Justice...
...The importance of community involvement, however, should not be overstated...
...But although the J4J campaign has done well in cities where immigrants predominate—such as San Jose, Denver and San Diego—it has also scored WINTER • 1997 • 43 Justice for Janitors success in Milwaukee, where the workforce is almost all African-American...
...If you ask, "Que piensa de la union...
...The staff read widely in the business press and the more scholarly literature as well...
...The local union leadership, made up of people highly supportive of the J4J effort, was turned out of office in the spring of 1995...
...The war-plan had several key elements...
...The SEIU had grown during the 1960s and 1970s, largely through diversification into health care and the public sector...
...In building services, as in so many other immigrant-employing industries, recruiting through informal personal contacts served both to attract labor and to keep it under control...
...Since construction could not begin without approval from the city's Community Redevelopment Authority (CRA), the union had a powerful lever...
...Enter the Immigrants Scratch a low-paid service worker, find an immigrant— so it goes in the caste society that is late twentieth-century L.A...
...I've been into buildings where the Salvadorans and the Mexicanos don't like each other," explained one experienced, Mexican-born union organizer, "and they hate and they are separate and they eat separate...
...for the past ten years, J4J has had the good fortune of confronting institutional investors who find themselves highly vulnerable to the tactics that it deploys...
...called a citywide tactical alert that day...
...As in other similarly competitive industries, unionized employers have been quick to find virtue in a union that can take wages out of competition...
...During most of the 1980s, the head of the L.A...
...Moreover, there may be less to today's pacific relations with employers than meets the eye: since wage increases in the five-year contract signed in 1995 are back-loaded, employers may grow restive when faced with the thirty-cent-anhour raise due in 1999...
...On May 29, 1990, "we pulled the buildings...
...But there is also an optimistic interpretation of today's internal travails...
...And the highvisibility tactics are also high-risk tactics, especially when the union runs up against owners or developers with deep pockets...
...The union had done a good job of being representative of membership and had black reps...
...All unattributed quotations in this piece are from interviews conducted by the authors with organizers for the Justice for Janitors Campaign...
...just after World War II...
...Other tactics took a different approach to win public sympathy...
...Organizers feared that workers would be intimidated, but at a strikers' meeting shortly after the event, it became clear that the attack had only strengthened workers' resolve...
...Public outrage added fuel to the campaign...
...As wages fell and the union's power waned, blacks moved out of the occupation...
...was due to a special dynamic created by the presence of large numbers of immigrants from Central America and Mexico in its janitorial labor force...
...What is now a set of campaign practices known as "Justice for Janitors" emerged gradually...
...The nonunion firms almost exclusively hired Latinos," explained a union organizer...
...An organizer recalled, "I would go to a building in Pico Union looking for someone from Premier [a cleaning contractor] and someone would say, `Oh, she's downstairs—with someone else from Premier.' " Moreover, the peculiar conditions of building service work created a sense of occupational community: working at night, the janitors formed a somewhat isolated group...
...But it was not a sufficient condition: the resources that the International devoted to organizing could have been misspent...
...The local's push to improve conditions and compensation motivated cleaning contractors to explore nonunion options, and by 1983, as Mines and Avina recount, "a small group of mid-sized, aggressive firms sensed the union's vulnerability and made their move...
...We went marching through the buildings, chanting and banging on drums, saying, "What do we want...
...The campaign is labor-intensive, requiring substantial personnel...
...The new, nonunion entities proved to be formidable competitors...
...Widespread outrage at the police action, both locally and around the country, led International Service Systems (ISS), the cleaning contractor for nearly all the Century City buildings, to sign a union contract soon afterward, in the largest private-sector organizing success among Latino immigrants since the United Farm Workers' victories nearly two decades earlier...
...From that point on, the pace of activity escalated sharply: We had daily actions, every morning we walked along the median strip with human billboards, traffic was really tied up...
...Defeat Out of Victory...
...It was not a matter of ending the marriage between L.A.'s political establishment and real estate interests, but of altering it so the deals that political leaders cut with property owners would occasionally yield dividends for someone else...
...And on some days we had big actions...
...The law prevents us from picketing against the building owner," one organizer recalled, "so we made a snowman with a picket sign...
...The name emerged in a "fight back" struggle in Pittsburgh, in which the SEIU defeated employer efforts to wring concessions with the "in-your-face, confrontational militant direct action" that has since become J4J's trademark...
...and a revival of demand for office space in L.A...
...The International SEIU responded by placing the local in trusteeship...
...for about two years, and this was one of many such demonstrations that had been held during that period...
...But as we have already noted, SEIU has a tradition of decentralization, and negotiations still occur at the local, not the national level, leaving solidaristic actions subject to local considerations...
...And another distinguishing characteristic of the SEIU [has] been its willingness to invest in this training...
...2) Guerrilla legal tactics: While abandoning the election route, J4J found legal protections that could be used to gain leverage over employers...
...But if we weren't in a position to hang on to our membership, if the building owners said, "We don't care what Gus Bevona says, you're out of here," there's not much that Gus Bevona can do about real estate developers in L.A...
...The story of Gus Bevona's role in securing a contract with ISS is revealing on this score...
...By filing complaints with agencies responsible for protecting workers, such as the California Occupational Safety and Health AdWINTER • 1997 • 39 Justice for Janitors ministration and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), J4J pressured the employer— and proved to workers that the union could intervene on their behalf even without a contract...
...In this case, successful mobilization in L.A...
...Although organizers initially feared that the violence might put an end to their effort, it proved a turning point in the campaign to unionize L.A.'s janitors, most of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America...
...2 Michael J. Piore, "Unions: A Reorientation to Survive," in Clark Kerr and Paul D. Staudohar (eds...
...U.S.-Mexico Relations: Labor Market Interdependence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp.429-48...
...Like immigrants everywhere, newcomers to L.A...
...an industry-specific strategy...
...The new staff members were recruited from the ranks of the not-so-new left...
...was Century Cleaning, a small local contractor with union and nonunion wings...
...In early 1989, the L.A...
...Here, you [were in a union] and you lost a job at $4.25...
...In New York, for example, immigrants make up 60 percent of the building service workforce, but earn $7,000 more than their counterparts in L.A., and New York never experienced the deunionization of j anitors that L.A...
...industry in the region, organized labor had lost legions of well-paid, blue-collar members in the 1970s and 1980s...
...Such intelligence also plays a role in motivating the membership...
...union, "all hell would break loose...
...Unionized WINTER • 1997 • 37 Justice for Janitors contractors ultimately provided a benefit package that included eleven paid holidays and full medical, dental, vision, and prescription coverage...
...consequently, no office tower built after 1987 opened up without a unionized cleaning crew...
...But the same structures could be put to a different purpose...
...is famous for no community . . . we found a community of janitors...
...By the mid-1970s, nearly all the large downtown buildings were under union contract, as well as most of the large buildings in Hollywood, Pasadena, and Santa Monica...
...as long as it does so, they may be quite willing to bid nonunion times goodbye...
...Centralization: J4J is widely seen as a bottomup campaign...
...But if and when good times return to L.A., institutional investors may sell out to hard-nosed owners who are less concerned with their public image and less fearful of losing tenants who will, in turn, have fewer options...
...The job had an additional attraction, namely the relative security it offered for undocumented immigrants fearful of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS...
...Instead, J4J developed the idea of a "comprehensive campaign"—in the words of a key organizer, "a war against the employers and the building owners, waged on all fronts [without] leaving any stone unturned...
...By 1990, the face of janitorial work in L.A...
...There is a saying that is much more common there: "La union hace la fuerza...
...Of particular good fortune for J4J was the fact that it began in the halcyon days of the 1980s, when investors were falling over themselves to build property in downtown L.A...
...they answer, "La union hace la fuerza...
...Moreover, local leadership has been less than enthusiastic...
...It wasn't that [employers] would actually fire the blacks...
...The possibility that employers might turn more obstreperous has much to do with the currently depressed state of the real estate market...
...In any case, with ISS brought to its knees, J4J won the battle for Century City, and this in turn paved the way for other successes in L.A...
...Unless we're in a position where we can use that help it would have been a meaningless gesture on his part...
...J4J seeks to compel employers "to fight on our terms, not theirs," as Stephen Lerner, former director of Building Service Organizing for the SEIU and the architect of the strategy, has described the basic plan...
...Thus a centralized structure that allowed the International to bypass local decision-makers was a necessary condition of J4J's success...
...campaign "had a full-time research/ corporate person," whose information was supplemented by data supplied by researchers at SEIU headquarters in Washington...
...The SEIU's "Justice for Janitors" (J4J) campaign had been underway in L.A...
...If the rest of the people want to be in the union, I want to be in it...
...J4J arrived in southern California in 1988, but not without trepidation, if only because "It was really huge . . . going from little Denver to monstrous L.A...
...and a critical mass of class-conscious immigrant workers...
...But even without initial contacts, the expanding janitorial occupation was an easy port of entry for immigrants with little formal education, in part due to its casual hiring practices...
...but] with attrition, the replacement pool was Latinos," one organizer told us...
...But the regime of John J. Sweeney, which began in 1980, transformed the organization...
...And if one can generalize from the experience of one rank-and-file leader—who described herself as having "learned in the university of daily life and gained a diploma in exploitation"— the bitter experience of settlement in the United States may have added to the union's appeal...
...As some of the nonunion contractors have not yet been brought to heel, even a marginal decline in Local 399's strength might swing the balance of power back to the nonunion side...
...As one union organizer explained: "We can have an election with cleaning contractors, [but] the building owner has a right to change cleaning contractors at any time...
...But it was not until the mid-1980s that the SEIU focused its efforts on its traditional home base—building services...
...In this view, the union's current problems are a normal, perhaps even inevitable result of such a massive organizing effort...
...The Immigrants In the period of Local 399's earlier decline, employers had used the social structures of immigration to evade the union and secure a more compliant labor force...
...In some respects, the campaign proceeded along traditional lines: contacting workers, making house calls, identifying leaders in both the union and nonunion buildings...
...Meanwhile, a new world of labor had emerged in L.A.: a burgeoning immigrant population employed in low-skilled, lowpaying manufacturing and service jobs...
...That experience did more than impart organizing skills...
...The police attack left several people seriously wounded and caused a pregnant woman to miscarry...
...That immigrants would work for lower wages was only part of the motivation to recruit them: "I think 'cheap' was less of a question [than] 'controllable.' " By virtue of its past history, Local 399 was ill-equipped to respond to the influx of a new type of worker...
...Ironically...
...We said, "There's been five demonstrations, it's probably very difficult for you, but we ask for your support as we fight for our rights...
...You can't scare us out of Century City.' This was not the organizers' message to the workers, this was the workers' message to the union...
...whereas in Century City, if we can get one owner to go union, we're going to take the whole thing," an organizer explained...
...Another important source of strength was support from unions representing janitors in other cities...
...J4J also staged various "in-your-face" publicity stunts to draw the attention of Century City building tenants to the janitors' plight...
...In the aftermath of J4J's successes in the early 1990s, unrest has moved from the streets into Local 399 itself...
...q Notes 1 Richard Mines and Jeffrey Avina, "Immigrants and Labor Standards: The Case of California Janitors," in Jorge A. Bustamante, Clark Reynolds, and Raul Hinojosa Ojeda (eds...
...Someone will get pissed if they learn that it costs the owner one cent to give them a raise...
...local put a halt to its material support for the campaign, and if the International had not intervened it is unlikely that janitorial unionism in L.A...
Vol. 44 • January 1997 • No. 1
