Janitors Union Vows to Turn Up Organizing Heat

After dumping a union janitorial firm in favor of a cheaper nonunion cleaning contractor two months ago, Pacific Bell managers braced for a clamorous labor protest at their Olive Street high-rise in downtown Los Angeles.

The old custodial crew, after all, was represented by one of the nation’s biggest and fastest-growing labor organizations, the brassy Service Employees International Union.

Yet after Pacific Bell ousted the union janitors, the response amounted to nothing more than a couple of labor people quietly handing out leaflets--and none of the feared drum banging or screaming in the streets.

“It was very low-key,” said a thankful Mary Hunter, Pacific Bell’s director of property management.

Now, however, the leaders of SEIU’s Justice for Janitors union-organizing campaigns are vowing to turn up the volume in key labor disputes around California. And that could mean new, and broader, labor warfare involving building service workers, janitorial firms, landlords and corporate tenants, particularly in Los Angeles and, eventually, in lightly unionized Orange County.

In part, the SEIU is counting on a recent internal overhaul to help rejuvenate its efforts locally to recruit janitors and other low-wage service workers. The union is also investigating whether it should step up efforts around the state by going after other office building workers, such as security guards.

When the union holds rallies for janitors at office towers, “the security guards come up to us and say, ‘What about us?’ ” said Mike Garcia, the SEIU official who was the architect of the recent local union reorganization.

Building owners and property managers, in many cases struggling with high vacancy levels, are nearly certain to contest the union fiercely. And some observers expect the union’s opponents in the business community to prevail if the SEIU goes ahead with major new campaigns.

The union is already facing tough going in an organizing effort among janitors on the USC campus.

A far rougher battle is being played out in Sacramento, where the union has been stymied for two years amid stiff employer resistance and legal maneuvering on both sides, including pending suits in which SEIU activists and workers opposing the union accuse one another of physical intimidation.

SEIU has “lots of money, and they have lots of political contacts,” said Floyd Palmer, a lawyer for a janitorial contractor fighting the union in Sacramento. But, Palmer said, his client, along with building owners and tenants, are resisting the union because employers have come to realize that “if I roll over now . . . I’ll have to roll over again when they want contract increases.”

*

Still, the SEIU already is the author of one of the most dramatic success stories in recent American labor history.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s in Los Angeles, SEIU Local 399’s Justice for Janitors campaign recruited thousands of low-paid Latino immigrant workers. The percentage of union-represented janitors working in downtown high-rises skyrocketed from about 10% to an estimated 90%. In high-rises citywide, the union says it built its ranks up to 70%.

One of the campaign’s most successful ploys was to embarrass office landlords into hiring union janitorial firms by staging boisterous demonstrations--in the buildings’ lobbies as well as on the streets--highlighting the miserable working conditions for many janitors.

The union has pointed to, among other alleged abuses, widespread sexual harassment by supervisors of female janitors, who often work alone at night. Union activists say janitors also commonly are forced to work unpaid overtime.

Even for union janitors, the pay remains low, particularly outside of downtown and Century City. With the raises included in the current contract, though, all covered janitors will receive family health- care benefits by 1999, and the minimum pay throughout the county will reach $6.80 an hour.

The recently completed union overhaul dates back to mid-1995, when Local 399 was sidetracked by an internal rebellion. The fight was racially charged, with predominantly Latino dissidents accusing white union officials of unresponsive and undemocratic leadership.

SEIU officials in Washington put the diversified local--which included health-care workers along with janitors and other service employees--under the control of a trustee, Garcia, and he began a painful, 18-month reorganization.

Culminating that effort, last week the Los Angeles janitors and a smaller group of other low-paid service workers were split off from Local 399 and merged into a similar Northern California SEIU unit, Local 1877.

The resulting 20,000-member group is envisioned by the union as a growing power in the building service industry throughout most of urban California.

Although the organization will continue to be known as Local 1877, it is shifting its headquarters from San Jose to Los Angeles, where 11,500 of the local’s members live.

One of the problems the union has long faced is that landlords typically are free to dump their janitorial firms with simply 30 days’ notice. So even when a janitorial firm agrees to sign a union contract, there’s no assurance that the firm won’t be booted out by the landlord and replaced with a less-expensive nonunion company, costing the union workers their jobs.

*

Garcia said that during the trusteeship, the local held its ground, with union contractors picking up enough new buildings to replace the offices that switched to nonunion firms.

Still, the recent loss of the Pacific Bell building and some other towers on the Wilshire Boulevard corridor to nonunion competition was a blow. Garcia said he is committed to bringing them back into union hands when he has staff available to reorganize the work sites.

Geoffrey Ely, president of the Building Owners and Managers Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, said high vacancy rates at many office towers are putting pressure on landlords to cut costs “in every conceivable way,” including hiring lower-cost janitorial firms. Meanwhile, he said there is “no great concern” among landlords that the union will retaliate with stepped-up organizing drives, including the strident protests of the past.

Ely said such tactics are costly for the union and risk triggering damaging public backlash.

But Garcia, 45, has expansion in mind. The gleaming office towers of Orange County, where the major janitorial contractors are not unionized, are a prime target for coming years.

First, though, Garcia says, he wants to focus on the ongoing organizing drives in Sacramento and at USC.

When it comes to Justice for Janitors campaigns, Garcia said, “We don’t walk away until we win.”