Janitors Stage Vigil as Part of National Protest

Los Angeles janitors began a 24-hour vigil at the Wells Fargo building downtown Wednesday afternoon to protest low wages and poor working conditions as part of a nationwide Justice for Janitors campaign.

The janitors have been engaged in a months-long organizing campaign in hope of elevating their wages and gaining health insurance and other benefits.

The workers, virtually all Latino immigrants, chanted, “Con union, hay proteccion” (“With a union, there is protection”), after one of their leaders, Gladys Monge, said in a speech that she was fired in late January for trying to develop support for a union in the building. The National Labor Relations Board’s Westwood office is investigating the firing.

Monge said that the Service Employees International Union helped her find another job at a unionized building and that she is now making $6.05 an hour. “Everyone of you should make at least that much,” she told the crowd, which included women workers who came with their children.

As Monge was speaking, janitors in 10 other cities from San Jose to Atlanta were also holding rallies. Stephen Lerner, building services organizing director for the Service Employees International Union, said the Justice for Janitors campaign has two basic goals: to secure union representation rights for thousands of the nation’s lowest-paid workers and to protect the contracts of the 175,000 janitors the Service Employees International Union has under contract.

Increase in Use of Non-Union Workers

The Service Employees International Union is also fighting an increase in janitorial companies that use non-union workers. In some cases these companies are corporate affiliates of older firms that use union employees.

Labor Department studies show that janitors are the fourth-largest-growing group of workers in the United States. But most janitors make barely above the minimum wage and receive no benefits, according to Lerner. For example, the janitors protesting here Wednesday typically make between $3.60 and $4 an hour and receive no overtime, health insurance or paid vacations, according to Cecile Richards, an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 399, which represents 4,000 janitors in Los Angeles.

She said unionized janitors are paid an average of $5.80 an hour and have a full benefits package, including health insurance, sick leave, paid vacations, paid holidays and a pension plan.

“It’s unfair to have all these riches side by side with poverty wages,” said Jim Zellers, president of Local 399, pointing his finger at the skyscrapers where janitors normally toil between 5:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. “The janitors subsidize the growth of this area with their poverty wages and lack of benefits,” he asserted.

Richard Genise, regional property manager for Lehndorff Management of California, the company that manages the Wells Fargo building, said he was aware of the protest but not involved in it.

He said he had awarded a contract to Century Cleaning of Los Angeles to maintain the building three years ago. “They happen to be non-union,” he said.

Richards said the building had used a unionized cleaning company previously. Officials of Century Cleaning declined to return calls asking for comment.

The nationwide campaign to improve the lot of janitors has been building for three years, starting with a 1985 clash in Pittsburgh where the Service Employees International Union staved off attempts by the Mellon Bank to lower the wages and reduce the benefits of janitors at an office tower there. The next major battleground was in Denver in 1986 where the union organized a thousand new workers with the help of the local religious community. Dozens of people were arrested during sit-ins there.

Founded in Chicago in 1921 as a union for immigrant janitors, then primarily from Europe, the Service Employees International Union organized cleaning workers in most major cities in the North over the next 40 years. But starting in the late 1970s, union janitorial contracts, like contracts in many other industries, came under attack from building owners seeking to cut costs.

Lerner said the building service industry has become increasingly competitive in the last decade, with a number of building owners canceling contracts with unionized companies and signing new pacts with non-union cleaning companies that are paying low wages, employing mostly immigrant workers and in some instances making the jobs half time. Additionally, Lerner said janitorial firms that have operated with unionized workers for decades are setting up separate firms that operate with non-union employees.