Port Board OKs Raise for Airport Janitors

For the past six years, the 70 janitors who clean up San Diego’s airport haven’t exactly been cleaning up in their pay envelopes.

In 1982, for example, the Lindbergh Field employees made $5.39 an hour, or about $700 after taxes each month, with no sick leave and one week of vacation annually.

Today, they make . . . $5.39 an hour.

But a little more green is finally on the way to the people who are the first glimpse, for many, of San Diego’s citizenry, thanks to the union that organized them a year ago.

The Board of Port Commissioners, the wealthy public agency that operates the airport, voted 5 to 1 Tuesday to pay $37,585.65 to Calhoun Maintenance Co., its contractor for custodial services, for a 5% increase in pay for the janitors--to $5.66 an hour--over the 11-month period beginning Aug. 28.

“The people on the commission are relatively conservative businessmen, but they finally saw the fairness issue,” said Commissioner Louis Wolfsheimer, who pushed for the extraordinary measure.

In fact, the winning arguments may have had more to do with image than with fairness: “The public sees those employees and they think they belong to the port. If we can’t pay them as much as our employees, by God, we can at least give them a decent increase,” Wolfsheimer said.

It took a long, increasingly public fight by Service Employees International Union Local 102, which attracted support from other unions and community groups, to make the Port Board overcome its reluctance to come between its contractor and its contractor’s labor, Wolfsheimer said.

Felt Janitors Deserved Break

The lone holdout, Commissioner Rip Reopelle, said he felt the janitors deserved a break but added that the move is “getting in the way of labor-management negotiations, which is not in the best interests of the Port District.”

The union, which had previously wrested $150 per worker from the board to make up for a shortfall in the contractor’s health-care benefits, hailed the decision as another victory in its citywide “Janitors for Justice” campaign.

“It’s a real clear-cut case of equity. The janitors were determined to get something done, and they kept at it and made it an issue,” said union President Eliseo Medina.

“We have been in negotiations with Calhoun since September, 1987, but we kept getting stuck on the question of money. They said they were locked into the contract with the city and couldn’t give a raise,” Medina said.

“I think we were able to get this because of the union,” said janitor Manuel Valdes, who has been on the job eight months.

Medina also applauded the board’s pledge to put a phrase in all subsequent contracts demanding negotiations between contractors and their unions.