While Building Owners’ Profits Soar, Janitors Get Poorer
America’s working poor are getting poorer, and evidence of that sad fact is apparent after dark in many of the nation’s most lavish office buildings. That’s when crews made up primarily of Latinos, immigrants and blacks--most of them women--clean the steadily increasing supply of those expensive, handsomely furnished buildings.
A just-released UCLA study showed, for instance, that the wages of the typical janitor were $4.50 an hour last year in Los Angeles, down 36% from 1983 after taking inflation into account. That was far worse than the estimated 8% average decline suffered by the entire work force here. With that kind of income, most janitors, like most other low-income workers, are forced to pay more than half of their earnings for rent.
The problem facing janitors doesn’t stem from foreign competition or from economic difficulties among most building owners. Their profits are soaring in Los Angeles, according to the study.
The report also showed that the percentage of all full-time workers in this area who are earning poverty-level wages has more than doubled since 1969 to 17.5%. (The poverty-level cutoff for a family of four was $12,091 last year.)
The depressing study, done by UCLA urban geographer Paul Schimek, was an outgrowth of a more comprehensive UCLA report made on the widening gap between the Anglo “haves” and the minority “have-nots” in this area. Similar studies of other cities are now being made.
There is some good news in the study, at least for those concerned more about the number of jobs available in this country than about the increasing poverty of low-wage workers: Janitorial service is one of the nation’s fastest-growing industries and in eight years, there will be an additional 725,000 janitorial jobs.
For nearly four years, a union campaign called “Justice for Janitors” has tried focusing public attention on the plight of those who work through the night at poverty-level wages to do the cleaning.
The much-needed, extensive campaign by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is having some limited success in a few big cities, but mostly it is going unnoticed.
It has attracted some television and newspaper coverage in cities such as Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Philadelphia. An impressive demonstration was also held in downtown Los Angeles two weeks ago when the City Council endorsed the campaign and Mayor Tom Bradley pledged his support to the effort.
And last week in Washington, hundreds of janitors in 18 office buildings got some attention when they walked off their jobs for one night, leaving the offices of annoyed tenants uncleaned, and marching to a rally addressed by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
But such gestures of protest have done little to raise the income of the country’s nearly 3 million janitors. The majority still get minimum wages and few, if any, benefits such as health insurance, and their incomes are dropping substantially in some cities, including Los Angeles.
Janitors in a few cities earn relatively good wages. In highly unionized San Francisco office buildings, for example, they make about $11 an hour, or more than twice what their Los Angeles counterparts earn, even though building owners charge tenants about the same rents in both cities.
Union members here make about $2 an hour more than those without a union contract, but even SEIU officials concede that increasing non-union competition makes it difficult to improve the union contracts much more.
When there is a small difference in labor costs between competing janitorial firms, building owners usually will hire the cheaper non-union companies, even though only about 3 cents out of each dollar of rental income goes to janitors’ wages here. That is down from 6 cents out of each dollar just eight years ago.
The vast majority of janitors don’t belong to any union. The SEIU began its Justice for Janitors campaign in 1985 as its janitorial membership dropped to about 160,000 and wages were plummeting outside of the SEIU strongholds in San Francisco, Chicago and particularly New York, where the union has 70,000 members.
Membership in Los Angeles was especially hard hit as more and more non-union services opened and, making matters worse, some government bodies such as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors gave their janitorial service work to private companies to save a few bucks.
That penny-pinching move did virtually nothing to reduce taxes, but did push more workers down to, and even below, the poverty line.
For instance, the county recently renewed its agreement to let the unionized Pedus Services Co. clean the magnificent Music Center. It has been paying those who do the dirty work $4.35 an hour, with few fringe benefits.
Those wages and benefits will rise somewhat under terms of a recently negotiated union contract, but the union cannot push wages and benefits much higher because the county would drop Pedus and hire a non-union company that pays even less.
Before the cleaning job at the Music Center was turned over to the private sector, the work was done by county employees who earn $7.25 an hour and get full health-care protection plus other benefits.
The Justice for Janitors campaign has not changed the lives of many workers, but in a few places, such as Los Angeles, it seems to have stopped the steady decline of wages and helped the union win back many of its lost members. Nationally, 15,000 janitors have joined the SEIU since the campaign began.
