The Sacrifice Behind the Speeches

Ana Veliz will rest Monday with a sober appreciation of the cliches of sacrifice and sweat and dignity that the rest of us hear dimly on Labor Day.

Around the nation obituaries will be read, as they are each September, for organized labor. Grave pundits will note that fewer than one in six American workers now belong to a union. Defenders of labor will blame an unfair economic landscape, a society in which workers with enough grievances and guts to strike often find themselves permanently replaced by non-union substitutes.

Ana Veliz will not notice most of this debate because she does not speak English. But she knows. Ana Veliz was a striker who lost something more precious than a job.

She lost her unborn child.

She is 30 years old. Two years ago she came to Los Angeles from El Salvador, leaving her six children, ages 2 to 12, at home with her mother. Her common-law husband, Leonidas Ramirez, had come here seven years before. He had worked with cattle at home but could not feed the family. Here he would work as a gardener and send money back.

But eventually Ramirez needed help. His wife would have to join him. Together they would scrape by, feed those back home and somehow begin saving to bring the children here with the help of the coyotes who smuggle illegal immigrants at $1,000 to $2,000 a pop.

They found a one-room apartment at Pico Boulevard and Western Avenue where the traffic noise rushes into the third-floor window and the rent is $425 a month. There is room for two small beds and two small couches. They take in a boarder, sometimes two, to save money.

Veliz found a typical immigrant job, cleaning Century City office buildings at $4.25 an hour, the minimum wage. She and Ramirez sent much of their income--$400--home each month.

Last fall organizers from Service Employees International Union, whose president, John Sweeney, was once a janitor, began an organizing drive in Century City, targeting a Denmark-based cleaning corporation that employed Veliz and about 200 others.

The union demanded that the cleaning corporation recognize it as the janitors’ bargaining agent. It demanded that wages be raised a dollar an hour more. It demanded health insurance. It got nowhere.

In March Veliz became pregnant. This baby would not need a coyote. It would be an American citizen.

Two months later the union called a strike. Veliz and more than half of her colleagues walked off the job. Several noisy demonstrations were held in Century City. Banners--”Luxury by Day, Sweatshop by Night,” and “Justice for Janitors”--were unfurled. The employer did not budge.

Two weeks later Veliz joined a union march of 400 janitors and friends from a park in Beverly Hills to Century City. About 100 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department blocked their path, herded them into the intersection of Olympic Boulevard and Century Park East and demanded that they disperse.

The demonstrators refused. Veliz, like many, sat down in the middle of the street. This was planned. Union organizers expected that their members would be peacefully arrested.

They were wrong. Police began to club them back down Olympic. Veliz ran. A club smacked her in the back--three times, she thinks. She and many others were eventually herded into a parking garage and arrested.

In jail, she said, she complained of pain and was given what she was told were vitamins. Twenty minutes later she began throwing up.

Four days later a physician at a county hospital informed her that she had miscarried.

A week later, the janitorial corporation, reacting to public revulsion at television broadcasts of the police violence in Century City, gave in. It signed a contract with the union raising minimum wages to $5.20 an hour, with health benefits. Another $152 a month. In union circles desperate for success, the victory won national acclaim.

Ana Veliz, sitting on one of her couches in her tiny apartment, is asked if it was worth it.

“I know that I paid a lot,” she says in Spanish, stoically. “I never thought they would beat us. I would never have been near the front if I thought so.

“But to earn $4.25 an hour is not fair. What I did, I didn’t do without thought. I’m proud to have a union. I’ve seen the strength you have.”

Will she always be a cleaning lady? How long will it take to bring her children here?

“For now I don’t have anything else. As long as God allows me I will keep doing my job.”

This is what new arrivals have always said. You work. For a living. Transcendent concerns are for others. Too much rides on each day. If only there were a moment to stop and think.

Let Monday be that moment.