Drums, Bells and Whistles

I walked with janitors the other day.

There were about 100 of them. We marched through a corner of Santa Monica to the beat of a drum, the clang of a bell and the trill of whistles.

They carried signs and banners that demanded social justice, equal pay and something better than what they had.

A few passing cars responded by honking their horns in sympathy, but mostly the janitors marched unseen, like an invisible army, past the very buildings whose offices they had cleaned the night before.

Those who noticed most were the security guards for those buildings. They glared at the slowly passing parade because it blocked their garage exits, making the driver of a BMW wait, holding up a Mercedes 350SL.

What the janitors were marching for are goals far less splendid than ownership of the shiny cars they forced to a halt. They want $6.80 an hour and health benefits.

That’s not a $6.80 increase, but a total. It’s the high mark for janitors in L.A., what they earn Downtown. In Westwood, they make $5.40 an hour. In the Valley, $4.25. They want parity with the Downtowners.

It was a good day for a march, under a sky that gleamed with blinding iridescence, but there was a pervasive melancholy too. At $4.25 an hour, you make less than $9,000 a year before taxes. Anyone trying to live on that is dangling over an abyss on a string, and the string could break at any moment.

*

Clara Ramirez knows that. She’s one of those clinging to life over a pit so deep she can’t see the bottom. She shares her tiny, one-bedroom apartment with her two children, a boyfriend and another family of three.

Their presence, she explains, is necessary to pay rent and buy food. The apartment overlooks a tree-shaded courtyard and is spotlessly clean.

For $4.25 an hour, Ramirez cleans four floors of a Woodland Hills office building every night from 6 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. She dusts, scrubs, empties trash, vacuums and does whatever else necessary to put the place in order.

A representative of the Service Employees International Union, the organization working to upgrade her life, estimates that Ramirez cleans the equivalent of 20 single-family dwellings every eight hours.

The work leaves her exhausted, but weariness is a luxury she can’t afford. Two children, ages 12 and 15, need clothes and haircuts, and clamor for the kinds of things other kids have.

So Ramirez, sitting hands folded on her lap, explains that she takes other work during the day when it is available, cleaning homes at $5 an hour. Her boyfriend, a day laborer, does what he can to supplement their income.

Life is not easy for them. There are no quick runs to the doctor when the kids are sick, because there’s no health insurance. Medical care is expensive. Extras are out. Existence is minimal.

At 32, Clara Ramirez doesn’t see how she will ever manage to swing away from the bottomless pit. She has no time for schooling and no savings to sustain her while she looks for a better job.

“I have no future,” she says. “I am trapped.”

*

Ramirez is among 8,000 janitors represented by Local 399 of the Service Employees Union, which is currently negotiating with the companies that contract out janitorial services for large buildings in the county.

What the companies have offered so far to those making $4.25 is a three-year wage freeze and then a nickel-an-hour yearly increase for five years thereafter. At the end of eight years, they’ll be making $4.50 an hour.

That doesn’t surprise Ramirez. She’s been working for the same company for 10 years and, even though she’s been honored as an outstanding employee, still earns only 90 cents an hour more than she was getting when she began.

What’s making the whole thing more difficult is that 95% of the janitors represented by the union are Latinos, and this isn’t a good time for them, even those who, like Ramirez, are here legally and work hard for a living.

Voices are rising against immigrants, day workers and anyone else who doesn’t speak English, led by a governor who is mounting a parade of his own toward the White House.

There’ll be drums and whistles in that parade too. The line of marchers will extend far beyond the horizon, because we live in a society that is increasingly hostile to the needs of the disenfranchised, and Pete Wilson is the poster boy for their interests.

One can only stand on the curb and watch both parades pass, and wonder at the processions of despair and disparity that march together before our very eyes in this fading century of enlightenment.