PERSPECTIVE ON LABOR : Janitors Win a Measure of Justice : A militant union of immigrants reinvigorates local labor with a victory for the workers who clean our luxury office buildings.

At 6 a.m. on April 3, more than 500 of us--both workers and community supporters--reported for duty at the Justice for Janitors headquarters at Service Employees International Union Local 399, ready for creative civil disobedience.

We enjoyed an impromptu victory rally instead.

Minutes before, the seven major janitorial contractors, in conjunction with the Building Owners Management Assn., had agreed to virtually all of the union’s key demands. The union had been prepared to escalate its militant street actions and pull 8,000 janitors out of Los Angeles’ luxury office buildings for what might have been a long and high-risk strike.

In the age of permanent replacement workers, the union work force, largely composed of immigrants, was vulnerable. Fortunately, so were the cutthroat janitorial contractors, whose profits are shaped by low-balling bids based on wage rates of as little as $4.25 an hour, dictated by the ruthless tactics of the building owners’ leadership. Their association subcontracts this service precisely to avoid responsibility for the inhumane treatment of the nighttime workers.

Justice for Janitors won because it forged a powerful coalition of community leaders on its behalf, but even more important, it generated one of the few mass movements of workers in the country, led by an articulate and militant group of largely Latino workers who have organized building by building and know how to take to the streets when necessary. Precisely because the union backed up its chants, “Se ve, se siente, la union esta presente!” (“Feel! See! The union is present!”) the contractors agreed to one of the few unequivocal victories for the labor movement in recent years.

The union closed the gap on wage disparities within the work force by winning a uniform wage rate. The contractors agreed to pay a minimum of $6.80 per hour within five years in every building covered by the contract. This involved some sacrifices by the “better paid” workers. Under the current system some members started at $6.80 an hour, while others earned as little as $4.25--an unlivable wage today, let alone in five years. Strategic class interest persuaded the higher-paid workers to forgo significant wage increases so would their lower-paid sisters and brothers be better compensated. With a unified base wage, a strengthened union can demand significant improvements in the future.

The union defeated the management association’s demand that workers pay 25%, or any percentage, of their health-care premiums; health-care benefits were extended to many workers who had none at all. This is a critical win, since at such low wage levels workers have no “disposable” income and with any co-payment would be forced to forfeit health coverage altogether--which was precisely management’s objective. Instead, Justice for Janitors won a fully paid family health-care plan for each member, phased in over five years.

The union also won protection against speed-ups. Too often, unions win small wage increases in the big print of the contract, and then trade away “work rules” in fine print that allow the company to earn back even more by speeding up work and laying off members--the type of betrayals that leave union members anti-union.

It is historically noteworthy that in the state’s post-Proposition 187 climate, a predominantly Latino and immigrant union has won a major trade-union victory. Many of those workers began as militants in the shops and streets of El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. Their fight for a fair contract in Los Angeles was an “in your face” answer to the immigrant-bashers of both political parties. Moreover, while membership in organized labor has dropped precipitously over the last decade, in the past eight years Justice for Janitors, as a component of Local 399, has increased its membership from 1,500 to more than 8,000--a rise of more than 400%.

In a society that brazenly calls itself capitalist, the struggle between labor and capital is both permanent and essential--unless the union movement wants to sign its own death warrant. Justice for Janitors, by creatively applying a strategy of class struggle, investing union funds into long-term organizing ventures and practicing union democracy rather than autocracy offers a paradigm that needs to be emulated and expanded.