A Fight for Dignity

Evening comes, and the mostly white, well-educated, relatively well-off workers file out of downtown office towers. It’s time for the second shift--mostly immigrant, Spanish-speaking, poor.

They empty the trash, scrub the toilets, wash the windows: an army of uniformed janitors, ubiquitous yet unseen, pushing buckets, mops and brooms through the background of Los Angeles.

Unlikely movie stars, indeed. And yet on this balmy night, dozens of real-life janitors gather before the cameras of noted British director Ken Loach, chanting the familiar oath of courage: “Si se puede. Si se puede.” (“Yes, it can be done.”)

They are here not for a documentary, but a feature film--one with a cast and a message rarely seen on the big screen.

Loach, along with frequent collaborator Paul Laverty who wrote the script for the film, “Bread and Roses,” has built a story of love, sacrifice and treachery around the groundbreaking Justice for Janitors campaign, which reached a peak here in the early ‘90s and resulted in unionization and higher wages for thousands of janitors.

Known for his sympathetic and vividly accurate portrayals of blue-collar life, as well as his unorthodox filming methods, Loach chose Los Angeles for his first U.S.-based film for the same reasons the janitors’ campaign captured imaginations across the country nearly a decade ago.

The inequalities are stark, the struggles heroic. The whole romantic notion of the working poor fighting for dignity is overlaid with issues of illegal immigration and, in some cases, revolution at home.

And it all happens in the glamour capital of the world.

“The idea of the American Dream is a very powerful cultural image, and that’s what is projected by Hollywood. If you work hard, you will be rewarded. You’ll have the car, the house, all those things,” said Laverty, a native of Glasgow, Scotland, who also wrote the critically acclaimed Loach movie “My Name Is Joe.”

“But people got here and found what was happening on the ground was the exact opposite. Most were working two jobs and barely getting by. Just look at the statistics. The exploitation is terrible.”

It was Laverty who first came across the janitors’ struggle while in L.A. on a Fulbright scholarship. Leaving a party near Beverly Hills at 2 a.m., he spotted a crew of uniformed workers getting off their shift.

It was a powerful image: poor immigrant women leaving some of the priciest real estate in the world for the long bus ride home.

Laverty, a former human rights attorney whose first screenplay grew out of his volunteer work in Nicaragua, was fascinated--all the more when he learned of the innovative organizing campaign being run by the Service Employees International Union.

Organizers targeted building tenants as well as the janitorial contractors they hired, drawing attention through raucous street theater and “invasions” of restaurants frequented by building owners.

With Loach’s encouragement, Laverty spent months with janitors, drawing out their stories and eventually sketching together a drama with elements of humor as well as tragedy.

The story revolves around Maya, a headstrong young woman who sprints across the border to join her older sister, Rosa, in Los Angeles. Maya lands a cleaning job with Rosa, and eventually runs into Sam, an anarchic union organizer who brings love, purpose and a little chaos into her life. Through it all run the complexities and contradictions that are the hallmarks of Loach films.

Working with a modest $5-million budget, most of which was raised from pre-sales to European distributors, Loach was determined to stay true to the movie’s genesis as well as its message by using all-union crews and filming in Los Angeles. Both decisions raised the cost considerably.

As he neared the end of filming this particular week, the soft-spoken, intensely opinionated director spoke of his first U.S. working experience in bitter terms, describing Los Angeles as “probably the most hostile place on the planet.”

Outside the immediate cast and crew, Loach said the local industry seemed shallow, alienated and obsessed with money. “Elsewhere, when you work on a film, you become a kind of family for the month or two that you’re together,” he said. “But here there is no loyalty. These people could be driving a truck of baked beans, for all they care.”

His opinion of the janitors, however, was only elevated by working with them. “We found real heroes among the people we worked with,” he said, “especially among the women. They were strong, passionate and articulate, just like the women who supported the coal miners in the ‘80s.”

His insistence on filming in sequence, rather than shooting all scenes at a location at once, drove up costs. But he said the payoff is authentic emotion in the acting.

For the same reason, he kept actors in the dark about where the movie was headed, often distributing scripts the night before a scene was shot.

Those familiar with Loach’s work won’t be surprised to learn that the director, whose preference for using real people in his films is famous, screened thousands of working janitors and union organizers while building his cast.

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Although professional actors such as Adrien Brody (“Summer of Sam”)--who plays the organizer Sam in “Bread and Roses”--fill lead roles, several key characters are portrayed by the very workers who inspired them.

They include Rosa Ayala, a Salvadoran immigrant and feisty downtown janitor who earned $4.45 an hour when she started cleaning offices 11 years ago. Countless marches, rallies and meetings later, Ayala now is in a union building making $7.80 an hour, with health insurance, eight paid holidays and five sick days a year.

“Everything in the movie is the truth,” said Ayala, 55, who plays a janitor-activist. “It’s the reality we’ve been living all these years.”

Rocio Saenz, national coordinator for the continuing janitors’ campaign, plays a character so like herself that she needs no script. Traveling between her base in Oakland, protest marches in Chicago and the sets of Los Angeles, the message she delivers over a bullhorn is blunt and consistent: “No Justice, No Peace.”

Non-janitors in the cast got a lesson in character-building one night when producers smuggled them into a downtown office tower, where they worked half a shift.

“What surprised me was how precisely the bosses measured the work,” said Mayron Payes, a Salvadoran immigrant who fled his country amid revolutionary violence and eventually became an organizer of day laborers here. He plays a janitor in Maya’s crew. “In four hours, I had to do all the bathrooms on eight floors. They knew exactly how long each stall should take.”

So realistic was the acting that during a staged protest in downtown Los Angeles, tenants in an office high-rise complained to security guards, who eventually evicted the film crew from the grounds. Loach, of course, recorded it all on film.

Another touch of realism: The movie is bilingual, with about one-third of the dialogue in Spanish, consistent with the dual lives of many immigrants in Los Angeles.

The film’s title, “Bread and Roses,” is a slogan taken from a long and violent 1912 strike by immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Mass. The workers said they were striking for bread but wanted roses as well. “That’s what you see here too,” Laverty said. “They’re working for bread, with very little roses.”

With release planned for next fall, the movie is expected to play well in art houses, where Loach already has a devoted following. But producer Rebecca O’Brien said she hopes its appeal will be far broader.

“The key is reaching the huge Latino audience that has been neglected for so long,” she said. As other producers can attest, however, that market has proven elusive for “small” films.

Between takes at the shooting of an evening rally scene, Ayala and other janitors said they’re hoping for an additional audience: the real estate investors who contract low-cost janitorial services for their office buildings.

With the janitors’ campaign gearing up for a new offensive next year, optimists like Ayala said the movie’s timing could be just the shot in the arm they need.

“For once, they will see the way we live and how hard the work is,” Ayala said. “When they see this movie, the whole world will know.”