Janitors Who Clean Many L.A. Buildings Vote to Walk Out

Waving red strike cards and chanting defiantly, about 3,000 Los Angeles janitors overwhelmingly rejected a final contract offer and vowed to walk off the job at a highly charged two-hour rally Monday.

Organizers with the Service Employees International Union said they would start with a series of strategic strikes, building through the week to a walkout on Friday by all 8,500 unionized janitors. About 70% of the county’s office space, including most of downtown Los Angeles and Century City, is unionized.

Monday night, strikers planned to hit three of downtown’s largest office buildings. As their shift began at 6 p.m., the 30 janitors who normally clean the 50-story Gas Company Tower at 555 Fifth St. picketed outside. At mid-shift, a larger group was to walk out of the 53-story office tower at 777 S. Figueroa St. At 11:30, still three hours before the end of their shift, workers were set to leave the 55-story Arco Center at 333 S. Hope St.

Officials of the Teamsters, which represents United Parcel Service drivers and sanitation workers, said their members would honor picket lines--a first for their union in Los Angeles. “People are looking at these huge [income] disparities and saying it’s time for a change,” said Danny Bruno, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 396.

Hoping to head off a strike, janitorial firms made substantial concessions Friday night--but only for workers in highly unionized areas of the county. Their final offer would have given some an immediate 50-cent hourly raise, with 40-cent increases the following two years. But wages for more than half the janitors would have been frozen for the first year, with 40-cent increases the next two years.

Janitors now earn $6.80 to $7.90 per hour, and won full family health benefits as of last year. They are seeking a $1-per-hour increase each year for three years.

Members of the bargaining committee described the two-tiered offer as an attempt to divide the membership. “The truth is, I am very offended,” Hector Jimenez told a cheering crowd, assembled in the SEIU parking lot. “What they don’t realize is that we are united, and we will have the last word.”

But Dick Davis, chief negotiator for the contractors, said contractors in outlying areas, from Beverly Hills to Pasadena, are more vulnerable to competition from nonunion janitorial firms, which typically pay the minimum wage of $5.75 per hour. “Basically, we’re caught in the middle,” Davis said, “We think the nonunion outfits would tear us up.”

Davis said several firms have hired replacement workers, and received hundreds of applications for the spots. He also said some building owners would probably seek injunctions to prevent strikers from blocking access.

No further negotiations are scheduled. Davis said the janitors had been unreasonable throughout the two months of bargaining. “We told them to come back when they’re ready to bargain,” he said.

Janitors in Los Angeles are among the lowest paid in the nation, earning far less than those in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, even mid-size cities such as Pittsburgh and St. Paul, Minn. They were once relatively well-paid here as well, but after a wave of outsourcing broke the union, pay dropped drastically. Union researchers said if janitorial pay had kept pace with inflation from 1983, it would now be above $10 per hour.

While conceding those facts, Davis said the janitors should not expect to recover all the lost ground at once. “You can’t make up for all the alleged sins of the economy in one contract,” he said.

At the rally, more than a dozen janitors repeated the demand for a greater share of the area’s prosperity. “I have three children,” said Victoria Marquez, who cleans a Beverly Hills building, and is among the lowest-paid janitors. “How am I going to give my children a decent education on $6.80 an hour in Beverly Hills?”

Sitting on folding chairs in the mid-morning heat, the crowd roared back with a mix of outrage and giddiness. Long before the vote, they called for a strike, chanting, “Huelga, huelga!”

Janitors cast their votes by raising red cards when asked if they approved the bargaining committee’s recommendations to reject the contract offer and to strike. In both cases, a sea of red filled the air. There was no question that the committee had more than the required 75%.

The SEIU national has set aside a $1-million strike fund, to help cover rents and emergency expenses if the strike should be prolonged. And the County Federation of Labor on Monday began distributing bags of groceries, vowing to deliver a bag a week to each striker as long as the action continued.

A series of religious and political leaders also offered support. “This is the best time for real estate owners in years,” said Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles). “In these prosperous times, people deserve to have a decent wage. This struggle will tell us what kind of city we live in, one of just rich and poor, or one where we’re helping people up.”