Janitors Deserve a Livable Wage
As striking janitors intensified their job actions, local print and broadcast news coverage is increasingly dominated by images of shouting demonstrators, snarled traffic and cordons of police. If the strike widens further, in a few days those images will begin to give way to others: interviews with angry and inconvenienced office workers, piles of uncollected trash, beleaguered building owners warning darkly of financial ruin.
At a time of almost unprecedented prosperity and low unemployment, what do those private-sector custodians working under union contracts have to complain about? Plenty.
Consider, in contrast, what dominates the national news coverage. Like riverboat gamblers betting their fortunes on the turn of a card, Wall Street bungee-jumpers gain and lose hundreds of millions of dollars at every blip of real or imagined financial news. In an era when daily market swings of hundreds of points have become almost commonplace, it’s easy to understand why the media are transfixed by this dot-com-driven Gilded Age of Affluence.
It’s easier still to overlook the fact that not only has the rising economic tide failed to lift all boats but that the hapless passengers in those mired on the bottom are in danger of drowning. Like many pockets of our new economy, Los Angeles is increasingly defined by a growing disparity between rich and poor.
The trend is clear and long term, but in recent years has accelerated alarmingly. As the numbers of millionaires and of those living in poverty continue to multiply, nowhere is the income gap more pronounced--or more poignant--than in our luxury office towers. Inhabited with bustling high-wage workers by day, they are cleaned by poverty-wage armies at night.
These foot-soldiers may draw a union wage of $6.80 an hour, but a full-time janitor struggling to support a family of four still falls below the federal poverty line. In real dollars, janitors’ wages in Los Angeles are significantly lower than they were 20 years ago, less even than comparable janitors’ wages in other major metropolitan areas.
If you think this is a private-sector labor issue of no concern to taxpayers, think again: As a result of earning less than a livable wage, these Los Angeles-area janitors who fill the ranks of the working poor are more likely to require aid to support their families, such as public assistance and health care, funded by county taxpayers, .
Most janitors in Los Angeles (including those who work at The Times in Times Mirror Square) work for employers bound by a contract with Service Employees International Union Local 1877, an agreement whose expiration and subsequent bargaining impasse prompted overwhelming approval of a vote to strike. The janitors are seeking a $1-per-hour annual wage increase for the next three years, a boost that will cost the average tenant the princely sum of roughly 1% over the life of the contract. Contract janitors who work for the county earn a livable wage of between $8.74 and $10.87 per hour. That’s a worthy goal for the commercial real estate world as well.
Our economy is booming. Our commercial real estate market is healthier than it’s been in 20 years. We must not sustain that prosperity on the backs of the men and women who each night clean our toilets and sweep our floors.
Moreover, we cannot sustain it: An economy built on luxury cars and high-end restaurants is built on sand. A boost for these workers benefits more than their families. When janitors earn real wages, they spend that money on goods and services in the communities and neighborhoods that need it most, helping every sector of our society. When they don’t, those communities sink back into pits of privation and despair.
Now is the time to take a stand for livable wages--as if $7.80 an hour the union is seeking is really livable in L.A. For those of us who can afford it--and most high-rise tenants certainly can--investing a penny on the dollar to lift our custodians’ families out of poverty would be the bargain of the century.
All Angelenos should stand with the janitors in their hour of crisis. This is not just about janitors; it’s about all of us. To borrow a line from Abraham Lincoln, Los Angeles cannot survive half-rich and half-poor.
In the end, our society will be judged by how we treat our most vulnerable members--and by whether we value them not just as workers, but as human beings.
