Janitors’ Quest Complicated by Shifting Nature of the Job

By the time janitor Rosa Alvarenga left El Salvador nine years ago, forces were already in motion that would push her to a picket line in Woodland Hills.

High immigration from impoverished countries, weak unions and an economic downturn all combined to lower paychecks for a whole class of semiskilled workers. Now low wages for blue-collar jobs are a given in Los Angeles, even in a booming economy, even as workers like Alvarenga struggle to make ends meet.

What is perhaps more significant, outsourcing and corporate consolidation--two of the sweeping economic changes of our time--have obscured the chain of responsibility between those who directly benefit from manual labor, such as building tenants, and those who do the work, such as janitors.

Alvarenga’s employer, OneSource, an Atlanta-based subsidiary of a company headquartered in Belize, is as anonymous to her as she is to the office workers whose toilets she cleans.

The effect is that both sides in the countywide janitors strike, which entered its fourth day Thursday and has become increasingly heated, are fighting a war with phantoms, loaded with symbolism and misunderstanding.

To Alvarenga, who cleans two floors of a gleaming high-rise, working alone from 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., the union’s demand for a $1-per-hour annual raise--roughly $2,000 a year--is reasonable and just.

Every night, as she vacuums the plush teal carpets and wipes down the granite bathroom counter tops, she is reminded of the wealth surrounding her. Yet she returns home to a crowded one-bedroom apartment in Canoga Park, furnished primarily with discarded office equipment, where she sleeps on the living room floor.

Too Much, Too Fast?

To the contractors who employ them, however, the janitors want too much, too fast. After all, Alvarenga earned only $4.25 per hour just six years ago. Her earnings have already jumped more than 50% since she joined the union, to $6.80 per hour, and she recently gained full family health insurance.

Union contractors also note that they are competing with nonunion firms that pay the current minimum wage of $5.75 per hour, with no benefits.

“How are we going to go and sell this to our clients?” said Dick Davis, chief negotiator for the 18 janitorial services involved in the master contract with the Service Employees International Union. “We think the nonunion firms would tear us up.”

In turn, those clients--the building owners and managers who buy the janitorial services--have distanced themselves from the labor dispute, saying they don’t set janitors’ wages.

“We actually don’t feel like we’ve got a dog in this fight,” said Geoffrey Ely, president of the Building Owners and Managers Assn., which represents most high-end office towers in the county. “The owners don’t have a direct relationship with the janitors. They don’t manage them day to day. In most cases, the building manager isn’t even there when the bulk of the work is being done. It’s entirely being handled by the cleaning company in every conceivable way.”

There is irony, Ely added, in the fact that owners of the buildings being picketed by red-shirted strikers this week have paid a premium to hire union contractors in recent years.

Nonunion contractors generally charge one to four cents less per square foot than union contractors, depending on location. Rents for prime office space in Los Angeles average $2 a square foot per month.

Many battles in the strike initially appear black and white but blur on closer examination. Often, it’s a matter of perspective.

Mike Garcia, president of the striking union, SEIU Local 1877, said that despite recent gains, janitors’ wages are still far below historic levels. Union janitors in Los Angeles earned about $7 an hour in 1983, which would be more than $12 an hour in today’s dollars. “We’re just trying to get back to where we were 20 years ago,” he said.

Union janitors in Los Angeles now earn $6.80 to $7.90 per hour with full health benefits, far less than comparable workers in most large and mid-size U.S. cities. The union is demanding a $1-per-hour raise each year for the next three years.

The contractors’ final offer, which was overwhelmingly rejected by union members Monday, would have raised wages by 80 cents to $1.30 per hour over the entire three years. In Alvarenga’s case, the contract would have meant a wage freeze the first year and 40-cent raises in each of the next two years.

Comparisons to 1983 are a bit deceptive, however. That year was a high point for unionized Los Angeles janitors. Soon after that, wages tumbled as nonunion firms established themselves in the sprawling suburbs and the union lost its hold on the market. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived from Mexico and Central America, desperate for work and accustomed to the low wages of their home countries.

Almost overnight, the work force changed from highly unionized, relatively well-paid and primarily African American to nonunion, minimum wage and primarily immigrant.

OneSource did not exist. The Warner Center complex had not been built. And Rosa Alvarenga was still washing and ironing laundry for the Salvadoran army.

She decided to come north in 1991, prompted by political changes that she said made it increasingly dangerous to be associated with the military. Turned back at the U.S. border three times, Alvarenga eventually crossed and joined two nephews in Los Angeles. Her husband, Pablo Inocente, an army sergeant, followed two years later.

Initially, Alvarenga worked as a nanny in a private home, earning $125 a week. Later, her nephews helped her land a better-paying job as a night janitor at a new office high-rise a mile away. Inocente soon joined her at the Warner Center office complex, where he polished floors in a cluster of smaller buildings.

Together, the couple earned enough to rent a studio apartment and send a little money home. Last year, Inocente’s 19-year-old daughter, Jessica, came north, pregnant, and the family moved to a one-bedroom apartment for $525 a month.

Jessica also works for OneSource now, on an on-call basis. But even with three $6.80-per-hour incomes, money is tight. Alvarenga and Inocente subsidize their wages by scouring yard sales for bargains and reselling the goods at swap meets. “Everything we wear--this dress, these shoes--is used,” said Alvarenga. “The only thing we buy new is underwear.”

The building where Alvarenga has worked for seven years, at 21700 Oxnard St., is in another world. Its glass walls rise 20 stories and it features an immense, marble-tiled foyer, a roaring courtyard fountain and thickly carpeted hallways that soak up the sound of footsteps. Each floor covers 8,441 square feet, with a maze of offices and two sets of bathrooms, four stalls each.

Until she went on strike Wednesday night, Alvarenga cleaned two of those floors, including the plush offices of United Artists Theater Circuit on the 10th and the music company EMI Latin on the 2nd. Every night, she polished the furniture and wiped down the computer screens. She scrubbed the toilets and the sinks and wiped the floor-to-ceiling bathroom mirrors to a shine. For almost four hours, she vacuumed.

By quitting time at 2:30 a.m., she said, her back, feet and legs ached and her fingers burned from cleaning chemicals. Then she and Inocente would return home, spread a sheet on the living room floor and go to sleep.

At first, their checks were issued by ISS International, a Danish firm with a U.S. division specializing in the fast-growing field of commercial building maintenance. Over the past decade, the cleaning industry, like many others, has been consolidating through mergers and buyouts. ISS was sold to British financier Michael Ashcroft and renamed OneSource, a subsidiary of Belize-based Carlisle Holdings Ltd.

Competition Means Pricing

By competitively bidding for new contracts and buying up smaller firms, OneSource has grown to be the second-largest commercial cleaning firm in the country, with operations in 38 states and more than $800 million in revenues. Company materials tout its sophisticated equipment and training, but competition in the industry usually comes down to pricing, and labor accounts for the lion’s share of contractors’ costs.

Union negotiators have said the raise they seek would cost contractors only one penny per square foot per month. But in a competitive bidding process, that penny could make or break a deal--particularly when multiplied by dozens of replaceable, anonymous workers.

“Because of outsourcing, building owners have been able to remove themselves emotionally. They don’t have to think about these workers as their employees. They’re just a percentage on a check,” said Jono Shaffer, who directed the SEIU’s campaign to reorganize janitors in Los Angeles from 1987 to 1995. “Our success has been to bring these people back into the daylight, to turn them back into people.”

Alvarenga joined the union in 1994, after an energetic and innovative campaign that organized about 70% of the county’s commercial office space--including her building.

The SEIU now has 8,500 members, with a level of participation that many unions can only envy. That’s one reason why the marches and pickets of this week have drawn such large numbers. Organizers expect at least 3,000 SEIU members to turn out for an all-day “pilgrimage” along Wilshire Boulevard today, joined by hundreds of other union members.

Alvarenga will be among them.

*

The Rev. Jesse Jackson joined striking janitors at a rally in Century City. B1