‘A Little Bit of Breathing Room’

Enrique Guerrero is about to get his first raise in 10 years. It’ll be just 40 cents an hour in April, but it breathes life into the 65-year-old janitor’s dreams to buy a trailer home so he and his wife can move out of their daughter’s home in Santa Ana to “really live free.”

“Just me and my wife in our little house, that’s all I need,” said Guerrero, a thin man with white hair and sad eyes.

Leticia Gonzalez, 33, mother of three, has no illusions about what a labor contract will do for her life right away, not after years of getting minimum wage for scrubbing toilets and urinals late into the night inside a fancy Irvine office building. She still won’t see more of her husband, who himself holds two jobs as a short-order cook, or her children, whom she kisses goodbye every day at an hour when most other mothers are settling in for a long evening with theirs.

But the soft-spoken native of Jalisco, Mexico, finally sees reason to celebrate over her job. “I think this gives us confidence in ourselves,” she said of the labor agreement. “It gives us hope for the future, that we can make a better life for our families.”

Guerrero and Gonzalez are among the county’s nearly 3,000 newly unionized janitors. They took the historic step Saturday by overwhelmingly approving their first-ever labor contract. They won raises that will boost their pay from as low as the state’s new minimum wage of $6.25 an hour to $7.45 within 18 months, and they will get six paid holidays, one to three weeks of paid vacation, a sick day a year and eventually medical benefits.

The improvements will help ease, at least a little bit, the daily pressures of trying to forge a living in one of the most expensive counties in Southern California. The janitors will still be part of the working poor, and to make it, many will have to hold more than one job or share an apartment with another family.

The medical benefits, which many janitors interviewed said were what they most wanted for themselves and their families, don’t kick in until 2003. And they cover only individual employees.

“Realistically, this contract will help them buy, maybe, decent clothing for their children to go to school in, a little more food on the table, and a little bit of breathing room,” said Reina Schmitz, a labor organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 1877, which negotiated the contract. “But it’s a good start.”

Indeed, as many janitors and labor advocates see it, this first contract’s significance is that it sets standards to build upon in future agreements.

“The victory has great symbolic importance,” said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Edmund G. Brown Institute of Public Affairs in Los Angeles. “There’s a feeling that united we can really achieve something.”

No matter how minute, “This is a win,” he said, and the victory puts the janitors in a stronger bargaining position in the future.

The Regional Wage Gap

The SEIU, which pushed for the Orange County agreement in the wake of the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles last year, says most of the 4,000 janitors in Orange County receive minimum wage. Janitors in Los Angeles have been unionized for more than a decade and earn $7.90 an hour, and in San Diego the average pay is $7 an hour. The contract doesn’t eliminate that disparity.

But union leaders will be seeking to close the regional wage gap in the next round of negotiations. Orange County’s contract shares the same expiration, April 2003, as those in Los Angeles, San Diego and other parts of California.

Orange County’s agreement covers about 70% of the building-maintenance workers who are employed by five firms. Many of the remaining janitors, employed mostly by small contractors, will likely be stuck at minimum wage.

“We have a quick-money, big-risk economy [in which] people want to squeeze nickels and save cents on the backs of people making [the minimum wage,]” said Allen Baldwin, executive director of the Orange County Community Housing Corp.

For Leticia Gonzalez, working amid the corporate wealth of Irvine commercial high-rises and men and women in designer duds, it was hard to believe the bosses when they told her they didn’t have the money to give her a raise.

“It doesn’t look to me like they don’t have the money,” she said with a sheepish grin on a recent late night as she scrubbed toilets.

Workers like her help keep clean some of Orange County’s most expensive real estate, from ritzy hotels in Newport Beach to office buildings in Anaheim. Many work odd hours, graveyard shifts when regular employees aren’t around, disconnected even from the people who pay them.

Because they’re contracted workers, they don’t really work for the companies whose buildings they labor in. Companies like Bank of America pay janitorial-service contractors a flat fee to provide custodial services. Janitors are expected to get a certain amount of work done in the hours they’re given.

There’s no overtime, so often, janitors face a dilemma if they can’t get all the work done: They can leave on time and risk a complaint or stay later and work for free, said Linda Sanchez-Valentine, head of Orange County’s Central Labor Council.

“The kind of lifestyle their pay forces them to lead is appalling,” she said.

Over a decade, Enrique Guerrero, the 65-year-old janitor, has become philosophical about his work and pay. For 22 years, he was a typesetter in his native Mexico before the profession became obsolete and he was prompted to move to California. He watches with fascination all the attorneys, engineers and businessmen who dash down the hallways that he polishes late at night.

“The rich live off the poor, and the poor live off the rich,” Guerrero said after a night of buffing the building’s huge cafeteria. “It’s a chain. I’m sure the rich have their own money problems.”

And in many ways, the poor live off the poorer too. Because many service workers can’t afford cars, some employees offer raites--or rides--to and from work for a price. Guerrero is one of several employees who has paid as much as $25 for 15 days of round-trips.

“I can’t get mad over it,” Guerrero said. “It’s what they have to do to make a little bit of money.”

Guerrero likes his job, especially since in Mexico he would be considered too old to work. “I enjoy what I’m doing and I really put a lot of ganas (determination) into it,” he said, speaking about the effort that goes into his buffing and polishing.

Recently naturalized, Guerrero lives with his daughter in an apartment and helps pay the $850-a-month rent. Although he works the night shift, he wakes up at 6:30 a.m. to help his son wash boats in Huntington Beach. Guerrero figures it will cost about $8,000 to buy the trailer home that he said will set him free.

“I think the raise will help me meet my goal,” he said.

Slight Easing of Money Woes

Arturo Palacios, 26, speaks about more modest dreams as he mops the floor in the kitchen of the same building. With his raise, he wants to send more than the $300-a-month he generally wires to his elderly mother in Acapulco.

“I work to send money home,” said Palacios, who lives with his brother in a Santa Ana apartment and works in old, cheap sneakers that have caused him to slip more than once.

Leticia Gonzalez hopes the raise will ease some of the pressure put on her and husband Rafael. About six months ago, the Gonzalezes, with a $7,000 down payment, purchased a modest two-bedroom home in a Santa Ana neighborhood they believe is cleaner and safer than the area in Santa Ana where they formerly lived. The couple and their three children like the new neighborhood, but even with Rafael working 17 hours a day and Leticia working from 6 p.m. until 1 a.m., they can barely afford the $1,500-a-month mortgage.

Without health insurance, the family sacrifices on food or other expenses if someone gets sick. A year ago, when a state-ordered minimum wage hike raised Leticia’s pay to $5.75 an hour, her employers took an hour from her schedule, in effect, negating the pay raise.

After arriving at home from work, Gonzalez sleeps until 6:30 a.m. She prepares breakfast for the children and readies them for school. After dropping the kids off at 8:30 a.m., she catches a little more sleep, then wakes up shortly after noon. Then she cleans, shops, cooks and picks up the kids.

On a recent afternoon, the family sat at the table while they ate macaroni in tomato sauce, with tortillas and fruit juice, then watched Spanish music videos. Before she stepped out the door for work, the children embraced their mother and gave her a kiss.

“I’m not thinking about things we can buy, really,” Gonzalez said. “We’re thinking about how this is going to hopefully let us pay the bills easier. . . . Maybe there will be a little more money left after that to do other things.”