CONTINUED FROM PART ONE:
IV. "JUSTICE FOR JANITORS" :
The SEIU bosses started off campaiging in Denver, Colorado, and their organizers soon fanned out to Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, DC. The workers were not hard to organize, and lead into demonstrations. However, the SEIU's new organizing staff, fresh from elite ivy league campuses, focused the campaign as they had been instructed by the SEIU bosses. The main focus of the campaign was around union recognition and minimal increases in janitor wages, if any. The main tactic was demonstrations, civil disobediance, hunger strikes [by the janitors, NOT the well compensated organizers] and church mediated mock elections, with strikes as a last resort.
And, rather than appealing for solidarity to the janitors brothers and sisters in the IUOE stationary engineers division, the building trades and the teamsters, who had traditionally helped building service workers organize, the main appeal for support was to middle class professionals. And, the appeals for support were not based on labor solidarity, but on pity for these "poor immigrants who cleaned up our offices at night"[and, who's low wages enabled them to get taxpayer financed food stamps]. In fact, to this day, you still see that kind of contemptuous rhetoric in SEIU press releases and pro "justice for janitors" media coverage.
And, the corporate backers, the Democrats, the church heirarchy and the social services community, used their political ties to keep the Immigration and Naturalization Service at bay, thus enabling the marches, sit ins and other media friendly "political street theater"stage managed by the SEIU organizers, and carried out by the building service workers, 75% of whom were illegal aliens.
And, the SEIU bosses did actually sign up a lot of janitors, or, more accuratly re-sign, since most of the buildings targeted had been union only a few years before. In the most sucessful campaign, in Los Angeles, the union signed up 8,500 janitors into local 399, and, after reluctantly calling a strike, and having a bunch of their members beaten on the streets by the LAPD, they actually got a contract in 1994.
The problem was, it was a garbage contract. The agreement was five years long, with no family benifits until the last year of the agreement, and low wages, "topping out" at $ 6.90 an hour in year 5. And the members didn't like it one bit. All that "membership involvement" rhetoric had given the building workers the idea that it was THEIR UNION. And, they had to be cured of that misconception by the SEIU bosses.
V. MULTIRACIAL ALLIANCE AND BUREAUCRATIC REPRESSION :
The SEIU bureaucrats had been compelled to recruit and train numerous rank and file activists among the 8,500 janitors to be able to sucessfully carry out the organizing drive. Also, among the immigrant workers, there were many who had been activists in their homelands, including numerous participants in the < Frente Farabundo Marti para Liberacion Nacional > < FMLN >, the far left coalition who had unsucessfully fought for a socialist El Salvador during that country's civil war.
And, it was going to be really difficult to get these workers to passively submit to whatever backroom deal that the bureaucracy felt like ramming down their throats. Especially once some of these worker activists began to organize against the local 399 machine.
In 1995, activists from the < Grupo Reformista >, based among the nearly all Mexican and Central Americn immigrant, 8,500 member, building service division, came together with Change 95, a group based in the largely White, Black and Chicano, 16,000 member, health care division and the 4,000 member allied services division. They set up a slate [called the "Multiracial Alliance", due to the fact that Black, White and Latino workers were all represented] to run in the June elections, and they won 21 out of 30 slots.
But, in a well meaning, but sadly misguided, attempt at "unity" with the local 399 machine, they hadn't contested the spot of President, letting incumbent Jim Zellers run unopposed. Zellers promptly launched an internal civil war against the Multiracial Alliance officers.
Which enabled the SEIU international office to step in, trustee the entire local, and oust the officers. But, that didn't go far enough. The danger to the union bosses of members from two major SEIU divisions uniting across craft and racial lines was just too much. In an unbelivably venal "destroy the village to save it" scorched earth move, the local itself was broken up !
The health care division members remained in local 399. Union boss Eliseo Medina says that the hospital workers needed to be in "a purely healthcare union". Allegedly, segregating the mostly American born hospital workers from their largely immigrant brothers and sisters in building maintenance will "help healthcare organizing".
The 4,000 allied service workers, mostly racetrack parimutuel clerks and stadium employees, and the 8,500 building service workers, were annexed to local 1877, a building service local based in San Jose, California, WHICH IS OVER 275 MILES FROM LOS ANGELES. 1877 also annexed the building service local in the state capital, Sacramento, which is 100 miles to the north, and in Oakland and the East Bay, which are merely 40 miles from the local's Sillicon Valley base. The janitors in San Diego and San Francisco still have their own locals, 2028 and 87, respectively. But, the SEIU bureaucracy, by creating such a far flung local, brought themselves an insurance policy aganst future contested elections.
VI. < ! SI, SI PUEDE ! > :
The SEIU bosses set the year 2000 as the deadline to bargain for a sort of half assed national agreement for big city janitors. They were able to get nearly all the locals to realign their contracts to expire in April or May of this year, with the view of threatening [but, not actually carrying out] a national building maintenance strike.
The only local who's officers wouldn't go along was San Francisco's local 87. They just had a strike last year, and, more importantly, the local's officers wouldn't want to risk the political suicide of their scale, which is close to New York City's $17/hr, falling to the near minimum wage level of the rest of the building service division.
New York's building service local 32b-32j had no choice but to participate. The local is under SEIU international trusteeship in the wake of the "retirement", one step ahead of a grand jury, of allegedly < cosa nostra > tied, quarter million dollar a year salaried, former local President Gus Bevona. The now 50,000 member local has been rechristened "local 32bj" and reduced from it's former 70,000 member size by the removal of 20,000 home care workers, who were annexed into newly SEIU affiliated local 1199, [ who's boss, former Communist Party member turned NYS Democratic Party bigwig, and AFL-CIO Executive Council member, Dennis Rivera, also swallowed whole nursing home workers local 144 and Upstate New York and Long Island health care workers local 1115, so he could have 200,000 people in his local]
The SEIU bosses set Los Angeles, San Diego and Chicago as the cities where they would actually call a strike. A network of shop stewards and rank and file activists had to be set up in those places, which is always a dangerous thing in a dictatorial union like the SEIU, but it had to be done.
But their could be countermeasures, like having the workers walk out in small isolated groups, and not telling members until the last minute that they were chosen to strike. Or, calling short, 24 hour, strikes just to "pressure" the contractors, like they did in Chicago's Loop. All useful tactics to control worker millitancy.
And, in the cities where there were no real plans to strike, the whole thing was just a bargaining chip. Like in New York, where local 32bj had made absolutely no serious preparations to strike, and in fact settled two days before the deadline, lest the members get unduely energized and mobilized.
Also, despite the fact that there are over 650,000 SEIU members in New York State [200,000 in 1199 and 400,000 in the Public Employee Federation, the SEIU/AFT jointly affiliated state workers union], absolutely no attempt was made to mobilize the public employee, healthcare or allied service workers to support the building service workers. And this was a national pattern, where the SEIU bosses went out of their way to avoid mobilizing the 1.2 million other Service Employees to support the 100,000 janitors.
Or, for that matter, to mobilize active support from building service worker's natural allies, the 3.1 million members of the 15 building trades unions, [and especially the 120,000 stationary engineers in the 357,000 member International Union of Operating Engineers, IUOE, who work side by side with the SEIU building service workers, for the same contractors, every day] in support of the janitors. The only attempt to reach out to the building trades was locals 1877 and 2028 asking the building trades to respect the picketlines in Los Angeles and San Diego.
The bulk of the SEIU bosses efforts to reach out for support consisted of appealing to the Democratic Party, the church heirarchy, the corporate financed not for profit social service groups and the corporate media. And, the line was just like 1985 or 1994, pity the poor janitors, get them a one dollar raise so they don't have to stay on food stamps. Among the corporate "friends of labor" that the SEIU bosses have looked to for help is the Archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Mahoney, who actually BROKE AN SEIU CEMETARY WORKERS STRIKE a few years ago.
VII. CONCLUSION, SOW THE WIND... REAP THE WHIRLWIND :
As of this writing, Friday, April 21, 2000, the janitors in Los Angeles [in San Jose local 1877], San Diego [local 2028] and in the Chicagoland suburbs [ in Chicago's local 1] remain on strike. New York, and the Chicago Loop, have settled, and no further janitors have been called out.
But, there is one bright spot in this somewhat sordid story. The SEIU bureaucracy had to mobilize a lot of workers to pull off those strikes, and they have had to allow a lot of worker millitants to come to the fore. In the 1990's, in Los Angeles, that ended up being a base for a progressive movement in at least one SEIU local 399. That movement was crushed by bureaucratic repression, but, this national movement may yet spawn a serious rank and file challenge to the machine that runs the Service Employees International Union.
Thats it for now.
Be union, work safe.
email Gangbox at gangbox@excite.com