From: Kate Bronfenbrenner, et al Organizing to Win (Cornell U Press, 1998) Chapter 6 Helots No More: A Case Study of the justice for Janitors Campaign in Los Angeles Roger Waldinger, Chris Erickson, Ruth Milkman, Daniel J. B. Mitchell, Abel Valenzuela, Kent Wong, and Maurice Zeitlin On June 15, 1990, striking janitors and their supporters held a peaceful march and demonstration in the tiny Century City district of Los Angeles, where Local 399 of SEIU was seeking a union contract for the workers who clean the huge, glittering office towers that dominate this part of the city. The SEIU's justice for janitors (JfJ) campaign had been under way in L.A. for about two years, and this was one of many such demonstrations that had been launched over that period. But, unlike previous demonstrations, this time the L.A. police brutally attacked the marchers, seriously wounding several people and causing a pregnant woman to miscarry. Although SEIU's organizers initially feared that the police violence might put an end to their effort, the demonstration proved to be a turning point in the campaign to unionize the janitors, most of whom were immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Widespread outrage at the police action, both locally and in SEIU offices around the country, led International Ser vice Systems (ISS), the cleaning contractor for nearly all the buildings in Century City, to sign a union contract soon afterward in the largest private sector organizing success among Latino immigrants since the United Farm Workers' victories nearly two decades earlier. Southern California hardly seemed a likely setting for this drama. Never as strong as in the northern part of the state, organized labor had lost legions of well-paid, blue-collar members in the region in the 1970s and 1980s. With the decline of heavy industry, first in the civilian sector and 102later in defense, union density had declined sharply in this massive manufac- turing center. Meanwhile, a new world of labor had emerged-a bur geoning immigrant population employed in low-skilled, low-paying manufacturing and service jobs. For a while it seemed that the advent of this new labor force would still any protest: so long as the newcomers compared a minimum-wage job in the garment center with an unyielding plot of land in Mexico's central plateau, not to mention a visit from El Salvador's death squads, employers could count on their workers being quiescent. But the tide seems to be turning, as militant union activity among new comers in a variety of industries suggests that the days of the immigrant helots are over. Emblematic of this shift is the JfJ campaign, which success fully reorganized the building services industry, ultimately bringing more than eight thousand largely immigrant workers under a union contract, in what has become a model for JfJ's national organizing efforts. This chapter analyzes the recent -growth of janitorial unionism in Los Angeles against the background of the previous history of the rise and decline in unionism in the city's building services industry, asking how and why JfJ succeeded in L.A. and whether its success will last.' Origins and Early Growth JfJ may be a bright new star on the otherwise dim labor firmament, but in many ways organizing janitors today does not differ much from the circumstances under which JfJ's parent organization, then called the Build- ing Service Employees International Union (BSEIU), first emerged in Chi- cago in 1920. The union's "founding members were drawn from society's poorest ranks. Then, as now, building service workers were disproportion- ately first- and second-generation Americans and minority workers" (Ser vice Employees International Union 1992:1). Of course, this continuity begs the very question with which this chapter is concerned, namely, how poor immigrant workers built a successful and enduring organization. Histori- cally, the phenomenon of organizing immigrants is not an oddity, but the labor historiography does not usually suggest that an old-line AFL union 1. In addition to the sources cited herein, this chapter is based on, among other sources, a Lexis Nexis search of periodical and other references relevant to the justice for Janitors cam- paign and the contract cleaning industry; the public-use microdata samples of the 1980 and 1990 censuses of population; and in-depth interviews conducted with nine union officials, four management spokespersons, and four rank-and-file leaders. Interviews lasted from an hour to the equivalent of an entire day and were recorded both in written notes and, for the important union interviews, on audiotapes that were subsequently transcribed. Unless otherwise noted, interviews are the source for all quotations. 103like the Building Service Employees would grow by recruiting "the dregs," as one veteran union official put it (cited in Piore 1994:529). Whatever the original impetus to organize, the BSEIU took on many of the defining characteristics of the old AFL. Among them were high levels of local autonomy, on the one hand, and a relatively weak, underfinanced, thinly staffed international, on the other. The reversal of these charac- teristics has created the conditions for organizing janitors today. Locals were autonomous in part because building services was a local industry: the employers were the building owners, most of whom were hometown capitalists, so that the relevant market had relatively narrow geographic bounds. In the 1930s, the BSEIU spread beyond Chicago, the Depression the catalyst for expansion. New York's janitors organized in 1934; San Francis- co's followed suit shortly thereafter. From that bastion of labor radicalism, janitorial unionism was exported to L.A. just after World War II. The newly born Local 399 recruited in-house janitors who cleaned downtown build- ings housing the entertainment and financial industries, as well as movie theaters. Starting in the 1950s, commercial real estate took on a different owner ship mix, as local owners were increasingly replaced by national and even international investors. These new owners found it more efficient to pur- chase cleaning services from a specialized vendor rather than organize a workforce for their diverse and scattered buildings directly. The advent of contracting initially had an adverse effect on Local 399's membership, but the structure of the industry enabled the union