The striking janitors approved the deal reached Monday, and judging by this story in the Houston Chronicle, they’re feeling good about it.
"Nobody thought that poor Latinos of Houston would be successful, but today we can stand up and carry our heads very high," Flora Aguilar, a Houston janitor and member of the Service Employees International Union bargaining committee, told janitors gathered at the George R. Brown Convention Center on Monday night to celebrate their victory. "We all won today."
After weeks of marching on downtown streets, blocking traffic at busy intersections and subjecting dozens of union members to arrest, 5,300 janitors who make on average $5.30 an hour, will be paid $6.25 an hour come Jan. 1.
Besides that, what did they win?
•Higher Wages. Janitors pay will increase to $6.25 an hour on January 1, 2007, $7.25 an hour on January 1, 2008, and $7.75 by January 1, 2009.
•More Hours. The new contract will increase work hours for janitors currently provided with only 4 hours of work a night to six hours a shift in two years.
•Quality, Affordable Health Insurance. At a time when many employers are shifting health care costs on to workers, Houston janitors won individual health insurance at a cost of only $20 per month. Family insurance will also be available for a cost of $175 a month. The health insurance will become available starting January 1, 2009.
•Paid Holidays and Vacation Time. Janitors will receive six paid holidays per year and be able to accrue paid vacation time beginning the first year of the contract.
Given that the minimum wage is likely to be raised by the incoming Congress, and that several building management firms, such as Hines Interests, credited by Houston Mayor Bill White as an “MVP” in these negotiations, it’s probably easy to think, as one employment lawyer in the Chron article contends, that this isn’t a big win for the striking workers.
I beg to differ for several reasons.
Not only did these strikers and the organizers from SEIU get the very basic issues of paid holidays and vacation, guaranteed hours, and access to health insurance (though I wish that wasn’t put off till 2009 to be enacted), they did something else that is sadly, rather extraordinary here in Texas.
They got recognition of their decision to bargain collectively. Don’t think that’s a big deal? SEIU did. They didn’t choose Houston by happenstance.
"It's a foothold into the South," said Julius G. Getman, Earl E. Sheffield Regents chair at the University of Texas and author of several books on labor unions. "SEIU has been waiting for an opportunity to successfully organize in the South."
Over the past two decades, the union has negotiated labor agreements for janitors in 25 cities, and as the campaign to represent some of the lowest-paid workers rolls across the nation, the union has picked its targets carefully.
Houston is the SEIU's "sweet spot," home to many low-wage workers without health insurance, said Michael Lotito, an employment lawyer with Jackson Lewis in San Francisco.
The nation's second-largest union is betting cleaning companies — who have operations in other cities — are vulnerable to their argument that it is unfair for their janitors in Houston to be paid less than janitors in other cities.
SEIU also believes that because many of Houston's office developers have buildings in other cities, pressure brought to bear on them will trickle down to the cleaning companies, said Stephen Lerner, director of the SEIU's nationwide Justice for Janitors campaign in Washington, D.C.
Also, these strikers stuck together for a monthlong strike, organized using non-violent civil disobedience, and weathered abuse from Houston’s finest for the apparently radical act of insisting that they and their work were entitled to be treated with dignity and a living wage.
They really tried to break us down. The first night (in jail) they put the temperature so high that a woman—one of the other inmates—had a seizure. The second night they made it freezing and took away many of our blankets. We didn’t have access to the cots so we had to sleep on a concrete floor. When we would finally fall asleep the guards would come and yell ‘Are you Anna Denise Solís? Are you so and so?’ One of the protesters had a fractured wrist from the horses. She had a cast on and when she would fall asleep the guard would kick the cast to wake her up. She was in a lot of pain.
The guards would tell us: ‘This is what you get for protesting.’ One of them said, ‘Who gives a shit about janitors making 5 dollars an hour? Lots of people make that much.’ The other inmates—there were a lot of prostitutes in there—said that they had never seen the jail this bad. The guards told them: ‘We’re trying to teach the protesters a lesson.’ Nobody was getting out of jail because the processing was so slow. They would tell the prostitutes that everything is the protesters’ fault. They were trying to turn everybody against each other.
I felt like I was in some Third World jail, not in America. One of the guards called us ‘whores’ and if we talked back, we didn’t get any lunch. We didn’t even have the basic necessities. It felt like a police state, like marshal law, nobody had rights. Some of us had been arrested in other cities, and it was never this bad before.
"Who gives a shit about janitors?"
Is this the world we want? Where spoiled scions of privilege expect to be comped by the hot spots of their choice, but those who work cleaning our offices, or fixing our computers, or take care of our homebound ill are called “whores” and denied food and medical care?
It is not the world I want, and I can remember exactly the turning point when I became a devoted union supporter-though I’ve never had the opportunity to join one myself.
I’d always defended unions in general, but it was the bus drivers strike in a city I was visiting in the late 90s that made me realize how important unions were-and how underpaid those who clean up after others are as well.
Bus drivers were striking in Southern California, which I’ve never thought of as a mass transit kind of place. The story right after the strike itself was how hotels and restaurants were going to be understaffed, because the housekeepers and servers they relied on weren’t going to be able to get to work. The story was intended to make the bus drivers look greedy and divisive, but the takeaway I got was completely different.
Enough people in So Cal’s economy were living on a wage that didn’t afford them enough to have a family vehicle that it was the second lead story on the morning news.
I was in a very nice hotel, with a rental car, being paid very well to do work that was tedious but not terribly taxing, and the economic gap between me and the people who were forced to stay home from work came up in sharp relief.
That’s the day I became a union woman without paying a cent in dues. (I also became a much more generous tipper, but that’s another story altogether...)
I salute the men and women who struck in Houston. They and those who supported them are fighters for economic justice, and value of work over wealth and celebrity.
Each and every one of them has shown more dignity and honor than the police who trampled them, the guards who abused them while in custody, and every emptyheaded celebrity who whined because they had to pick up their own tabs.
Combined.
Originally posted at Texas Kaos.