Boston Janitors Say Strike Settlement Is No Victory

Boston janitors ratified a five-year contract on November 9, two weeks after ending a 23-day strike that attracted national attention. The trustees of the janitors’ union, Service Employees Local 254, called the settlement a victory because it extended health benefits to 1,000 part-time workers.

Yet many janitors expressed anger and disappointment with an agreement that they say locks them into five years of stagnant wages. In a week-long ratification process, fewer than 800 janitors out of the eligible 12,000 voted.

ON STRIKE

For 23 days, janitors disrupted traffic with marches of up to 2,000 members and supporters. Strikers trashed the insides of buildings and walked picket lines chanting “Que limpien los jefes, estamos en huelga” (“Let the bosses clean, we’re on strike!”).

About 50 community supporters were arrested in acts of civil disobedience during the course of the strike. Actions ranged from weekly traffic blockades planned by SEIU to a one-day shut-down of the cleaning contractors’ scab operation by Jobs with Justice.

The level of community support was unprecedented in Boston, according to Lara Jirmanus of Massachusetts Jobs with Justice. “Everyone from the Black Ministerial Alliance to Oxfam America came forward to support the janitors,” she explained. “The coalition was larger and more diverse than any we’d seen.”

The size and spirit of the support activities influenced many community supporters to see the strike as successful, in contrast with the janitor activists, who tended to look more closely at the terms of the contract.

The strike targeted UNICCO, the largest cleaning contractor in the consortium with which the union was negotiating, the Maintenance Contractors of New England.

In spite of broad community support and national media coverage, the strike failed to mobilize more than a fraction of the members. The union leadership said that, at its height, the strike involved 2,000 janitors, out of 12,000. Lourdes Hernandez, who cleans one of the largest downtown office buildings, estimates that the total never exceeded 1,500. “If more participated, we would have achieved more,” she said.

According to janitors, few workers were willing to strike because the leadership designed the strike without them. “There was a lot of confusion about demands, and not enough information,” said Juana Benavides, who cleans a downtown hospital. Workers prioritized wages, while the leadership conveyed health insurance as the primary demand.

Jill Hurst, Local 254’s staff director, said that most workers did not strike because the leadership did not ask them to. “We were targeting certain companies,” she explained. One SEIU staffer said, “The buildings were getting cleaned. We knew that. But it doesn’t really matter how many members were out. It’s the political pressure we were bringing that matters.”

Staff organizers maintained that the union targeted a few contractors because it could not mobilize most members.

Rocio Saenz, Deputy Trustee of Local 254, noted that the union had only a year to organize for the strike. The SEIU International placed the local in trusteeship in the spring of 2001. “This was more like new organizing than a contract campaign,” Saenz explained. “We were getting people involved in the union.”

Local 254 hired a few dozen workers as part-time member organizers, and created a Contract Action Committee of 200 workers. Yet workers were not included in strategy discussions, and the Committee was excluded from negotiations during the strike. A handful of union staff negotiated the final agreement, although 254’s members include veteran trade unionists from Latin America.

In the end, the leadership presented a tentative settlement to the Contract Action Committee, which voted to end the strike; there was no membership discussion. After members returned to work, there was no single membership meeting to discuss and vote on the contract, but instead site meetings and 70 voting areas. At one site meeting, workers angrily walked out chanting “¡No se pudo!” or “No we couldn’t!” -- a bitter reply to the union’s “¡Si se puede!”

THE CONTRACT

“The highlight of the contract,” says Hurst, “is getting 1,000 additional part-time workers health insurance.” These benefits will increase contractors’ labor costs significantly. However, they begin in 2006, three years into the five-year contract.

The union demanded health insurance partly to win full-time jobs. Adding benefits to part-time work was supposed to create incentives for management to convert part-time jobs to full-time ones. However, the contract creates the opposite incentive. From the time that 1,000 part-time workers qualify for health insurance in 2006 to the end of the contract, employers’ insurance payments for part-time workers will fall from 50% to 38% of payments for full-time workers. Two part-time workers will be as cheap or cheaper than one full-time worker.

For many janitors, wage agreements are the contract’s greatest disappointment. “We got no money,” said Benavides. Workers within fifteen miles of Boston will receive raises averaging 55 cents per year, while those further out will receive an average of 45 cents. These 5% raises will just keep up with Boston’s skyrocketing cost of living; wages will not rise in real terms. After five years, workers in the higher tier will make $12.95-$13.10-wages that might constitute a living wage today in Boston.

Saenz said that the union succeeded in including 4,000 more workers in the top tier than contractors wanted. To achieve that goal, however, the union agreed to stretch the wage scale across five years instead of three. Hurst acknowledges that a five-year contract “is not what we wanted.” With a five-year wait ahead, the union may not be able to generate more power for the next negotiations.

Ultimately, the contract was ratified 622-103 after members had been sent back to work for over a week and strike momentum was lost. “The majority of my co-workers are not satisfied with the contract,” explained a Salvadoran janitor who works at a downtown university. “People did not vote against it because they were afraid of going back on strike.”

Benavides explained the reason that her co-workers did not vote: “They were upset. They said, ‘Vote for what?’ They don’t want anything to do with the union now.”

According to Hurst, “It’s not good that people didn’t vote, but that’s typical when people are satisfied.”

AFTER THE STRIKE

This contract is the product of a trusteeship that promised to reform Local 254. Under the last president, Eddie Sullivan, most janitors never saw a union representative, and contract campaigns did not exist. Saenz calls this fall’s contract campaign “a first step” toward a more participatory and powerful local, and SEIU sees strikes like Boston’s as the future of the union.

Yet workers who walked off the job and feel that they lost do not agree. According to the university janitor, “Some people on the outside see this as a first step. But many people are afraid to go on strike again or ask for more.” Some have told organizers that they will not participate in union activities again. Benavides says that her co-workers are among the angriest; they “want to get rid of the union.”

Just before the strike, SEIU chartered a new local for the janitors only-Local 615-in order to extend the trusteeship. Saenz explains that it was impossible to hold elections for new officers as the strike approached, but that the local is now creating permanent steward structures and a multi-year plan which will include elections. She is expected to run for the local’s presidency, and may face opposition from a rank and file candidate.

---

Amy Offner, a former SEIU organizer, is a co-editor at Dollars & Sense magazine. TEXT