Organizing the Unorganizable - The Unlikely Spark for a Rebirth of Labor
Submitted on Mon, 10/02/2006 - 3:31pm
Disclaimer - The following article is reposted here because it is an issue with some relevance to the IWW. The views of the author do not necessarily agree with those of the IWW and vice versa.
By Ruth Milkman - Boston Review, September 29, 2006
In 1990, after a few years of intensive organizing, a group of immigrant janitors in Los Angeles went on strike, endured a brutal police beating, and then won union recognition. All but invisible to the public, these workers cleaned up after hours for the well-paid lawyers and other professionals who inhabit the glitzy office towers of Century City, an upscale section of Los Angeles. Most were immigrants from Mexico and Central America, many of them undocumented. Like countless other foreign-born workers who populate the lower echelons of southern California's vast blue- collar labor market, they worked long hours for minimal pay, often under substandard (and sometimes illegal) conditions.
The Century City victory was a turning point for the national "Justice for Janitors" campaign of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which would go on to win a series of contracts guaranteeing improved wages and working conditions for an ever- growing number of southern-California janitors, as well as janitors in several other U.S. cities. By the end of the century the local janitors' union not only had consolidated its position within the L.A. building- services industry but had also become one of the most dynamic and politically influential labor unions in the city and a vocal advocate for its burgeoning population of low-wage Latino immigrant workers.
In numerical terms, the janitors' triumph was an insignificant development, involving only a few thousand workers in the nation's second-largest city. Yet in the early 1990s, after decades of deunionization and in an extremely unfavorable political climate, any progress in the U.S. labor movement was a notable achievement. In the once-legendary "company town" of Los Angeles it was especially impressive. And the fact that the protagonists included undocumented immigrants - long presumed to be "unorganizable" - seemed almost miraculous. The janitors' success sparked a resurgence of union organizing and community- based economic-justice campaigns in Los Angeles, a wave of activity that has since spread across the nation - highlighting the potential for a broader labor resurgence.