!MUCHO TRABAJO, POCO DINERO!,
THE SEIU AND THE JANITORS :
or, what do they REALLY mean when they say "low wage organizing"?By Gregory A. Butler, local 608 carpenter
The 1.3 million member Service Employees International Union has been in the news a lot these last few weeks. Their nearly 20 year old "justice for janitors" campaign has led to 100,000 big city janitors having contracts that expire within a month or two of each other. And, with the exception of the strike against UPS by Ron Carey's Teamsters in 1997, no other labor dispute in the last decade has gotten such postive coverage from the normally anti union corporate media.
The SEIU bureaucracy has also gotten a lot of support from the Democratic Party leadership, and even some top clerics in the Roman Catholic Church, who are normally anti union. Including LA's Cardinal Mahoney, who broke an SEIU strike in the Catholic cemetaries just a couple of years ago. Why is that? And, what's the behind the scenes story about how the SEIU lost, and found, what was once it's core jurisdiction, building service workers?
And, the untold story of how the SEIU bureaucracy's philosophy of "low wage unionism" means, in the words of one of the SEIU's academic friends, Professor Gary Chaison of Clark University; "Instead of saying 'We're going to get you tremendous wage increases' they say ' we're going to get you bargaining agreements that will give you your fare share of economic prosperity'".
Of course, to the SEIU bureaucracy, minority and women janitors "fare share of economic prosperity" is very close to minimum wage, and definitely below the poverty line. So, what's the real deal on the SEIU, the "marginalized" workers union? Let's have a look.
I. BACKGROUND:
The Building Service Employees International Union was originally chartered by the American Federation of Labor in 1921 in Chicago. It's jurisdiction at the time included janitors, doormen, maids, building porters, supers, handymen and the various unskilled and semiskilled workers found in and around office buildings and apartment houses.
The BSEIU filled in a jurisdictional hole in the maintenance sector of the AF of L's building trades : the skilled workers in building maintenance, the stationary engineers, were represented by the International Union of Operating Engineers, a union that also represented construction heavy equipment operators, the stationary firemen, who were the engineers helpers and also loaded coal into the boilers, had their own union, the International Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers, and the building laborers who did cleaning on buildings while they were under construction were represented by what was then called the Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborer's International Union of North America, today's Laborers International Union of North America.
The bulk of the BSEIU's members were big city building service workers, who had been organized during the upsurge of union activism during World War I. Prior to the chartering of the BSEIU, the janitors had been originally recruited into what were called "AF of L federal locals" local unions directly affiliated to the federation that represented workers who's craft didn't yet have an international union.
One factor that was decisive in forcing building owners to use union janitors was the fact that, during this time of union militancy, many IUOE stationary engineers and IBFO firemen refused to work alonside non union workers. Also,by the 1920's, much of the AF of L in big cities like New York and Chicago was dominated by < la cosa nostra > and other gangsters, so the building owners could safely sign a union contract secure in the knowlege that the mobsters would control any worker millitancy.
Not surprisingly, once the BSEIU was organized, the conservative gangsters who controled the major locals and the international office were not very active in organizing the unorganized. The only major organizing they did was to extend the union's jurisdiction to jewelery workers in New York's Diamond District, and to parimutuel [betting] clerks at horse racing tracks.
And for many years, the BSEIU's corrupt bureaucracy chugged along with about 70,000 members, and made no major effort to organize the large portion of the craft that were non union. The main preocupation of the BSEIU's leaders was, like most labor racketeers, trying to get as much protection money from the employers as they could, running little scams like job selling, [especially for building super jobs, which came with free apartments], and keeping the members in line by any means necessary.
But, by the late 1950's, two new frontiers had opened for the labor movement; hospital workers and state, county and municipal government employees. These groups of workers had heretofore been either unorganized or in weak company union-style "associations". In the 1940's, communists and socialists in the Congress of Industrial Organizations had taken the first difficult steps in organizing these workers, facing great resistance from the employers.
By the 1950's, the mainstream union bureaucrats and the labor racketeers came in to capitalize on this new territory opened by the labor radicals. And the bosses of the rechristened SEIU [during the 60's the bureaucrats dropped "Building" from the union's name, in honor of the expansion of their jurisdiction] were among those in the labor establishment who decided to cash in.
Organizing civil servants had many advantage for these conservative, and often corrupt, bureaucrats. In many cases, the "organizing drives" consisted of making back room deals with Democratic Party hacks, or taking over already existing company unions, or, "employee associations", as they were usually called.
A far cry from having to struggle against employers, and mobilize and agitate workers, necessities of most private industry organizing drives, which union bosses found very distasteful, and even dangerous, as mobilized workers often get radical ideas about controling the union they pay dues to.
So, the SEIU waded into civil service unionism, becoming a major player in the sector, right up there with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees [AFSCME], the American Federation of Teachers [AFT] and the public employee division of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters [IBT].
The bosses of the SEIU also discovered the hospital sector. There, they could often cut the same backroom deals with employers that were possible in the local government sector. And, unlike public employees, there was, at the time, only one other competitor in the field, local 1199 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, a communist led union that was originally chartered as a pharmacist's and drug store clerk's union for the New York City Boros of Manhattan and the Bronx in 1936.
1199 got into hospital organizing in New York in 1959, and, within a few years, had, despite the local's radical-sounding media image, had come to understandings with most of the private hospitals in NYC. SEIU didn't try to contest 1199 in New York, but did their hospital worker organizing in California and other states. By the 1970's, the SEIU was America's leading hospital worker's union, and they also organized virtually all the non professional hospital workers in Canada.
But, the bosses of the Service Employees International Union didn't limit themselves to just expanding their jurisdiction into civil service and health care. Like a lot of other unions in that era, the SEIU also started down the road of "conglomerate unionism", organizing anybody with a W2 and a socal security card, even if they were in industries far removed from the union's 3 main jurisdictions. The so called "allied services division" came to consist of everybody from metal plate workers to gravediggers to New York City taxi drivers, and, in many cases, sweetheart contracts were signed.
This was especially true of the luckless New York City yellow, or "medallion", taxi drivers. Their local, Taxi Drivers and Allied Workers local 3036, SEIU, was originally organized by, of all people, Harry Van Arsdale, Jr, the boss of the electricians union and the central labor council in New York.
Van Arsdale even got himself elected president of the local, while simultaniously running local 3 IBEW and the CLC, and, even odder, affiliated the local to the SEIU, rather than his own union, or, perhaps, a more jurisdictionally appropriate union like the Transport Workers or the Teamsters. Harry served two terms before fleeing back to his own union, in the face of rank and file pressure, and leaving another hack to run 3036.
Within 15 years of these unfortunate workers being organized into the SEIU, the 30,000 cabbies had been, WITH THE ACTIVE CONSENT OF THE LOCAL 3036 BOSSES; stripped of their employee status and declared "independent contractors" legally barred from unionizing; been stripped of their previous commission system, where they got 60% of the metered fare + tips; been forced to "voluntarily" lease the employer's cars for $ 100 a day plus $ 3 dollars union dues plus the driver buys the gas CASH UP FRONT; and, finally, to add insult to injury, most of the drivers were denied benifits from their own benifit fund. In other words, they got screwed royally.
The charred remains of local 3036, together with a few other miscellanious allied services division locals, [Jewelry, Diamond and Watchcase Workers local 1J; Metal Spinners and Silver Plate Workers local 49E and Cemetary Workers and Greens Attendants local 365] were annexed in 1998 to the former School and Library Workers local 74, a civil service local representing NYC Board of Education, NY Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Public Library janitors, which was rechristened "local 174".
But, what happened to the SEIU's original core jurisdiction, building maintenance?
II. ENTER THE CLEANING CONTRACTORS :
The bureaucrats of the SEIU had neglected their core jurisdiction, secure in the confidence that building owners would always use union janitors. They assumed that, just like always, the refusal of union building tradespeople to work in buildings with non union service workers would allow them to coast, just like they had since 1921. But, the SEIU bosses were wrong, horribly wrong.
Because, around that time, some of the leading old line Wall Street industrial corporations had gotten together in a group originally called the "Construction Users Anti Inflation Roundtable", which would later become much better known by the name The Buisness Roundtable.
Their problem was that the cost of constructing and renovating industrial plants, and 1st class office space, had gone up. These increased construction costs were beginning to dig into the profits of the bid corporations who owned these facilities, and the banks who issued the mortgages on these properties, and were substantial construction users on their own properties.
The only way to get the contractors to submit lower bids, and bring construction costs down, was to reduce the contractor's labor costs. And, despite the shameless cooperation the contractors had long been recipients of from the building trades unions, the only way to REALLY bring down construction labor costs was to dispence with the unions entirely.
So, to persue this goal, the Roundtable began a full scale attack on construcion unions, especially in industrial construction. Simultaniously, the building trades began to lose ground in resedential and light commercial construction.
Starting in the 1950's, the building trades unions [especially the carpenters and laborers] had tolerated large scale non union construction of single family houses. Within a decade, there were a large number of experenced non union contractors, who had a large labor pool of non union tradespeople to hire from.
The non union tide spread into the construction of storefronts and shopping malls, and took on an organized form, the Maryland based Associated Builders and Contractors, [ABC] , founded by rat residential contractors in Baltimore in the mid 1950s, but a huge national organization by the 70's. And the ABC's main goal was to open up the one last bastion of union construction, public works, to the non union element. By the mid 1980's, the ABC had basically suceeded in that goal.
The building trades unions fell from 70% of the building trades workforce in 1950 to 13% by 1990. And the SEIU's building service division, who had depended on an all union commercial construction environment for it's very existance, was in mortal danger.
The SEIU could no longer rely on a largely union construction workforce who would refuse to work in non union staffed buildings. And, even for the fraction of the building trades that were still organized, outside New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, union officials were reluctant to want to fight building owners over the issue.
Most importantly, there had been major changes with the building owners and their labor relations. First of all, one of the major unions in building maintenance, the IBFO, had virtually dissapeared, because buildings no longer required firemen to fuel boilers, which were now oil, natural gas or steam fired. What was left of the IBFO limped along until 1995, when the remains of the union were taken over by the SEIU.
But, more importantly, most building owners had gotten out of the building maintenance buisness. They now concentrated on their core real estate management buisness, and hired contractors to provide janitorial and skilled trades maintenance services. And, those contractors could be, and were, replaced if a company that could do the work for less came along.
The SEIU bureaucracy was totally blindsided, and really didn't have a strategy to deal with this. Neither did the stationary engineers division of the IUOE, who also found themselves in headlong retreat in the building maintenance industry.
So, with the partial exception of New York City and San Francisco, a full retreat began for the SEIU's building maintenance division. Many buildings went non union, and, for the ones that didn't, the union bureaucrats gave massive wage concessions. For example, in 1978, in Los Angeles, local 399 janitors made $ 13 an hour, plus bennies. By 1981, LA janitors, now non union, made $ 3.35 an hour with no benifits. [LA's collapse of wages was also, in part, facilitated by a decision by the contractors to abandon the previous White American, Chicano and Black workforce, and replace them with illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America] This pattern was repeated again and again, across the country.
The SEIU bureaucracy hung on to the workforce they did by either making massive wage concessions, or offering wage freezes. The only exceptions were New York and San Francisco, where, due to the still remaining stregnth of the building trades in those towns, the janitor's wages kept pace with other trades. [that is why, to this day, in the SEIU, there is a massive disparity between the wages in New York and San Francisco, which are actually halfway decent, in NYC, $ 17 an hour, and the rest of the country, where union janitor wages hover around minimum, or are, in a couple of major cities like Chicago, in the $ 12 an hour range]
So the SEIU was collapsing in their core jurisdiction, while expanding among government and health care workers. But, how did the SEIU bosses come back from the brink?
III. < ! SI, SI PUEDE ! >, "JUSTICE FOR JANITORS" AND THE RESURRECTION OF THE SEIU BUILDING MAINTENANCE DIVISION :
By the early 1980's, the bureaucrats of the SEIU knew they were in a crisis. And they had to do something to rebuild their rapidly declining presence in the building services industry. So, they launched an organizing drive.
The SEIU bosses knew that, if they relied on the NLRB election process, they would be tied up in court for years, and would organize, at best, maybe a few hundred members a year. At that rate, it would take them decades to regain the ground lost in just the previous decade. They knew that the SEIU would have to take a different course, one based on mobilizing the unorganized workers, and leading them into struggles and strikes. That was how the AF of L and the CIO were built back in the old days, and that was the path they would have to take again to rebuild the union.
But, that was a very dangerous path for the SEIU bosses. Because, members who become activists within their own unions often get the idea that the MEMBERS should actually run the union. And, that just wouldn't do in a deeply bureaucratic labor organization like the Service Employees, where the union had long deliberately been structured to prevent rank and file activism, with large locals, covering huge territories and widely dispersed workplaces.
The union also had a longstanding deeply undemocratic tradition, similar to the ILGWU, of excluding as many members as possible from the leadership ranks of the union, and recruiting offcers, organizers and buisness agents for the service workers union from among the ranks of college educated professionals. For example, John Sweeney, the SEIU president at the time and now AFL-CIO president, had never worked a day in his life as a janitor, or in any SEIU craft, for that matter, but the son of a Transport Workers Union Vice President had been hired straight out of college as a buisness agent for local 32b-32j, the mobbed up building service workers local in New York City
But, the SEIU bosses really didn't have a lot of choices. They had to take the risk of mobilizing the members, or they wouldn't have a building service division outside of New York and San Francisco in a couple of years.
The bureaucrats would just have to take the chance of relying the ironclad control that the officers had over the locals to control any members who got out of line. Also, the union bosses made sure that they took advantage of their ties to the Democratic Party, liberal elements in the Roman Catholic Church ecclesiastical heirarchy and the old line Wall Street corporate foundation financed liberal Not For Profit/Non Governmental Organizations social services community.
These high powered ruling class elements would be able to shape the campaign to reorganize the building service workers along the lines of a United Farm Workers-style campaign. The actual workers would be presented to the media, not as millitant workers fighing to restore their past middle income living standard, but as pitiable, ignorant immigrants, who only want to live slightly above the poverty line.
And, in fact, the campaign the SEIU bosses, and their corporate allies, dreamed up, would in fact NOT be based on restoring the previous wages and conditions of janitors, which had been comparible to those of unionized construction laborers. Instead, this was a "we are the world" "save the children" "UNICEF" type approach to labor organizing, where the union would only ask for wages just over the poverty line.
This, by the way, was the prototype for today's "low wage organizing", where the object is to organize a group of minority and/or female and/or immigrant workers who make low wages, but to NOT demand middle income "American Dream" standards of wages and benifits, but to merely lift these workers just high enough above the poverty line so they can't collect food stamps anymore.
Which, incedentally, is the unspoken reason why the corporate politicians, the media and the Wall Street plutocrats who stand behind them, have given this campaign so much support. After all, raising building workers wages just a hair above the poverty line, just enough to make them inelegible for government aid, does fit right in with reducing the welfare roles.
But, what is the justification for such low wage demands?
Supposedly, these are "realistic" and "winable" demands, similar to the now popular "living wage ordenances" in some cities, where a "living wage" is defined at as low a level as possible.
And, if the union was to ask for more, they would lose "popular support" [that is, support from the corporate politicans, the clergy and the corporate media].
And, as the union bosses and their academic apologists put it, [in media outlets and academic journals that they are sure that their members don't read] near minimum, slightly above poverty level wages are these largely minority and immigrant and female workers "fare share" of they economy, a polite way of saying these brothers and sisters don't deserve a middle income working class standard of living.
In any event, this campaign was the prototype for what is now AFL-CIO orthodoxy, and it was called ...