Three Thousand San Francisco Janitors Prepare for a
Strike

By David Bacon
Truthout
August 10, 2012

http://truth-out.org/news/item/10816-three-thousand-san-francisco-janitors-prepare-for-a-strike

San Francisco

The national confrontation between janitors and some of
the world's richest property owners has arrived in San
Francisco where, on Wednesday, over two thousand
building cleaners shut down the city's main artery,
Market Street, in a huge march. Later, twenty-seven
workers and supporters were arrested in a financial
district intersection as they blocked it in an act of
civil disobedience.

Among the many banners carried by the marchers, by far
the most common was one that said, "We Are Ready to
Strike the 1%." It clearly summed up workers' anger,
which made this march even larger than one three days
earlier and others organized during the weeks prior.

A strike is on the near horizon in San Francisco,
according to Olga Miranda, president of Service
Employees Local 87, one of the oldest janitors' unions
in the country. "Our members are determined to go on
strike and we've already called for a strike vote," she
shouted over the chantsof marchers. "They're telling us
the union must lead and going on strike is our
recommendation."

The local already took a vote to authorize a strike when
its contract expired on July 31 with the city's main
building service employers, Able Building Maintenance,
American Building Maintenance and the San Francisco
Contractors Association. That was fine with janitor
Mohamed Ismael, who said, "A strike is possible. We
don't like to go on strike, but if they don't make a
reasonable proposal, if they tell us this is what you're
going to get, if we go to the end of the line, then it's
better for us to go on strike."

At issue in San Francisco is the same sticking point in
most union contract negotiations - health care costs and
wages. San Francisco janitorsare the second most highly
paid in the country, after New York City, but the city's
living costs are so hig that few can afford to live there.
Ismael was fortunate enough to find affordable housing in
the city 20 years ago. But now, the contractors are
demanding that workers pay $600 a month for family health
care coverage and he has a wife and four children. They
offer a raise of 50¢ an hour, which would total about $85,
resulting in an effective wage cut of $515 a month.

"If they do this, there is no way I could live as a
human being in San Francisco," Ismael said. "I would
have to leave."

Miranda claims bitterly "they're forcing families out of
their homes. We have these benefits because our union
has been here for 78 years. We're saying, don't take
away what we already have. They're offering 50¢ and they
have revenues of millions. We absolutely cannot afford
to pay this."

Ismael works at Embarcadero Center 4, one of four huge
office and retail buildings on the San
Francisco waterfront owned by Boston Properties, which
reported total revenue of $1.7 billion in 2011.

At night, the buildings are outlined in lights, a
signature element of the city skyline. Inside, Ismael
runs floor polishers and cleaning equipment, empties
waste baskets and washes down bathrooms for Able
Building Maintenance, his direct employer and the
company with the cleaning contract for 4 Embarcadero
Center.

But the real wealth and power in relation to the
janitors belongs to Boston Properties and other real
estate investment groups. They dictate the terms of the
contracts for cleaning the offices of their tenants,
another extremely wealthy group that includes banks like
Wells Fargo and other major corporations. Nevertheless,
cleaning contractors are hardly mom-and-pop operations
and haven't been for decades. They're large corporations
themselves. Able and its main San Francisco rival, ABM,
clean buildings for real estate trusts throughout the US
and all over the world.

As their banner says, janitors are up against the 1%,
whether they're direct employers or the financial interests
behind them.

Warren Delahoussaye works at 50 California Street, a
tall office building owned by Shorenstein, whose founder
Walter Shorenstein started the San Francisco office
property boom decades ago. This trust is now the biggest
player in the city's commercial real estate market and
has expanded to own buildings around the country. The
Shorenstein real estate portfolio now tops $6 billion.
"These corporations and the wealthiest 1% whose offices
and buildings we clean, can afford to do right by San
Francisco families," Delahoussaye said.

If San Francisco's 3,000 union janitors go on strike, it
will be the first time since 1996 and the largest
janitorial strike since the huge Los Angeles walkout of
2000. The other big janitors' local in California,
United Service Workers West, almost struck over similar
employer demands when its contracts expired April 30,
which cover 10,000 members in the East Bay, Silicon
Valley, Sacramento, Los Angeles and Orange County. After
marches and civil disobedience agreements were settled
in June.

In July, however, janitors went on strike in Houston,
where the Service Employees union only signed a first
contract six years ago, also as a result of a strike.
This year, Houston's oil and bank interests and the
contractors working in their buildings proposed to
increase the base hourly wage of $8.35 by fifty cents in
raises to be spread over five years. ABM is a major
employer in Houston, as it is in San Francisco, and the
same 50¢ offer showed up on the bargaining table in both
places. In Houston, however, janitors, still only have
health coverage for individual workers, not their
families. Many make an average of less than $10,000 a
year because they can't work enough hours to earn more.
They're demanding a $10/hour minimum wage and more
working hours to raise their overall income.

Five hundred of the union's 3,200 members are on strike.
Since negotiations hit the rocks, Houston intersections, too,
have been blocked by supporters in acts of civil
disobedience. In the strike's second week, the union called
on other janitors' locals around the country to mount one-day
work stoppages in solidarity and cleaners then walked out of
buildings in New York, California, Illinois, and other states.

San Francisco has the hottest commercial real estate
market in the country. Despite foreclosures on the homes
of workers and thousands of working-class homeowners in
the Bay Area under water because their homes are now
worth less than their loans, the prices of city office
buildings continues to go up. And they are selling. The
corporate tenants as well are recording large profits.

One union study, "How Much is The 1% Holding Back Your
Family," argued that corporations with California
headquarters have cash reserves of $500 billion. The
Federal Reserve said that the cash reserves of US
corporations have more than doubled since 2000,
including during the years of the current economic
crisis.

"It's ridiculous in a city where the market is
continuing to grow and companies have so much cash that
janitors are expected to pay $600 more for their
healthcare," Miranda charged. Nevertheless, no progress
was reported in negotiations the night before the latest
San Francisco march and no new sessions are scheduled.
In the media, contractors' association negotiator Jim
Beard said employers were negotiating in good faith.

A strike is now looming in San Francisco.

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate