There is a dimension now in which whole human beings can be rendered invisible, just erased...

Published on Thursday, April 13, 2000 in the Miami Herald
Justice For Janitors
by Shawn Hubler

You start with the bathrooms. You are to wait until they are empty. The building's occupants must not be disturbed. It is 6 p.m. Five floors of bathrooms, two bathrooms per level. Your uniform is dark pants, T-shirt, sneakers, blue apron. You push your supply cart noiselessly down the plush, carpeted hallway. Executives brush past, ending their day as yours is beginning. There is no eye contact. They are expensively dressed, unlike you.

You start with the mirrors. From your cart, you pull your feather duster, your spray bottle of industrial-strength glass cleaner, a fistful of paper towels and a plastic jug you've rigged to hold a toilet brush. You dump clear blue solution onto a towel to polish the mirrors. The fumes hit you like a faceful of Windex.

Quickly -- because, besides these 10 bathrooms, your shift requires that you clean five floors of offices, a job the size of five single-family houses -- you unlock the trash bins and pull out the trash: wet paper towels, strangers' gum, wads of Kleenex with red lipstick on them. You change the trash bags, lock the bins up. You swab out the sinks, start with the urinals and toilets. Lift the lids, wash them top and bottom, clean around the base, down the sides.

Dunk the brush in a solution of water and urinal cleaner. Hold your breath as more fumes rise from the suds. Try not to think about the dried rivulet under the toilet seat, the brown deposit of unflushed feces. In the ladies' room, go stall to stall , disposing of bloody tampons. As night settles in -- over this city, your unseen form, your sleeping children -- use aerosol stainless-steel cleaner and a damp, soft cloth to swipe at the scent, almost more palpable now than you are, of rich strangers' excrement.

To understand the strange, ragged vehemence of the janitors' strike that has dominated Southern California for a week now, it is necessary to experience -- just for a moment -- the job. This isn't the case with all strikes, which tend to be variations on the old theme of what work is worth in the new economic order. But the janitors' strike has an extra dimension, one that has brought to the surface something deeply resonant about the lives of all of this nation's working poor.

It is a dimension that, with time and rising middle-class prosperity, has become so accepted as to go unnoticed, in the same way that no one at the Landmark Square high-rise in Long Beach, Calif., on this particular evening, notices Maria Castel. This is last week, days before the rolling strike will hit Castell's building. She is 51, a short woman with pinned-up hair, a silver front tooth and two tags on her apron, one bearing the name of her employer, the American Building Maintenance Co., the other reading ``Justice for Janitors.''

HUMAN BEINGS AT WORK

Castell and 10 other janitors (``Manuela, Cristina, Antonio, el otro Antonio . . . '') are paid $6.80 an hour to clean this 24-story building every night until 2:30 a.m. Her two girls are home with their father, whom she'll see for two hours before he leaves for his work. Janitorial jobs, the women say, are tough on marriages.

Tough on bodies, too. Maybe an hour into your shift, the knees start to twinge, and the back starts throbbing. ``They promised us benefits a year ago, but so far we haven't seen them,'' Castell confides in Spanish, parking her cart in front of the fifth-floor men's room. But that's not the side of the work that eludes the public. Cleaning is hard, but it can have a satisfying, almost moral feel.

No, to understand, you must let the silence fall as you spray and wipe and breathe the glass cleaner. To shine even the silver doorplates with their symbols for ``Men'' and ``Women'' until you can see the reflection of someone -- an executive in a white shirt, coming toward the men's room.

It is then, as he brushes past you -- without acknowledgment or eye contact, leaving just the fresh smudge of his handprint -- that you finally understand. There is a dimension now in which whole human beings can be rendered invisible, just erased, by the classes, by the millions. And something wells up, something palpable, as you consider that silver doorplate. Something like: I exist. I demand.


http://www.commondreams.org/views/041300-103.htm

Justice for Janitors is a movement of janitors uniting for dignity, respect and fair working conditions. It is part of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Justice for Janitors started in Denver, Colorado in 1985. 200,000 plus janitors in more than 29 cities throughout the United States have united in the SEIU and won family health insurance, livable wages, full-time work, and better working conditions. This movement of low-wage, mostly immigrant workers has earned broad-based support from the public as well as religious, political and community leaders.

A watershed moment for the movement was the Century City strike. In 1990, janitors in the Century City high-rise commercial office area of Los Angeles staged a three-week general strike for improved wages and benefits. On June 15, LAPD officers attacked a group of 400 non-violent demonstrators, injuring two dozen janitors. Television coverage of the attacks, which were seen as a police riot and condemned by elected officials and several dozen local judges, won widespread public sympathy for the striking janitors. The contract signed by the Los Angeles cleaning contractors and the janitors, represented by SEIU Local 1877, resulted in a 25% raise and fully-paid health benefits - more than any settlement janitors had won in the past 20 years. In the ensuing lawsuit, in which news videotape was brought to bear during testimony, the LAPD was found guilty of causing the riot and forced to pay SEIU Local 399 , over 3.5 million dollars.<1> The strike was memorialized in a fictionalized account by Ken Loach in the 2000 film Bread and Roses. June 15 is now celebrated as "Justice for Janitors Day."