On strike: in Los Angeles, a member of the janitor’s union marches for better pay.
Silicon Valley
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Some will always be above
others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.
Ralph
Waldo Emerson,
U.S. poet and essayist
(1803-1882)
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Key indicators
Population
(millions, 1998): 274
GNP ($ billions): 7.903
GNP per capita
($): 29,240
Population below
income poverty line of $14.40 a day, the norm for industrialized countries (%):
14.1
Source: UNDP Human
Development Report 2000
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By exposing the flagrant gap between
rich and poor, janitors in America’s high-tech heartland have captured nationwide
attention in their fight for decent working conditions
 Vicente Mendoza, an immigrant from Mexico, travels about 15
miles (24 km) through the rush hour traffic each morning from Oakland, California,
to his first job in San Ramon, where he shows up to work in a restaurant at 9 a.m.
After five hours of work, he stops home again for a couple of hours, then crosses
the San Mateo Bridge over the San Francisco bay and heads for the offices of Advanced
Micro Devices, 26 miles (40 km) away in Sunnyvale. Here, he works as a janitor for
his second shift of the day, from 6 p.m. to 2.30 a.m. The office workers are gone;
only a few late night stragglers see him push his cart around, loaded with cleaning
fluid and mops. By the time he gets home again, it’s 3:15 a.m.
It’s surprising he had any energy left over to march, but this spring Mendoza was
one of the 5,500 janitors in Service Employees International Union, Local 1877, who
came out with the Justice for Janitors movement to rally in Sunnyvale for decent
working conditions and better wages. They wore red T-shirts to make the point that
invisible as they are, working out of the public view, they were determined to be
seen.
Tenuous contracts
In this they succeeded. Low-paid workers
in a high-tech economy, they managed to capture attention nationwide as cast-offs
of the unprecedented growth in Silicon Valley. Working relentlessly to try to make
ends meet, they have been left behind by an industry that has grown faster and produced
more wealth than any other in the history of the world.
At the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in December, there was little
talk of this volatile nexus of the world economy. And yet, according to one of the
Seattle protesters, Raj Jayadev—a young Bay Area activist who grew up in San Jose
as the son of Indian immigrants—Silicon Valley brings together the key issues raised
by globalization.
“The labour struggle, the environmental degradation, the inequities, the falling
standards of living, the importance of immigration — it’s all played out on the shop
floors of Santa Clara County,” he says. Jayadev describes how he worked on the assembly
line at Hewlett Packard, lifting boxes with an electrical engineer from the Punjab,
an Eritrean with a degree in finance and a plant owner from Kerala, India, all of
whom were acutely conscious of their drop in status.
While some circuit board assembly lines have since been exported abroad, to Taiwan,
Korea, India and East Germany, janitors need not worry that their employers will
pull out and move elsewhere. The gleaming office buildings in Cupertino and on the
man-made lake at Redwood Shores are not going away.
But the janitors have also been caught in the characteristic bind of the new economy.
Conditions of employment in California have grown increasingly tenuous as the new
economy goes from strength to strength. According to Working Partnerships, a labour
think-tank based in San Jose, 45 per cent of Californians now have no more than two
years’ tenure in their current jobs, and temporary employment agencies between 1993
and 1998 expanded by 182,900 people —more than the net job growth in the software
and electronic industries combined. The trend toward outsourcing, as businesses pare
down extraneous employees to concentrate on their core business, has been felt throughout
the workforce.
Fourteen years earlier, workers like Mendoza would have been in-house employees earning
as much as $14 an hour at such firms as Hewlett Packard. But in the economic slump
of the early 1990s, the high-tech firms reaped a bonus, spinning off janitorial work,
along with such services as landscaping and security, to competing independent contractors
and substantially bringing down the cost of janitors’ labour, to around $8 an hour.
The Silicon Valley giants in turn argued that they had no responsibility for the
workers that the subcontractors brought in to sweep their marble halls. Janitors’
leaders, however, have not hesitated to exploit their position as a symbol of the
vast disparities of wealth in the area. “It was a larger question that brought so
much attention: What are we going to do with our poor in today’s booming economy?”
says Mike Garcia, the president of the local janitors’ union. “These people were
working two to three jobs and trying to raise a family. Meanwhile, they’re cleaning
the edifices of the filthy rich, the overnight billionaires and millionaires. How
could they explain that their janitors are living two to three families in a garage?”
Tom Csekey, the union’s vice president, has spent the last decade with Garcia building
up union representation among janitors in the Bay Area from about 25 per cent of
the janitorial workforce to more than 75 per cent this year. In 1996, they were able
to get a living wage ordinance passed in Los Angeles; the union’s recent struggles
have centred on immigration issues and health insurance. “We devised a strategy where
we were able to talk not so much about wages as about the conditions the workers
live in,” says Csekey. “The backdrop was going to the clients and saying: ‘These
people work within your walls. You’ve got some level of responsibility here.’”
And finally, faced with a chorus of protest from other unions, Catholic bishops and
local politicians, executives at the biotech firm Genentech and the telecommunications
company Pacific Bell were shamed into admitting responsibility for workers they had
refused to acknowledge.
The contract the janitors settled in June, without going on strike, was the most
generous in the history of the union. It provides for an eight per cent annual increase
in their hourly pay over the next three years, from $7.64 or $8.04, depending on
which county they work in, to $9.64 or $10.04. But that is hardly going to help them
move out of the converted garages they live in, where a small two-bedroom house can
fetch $750,000.
After prevailing both in the Bay Area and in Los Angeles, the union is now concentrating
on the janitors of Sacramento. The expiration of the contracts it has just negotiated
has been synchronized, so that in three years, 14,000 janitors across California
will be acting in concert.
The dispossessed
Much of the workforce of Silicon Valley is
as yet unorganized, from the crews at Internet start-ups who work 14-hour days and
camp out in their offices to the lower echelons. In the almost entirely non-unionized
“clean rooms” that assemble circuits, Asian workers are often wary of joining a union,
sometimes because their immigration status is uncertain.
But among the ranks of the janitors, many of whom are also undocumented, the Mexican
tradition of organizing is strong. “They understand the concept of unionization,”
says Garcia. “They’re not confused at all that our powers lie in our ability to come
together.”
Garcia is anxious to make common cause with the increasingly dispossessed middle
classes. The strike, he feels, has helped to turn around the climate of xenophobia
that swept through California over proposed anti-immigrant legislation. “People look
at immigrants in a much more positive vein today,” he says, “as hard-working people
trying to advance themselves.”
Marianne Steeg, staff director of the South Bay Labor Council, argues that the janitors’
strike helped to draw attention to questions of the area’s social contract, putting
the need for affordable housing, transportation and health care firmly at the top
of the political agenda.
“School teachers, firemen, health workers — so many of our workers who can no longer
afford to live here —no longer identify with the upper-middle class, but with the
working poor,” she says, adding that the strike put a dent in the shining armour
of the high-tech firms. “They can no longer claim that the prosperity of Silicon
Valley means prosperity for all.”
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