At first they would send him away from their doors, saying they didn’t trust unions, that they feared getting fired, and that nobody could help them.
But Juan Roman persisted, telling the Houston janitors whom he was visiting on behalf of his union, the Service Employees International Union, that he is one of them–a Latino, and a night-shift janitor at Chicago’s Harold Washington Library.
It wasn’t hard for the 28-year-old Mexican-born Roman to bond with the Houston janitors.
“I felt that it was very unfair,” he says. “The pay is so little. $5.25 an hour. They have no health insurance. No lunches. No breaks. No nothing.”
The persistence of Roman and dozens of other Chicago-area janitors recently paid off in a unique organizing victory. As a result of a $1.5 million campaign led by Chicago’s SEIU Local 1, several Houston cleaning contractors agreed to bargain with the union on behalf of nearly 5,700 workers.
Deep in the heart of the largely non-union South, it was a precedent-setting event on several accounts.
It was the largest single organizing win by a union among private workers in Texas in decades. With barely any presence in Texas, the SEIU turned the effort over to the Chicago local, which relied heavily on janitors rather than union organizers to make the union’s case.
“I almost cried whenever I talked to them. They have so little,” recalls Jose Molotla, 59, a janitor at Northwestern University. “I said to them, `You need money for food for your children. You need medical attention.'”
While SEIU officials say Houston may be the forerunner of other Southern organizing efforts, others are not so sure. They point to the troubles faced by the union in a stalled attempt to organize condo workers in south Florida. In that case, a New York City SEIU local is similarly leading the campaign.
More Top Picks Ultraloq U Bolt Pro
“It’s tough to see this (Houston) as a precursor for broader organizing,” says Barry Hirsch, an economist at Trinity University in San Antonio. The SEIU was able to pull off a win in Houston, he suggests, because it put pressure on businesses that deal with it elsewhere.
To be sure, Local 1 president Tom Balanoff says one reason Houston became a target was because many of the cleaning firms there have contracts with the SEIU in other cities. After the union approached them, the contractors also were not against reaching a deal, he adds.
But there were problems.
The companies wanted an agreement to include as many firms as possible, so that nobody would take advantage of lower wages, he said. Just when a deal seemed certain in August, a major contractor also nearly walked out of the talks.
To push things along, several Houston janitors also staged a brief walkout, and the union warned that janitors in other cities might strike in support of the Houston workers.
Pumping up the union’s presence in the South became a goal for the union early last year, according to Balanoff.
Union officials felt that the SEIU could not call itself a national organization until it set down roots in the largely non-union sections of the nation.
In Molotla’s case, he saw his effort as helping fellow janitors, and Latinos.
But when union officials called, asking if he would go to Houston, he was a little surprised. A janitor for the last 27 years, and a union member for the last 12, nobody had ever asked him to do such a thing.
On his $9.45-an-hour janitor’s wage, he lives in a small, simply furnished one-room apartment on Chicago’s North Side. Chicago janitors, who have a different contract from their suburban colleagues, earn $13.40 an hour.
After starting his work in Houston, Molotla found it difficult to recruit people.
Many janitors still carried largely negative memories of unions from their days in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America. Others were sure they would be fired if their bosses knew they were in favor of a union.
But once they saw that he, too, is a janitor, Molotla says they would sit with him for hours, comparing their lives, and jobs. “I would tell them, `Hey, in Chicago they get more than $13 an hour. So, why don’t you guys get the same?'”
While Molotla had strong positive feelings about the union, that wasn’t true for Ramon before he went to Houston. The union seemed to take members’ money and not do much else. Nor had he paid much attention to the union.
That was partly on his mind when he agreed go to Houston for only a few weeks. But his thinking soon changed, and he stayed on for five months.
What he witnessed moved him.
“Sometimes, when you are not poor, but hard-working, you don’t care about anybody,” Ramon says. “But then you go into peoples’ houses and trailers. And you see how they don’t have anything.”
———-