Union Strategy Targets High-Rise ‘Sweatshops’ to Organize Custodians : Labor: The ‘Justice for Janitors’ campaign successfully combines quiet networking in the Latino community with demonstrations that are meant to embarrass building managers.

Mario Rivas glides through the empty lobby of a Beverly Hills office tower, past a distracted security guard and down a back stairway.

He is met in a parking garage by three of the eight janitors who clean the Wilshire Boulevard building. They joke around and pass along the latest scuttlebutt on their employer. Rivas offers encouragement and fills them in on the details of his union’s newest battle plans.

For months now, this late-afternoon ritual has been repeated all over town as hundreds of mostly Latino custodians show up to begin cleaning the grandest office buildings on the Westside--the newest center of a militant and remarkably successful drive to unionize Southern California’s janitors.

After watching its grip on the region’s janitorial industry nearly vanish during the 1980s, Local 399 of the Service Employees International Union launched an unconventional strategy--blending unionism with grass-roots community organizing--that in the last five years allowed it to recapture strongholds in downtown Los Angeles and Century City.

Now it is working its brand of organizing in the largest commercial buildings in Beverly Hills, Westwood and the mid-Wilshire corridor, between Hoover Street and San Vicente Boulevard.

The goal of the latest “Justice for Janitors” campaign is twofold: to get more members on the fertile Westside and press union companies here to match the $5.95-an-hour wage and family health benefits paid to union janitors downtown and in Century City, which are lumped together in the city’s master contract. Union janitors elsewhere on the Westside currently earn $5 an hour without health insurance.

Rivas, a 30-year-old Salvadoran immigrant and former aide at the politically active La Placita Church on Olvera Street downtown, said the 6-month-old Westside push has gone so well that he has been reassigned to organize janitors mostly in mid-Wilshire.

The Westside janitors are, as elsewhere in the city, mostly immigrants from Mexico and Central America. It is generally assumed that many work illegally. At non-union companies, most are paid the $4.25-an-hour minimum wage or slightly higher to clean an equivalent of two to three homes a night--a pace that even company executives admit is exhausting.

“Janitors make these offices shiny--clean and luxury,” Rivas said, adding one of the union’s favorite refrains: “Luxury by day and a sweatshop by night.” Ricardo Martinez, 24, is one of an estimated 1,350 janitorial workers who make their way across town every afternoon to tend to the Westside’s 150 largest office buildings. He is paid the $4.25 an hour--no fringe benefits--to clean three floors of a Brentwood building.

Working six hours a night, Martinez said he makes $232 every two weeks, roughly the amount he pays each month in rent for a shared house near Normandie Avenue and 51st Street. Little is left over to send to relatives in Mexico City, he said.

Roberto Diaz, a 21-year-old Salvadoran, said he makes $4.60 an hour after working three years for non-union Skyline Building Services at 9100 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills. He said he has to pass up lunch and rest breaks in order to finish his assigned cleaning work by shift’s end at 2 a.m.

“It’s a tough job. Have you ever done it?” asked George Vallen, chief executive officer of non-union Advance Building Maintenance, one of the companies being organized most aggressively. “I have. My feet and back were killing me by the end of the shift.” But Vallen said a bloated labor pool and recession-heightened competition in the cleaning industry have discouraged him from recognizing Local 399.

Yet even as many other unions saw wages fall and fresh organizing stall, by all accounts the local Justice for Janitors campaign has found a winning one-two combination: quiet networking in the Latino community with house visits and informal carne asada meetings, paired with a confrontational, public style meant to embarrass building managers into hiring union cleaners.

Two years ago, the campaign won a fight to unionize an international cleaning company operating in Century City after hundreds of striking janitors clashed with Los Angeles police during a march there. Forty people were arrested and 16 were injured in the highly publicized incident. The janitorial firm, International Service System, agreed to a union contract three weeks later.

The public portion of the union’s Westside drive has been much less dramatic so far, relying mainly on regular mini-demonstrations in front of key buildings and occasional larger marches. But even cleaning contractors who criticize the union as overly aggressive acknowledge that it has succeeded in getting building owners and managers to hire union firms, even at costs estimated typically at 5% higher.

The janitors’ campaign has so far organized about two-thirds of the target buildings in Beverly Hills and Westwood and roughly half of those in mid-Wilshire, according to Local 399 organizer Jono Shaffer.

In Beverly Hills one recent afternoon, about 20 organizers and union janitors picketed in front of the Beverly Hills offices of the William Morris Agency, which is cleaned by non-union A&D; Building Maintenance Inc. of Van Nuys.

With police and agency security guards watching and A&D;’s owners snapping photos of them, the picketers marched back and forth, chanting: “Se ve! Se siente! La union esta presente!” (“You can see it! You can feel it! The union is here!”) and “A&D;, no! Union, yes!”

Shaffer said that kind of local action, combined at times with pressure on corporate parents, has helped force cleaning companies to the bargaining table more quickly than through the conventional technique of getting workers to sign union authorization cards and then seeking workplace elections, which organizers claim intimidates workers.

A&D; co-owner Alan G. Florea decried the union’s tactics, saying they succeed by strong-arming companies into switching to union firms, rather than through organizing workers. He accused the union of trespassing and spreading false information about the wages his firm pays, though a janitor stopped at random said the union’s figures were accurate.

Larry Bloustein, a William Morris spokesman, said the agency was staying clear of the union struggle and leaving the matter up to A&D; and its employees.

One cleaning firm manager, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was not even aware of the union’s efforts to organize his workers in Beverly Hills until management told him that it was switching to a new cleaning company, in part to avoid the bad publicity.

Vallen, of 400-employee Advance, said the union’s methods resemble blackmail.

“They don’t petition the workers. They intimidate the building owners or management companies,” Vallen said, accusing the union of allowing union companies to cut back staff in order to be able to underbid non-union contractors. Shaffer denied this and defended the union’s existing multitiered wage system as reflecting local sub-markets, not the ideal.

Under the three-tiered salary structure in the union’s master contract with 16 area cleaning companies, janitors in the Westside zone make about one-sixth less than downtown and Century City workers, with no health benefits.

Ron Goins, division president of Denmark-based ISS, said that because of higher costs, the firm initially lost business after reaching agreement with the union following the 1990 Century City clash. He said the company agreed to settle then as a result of pressure on the firm’s U.S. corporate headquarters in New York.

“Our experience (with the union) on a working day basis has been reasonably (good),” Goins said. “They are, I would say, inordinately militant to work with compared to other unions I’ve worked with. But I think they have to do this to keep up the thrust of their organizing effort.”

The depressed office market and higher-than-normal vacancy rates--an estimated 14% throughout most of the Westside and 18% in Beverly Hills--is putting extra pressure on building managers to keep all operating costs down, including cleaning help, said Geoffrey M. Ely, executive director of the Building Owners and Managers Assn. of Greater Los Angeles. A cleaning contract for a medium-sized office building can exceed $100,000 a year.

But organizers are gambling that building managers are equally anxious that negative publicity will scare away potential tenants. And they may be right.

In part as a result of the organizing effort, managers of the 10-story Wilshire Doheny Plaza at 9100 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills recently decided to drop the non-union cleaner in favor of a union company.

“If you look at Century City and you look at the union drive to organize the Beverly Hills-Wilshire area, it would seem that when you have as big a building, it’s natural that they’re going to center activity on it,” said Ross Crowe, vice president of Lowe Enterprises Realty Services Inc., the management firm. “We prefer not to have that kind of publicity.”

The Westside was the first region to go non-union, and some buildings are too new to have been organized in the first place. At the peak of union influence, pay areawide was $7.32 an hour with benefits. Those rates tumbled in the mid-1980s, a result of lapsed union efforts, rapid building and a tide of cheap immigrant labor that gave the edge to non-union firms.

In addition to seeking new union contracts, organizers hope to renegotiate contracts already in place on Westside.

The contract, which expires in 1995, allows the union to seek to reopen contract talks in mid-term if it organizes more than half of a zone’s commercial buildings that are larger than 100,000 square feet in area.

“We don’t know how it’s going to play out,” Shaffer said. “But a janitor who cleans a building downtown or in Century City should be making the same amount of money as someone working in Beverly Hills. And they all should have health insurance.”