Walkout by janitors expected in L.A. today

Unionized janitors are scheduled to walk off their jobs in Los Angeles today and in other cities soon in an effort to pressure national cleaning contractors to reach a contract accord with thousands of low-wage janitors in Houston, labor officials said Tuesday.

More than 5,300 janitors in the Texas city voted last year to affiliate with the Service Employees International Union, which represents 225,000 janitors in 29 cities. But the union and cleaning firms have been unable to reach an agreement over wages and benefits, prompting janitors to strike last month.

Union officials declined Tuesday to specify which Los Angeles buildings would be affected and how many workers would be involved, saying that would be revealed today when the walkouts begin.

The planned pickets illustrate growing efforts to mount national labor actions to counter the clout of national and global employers. They also highlight an increasing focus by unions on low-wage workers, whose numbers are growing in service industries and in cities such as Los Angeles that have significant immigrant populations.

Houston building cleaners who work for the five targeted contractors earn as little as $20 a day for part-time work and receive no health insurance. By contrast, unionized janitors in downtown Los Angeles who work for the same companies earn about $11.30 an hour and are eligible for full-time work and family benefits.

To break the stalemate, SEIU leaders planned to set up picket lines in other cities. The job action was scheduled to start Tuesday night in Chicago and today in Los Angeles, and could spread to New York and other cities in coming weeks.

“We expect a strong majority of the workers will honor the picket line and choose not to go to work,” said SEIU spokesman Andrew McDonald.

Jose Juan Ibarra, a janitor with SEIU Local 1877 in Los Angeles, said, “The Houston janitors are our brothers and sisters. They do the same work for the same companies we do.”

Ibarra works for ABM Janitorial Services, which cleans the Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters building downtown, where he works. Ibarra said he would honor picket lines set up in Los Angeles by striking Houston janitors.

In addition to ABM, which also provides janitorial services for the Los Angeles Times, the Houston strikers have targeted GCA Services Group, OneSource Management Inc., Pritchard Industries Southwest Inc. and Sanitors Inc.

Representatives of OneSource and ABM declined to comment on the job action. Calls to the other contractors were not returned.

The wage gains won by Los Angeles-area janitors evolved over time and are unlikely to happen in Houston anytime soon, said Brad Kampas, a San Francisco lawyer who represents employers.

For now, he said, the contractors are caught between what the building owners have agreed to pay them and what the janitors want. If they raise wages substantially, the cleaning companies “can only pass on so much of the cost,” he said.

Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., said he did not believe that pickets outside office buildings in Chicago or Los Angeles would attract enough attention in Houston to force concessions from the contractors.

Moreover, he doubts that the widespread sympathy the Los Angeles janitors generated among the public will surface in Houston.

“Things have changed, especially since the May 1 immigration rallies, and a lot of that was organized by the unions,” Kyser said. Those rallies “seemed to sour a lot of people on what was going on.”

The SEIU’s success in organizing Los Angeles-area janitors after a major strike against cleaning contractors in 2000 is seen as a key milestone in labor’s efforts to reach low-wage workers. To counteract union efforts against some of the same firms in other cities, however, employers have sometimes refused to bargain with newly organized union locals.

The pickets to begin today, aimed at amplifying the union’s leverage in the Houston area, follow a trend in labor strategy in industries such as building services, in which the targeted companies tend to be national and even international in reach, said Ken Jacobs, chairman of UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education.

“If corporations are going to operate nationally and internationally to have power, unions need to do that as well, and they understand that,” he said.

The three-week-long Justice for Janitors strike in Los Angeles against some of the same cleaning contractors being targeted today was seen as a turning point for the labor movement in the city. The red-T-shirted janitors became labor heroes after winning an unprecedented 25% wage increase over three years.

The Los Angeles janitors strike also raised the SEIU’s profile locally and nationally as the union applied the strategies pioneered in L.A. to other cities and occupations. The fast-growing union now represents 1.8 million workers, most of whom are security guards, janitors, healthcare workers and public employees.

Union leaders recognize that growth depends on focusing organizing efforts on low-wage workers, Jacobs said.

That sector has experienced some of the biggest economic growth in recent years, he said, making “low wage the main battleground for unions.”

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molly.selvin@latimes.com