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Health Care for
Janitors
On Friday, June 10, about 300 janitors marched for health care in the
business and financial district of La Jolla, North San Diego County’s
enclave for the super-wealthy. As they passed the fashionable patrons of
tony restaurants, the marchers rattled soda cans full of gravel, drummed
on plastic buckets, and chanted, “Se ve, se siente! La union esta
presente!” See it, feel it--the union is here!
About 1400 suburban San
Diego janitors are members of SEIU Local 1877. They are the last group
of union janitors in the state without company health care benefits, and
most earn $7.60 an hour, or about $1000 a month. Poverty wages like this
mean that each day they face impossible choices. One striker’s sign
asked, “Health care, food, or rent--which would you choose?”
The march wound through a large complex of steel and glass office
buildings, Chancellor Park, home to many of San Diego’s most profitable
biotech, pharmaceutical, and financial corporations. Chanting, “Huelga,
huelga!” strikers occupied the lobby of the main building, hoping to
raise so much ruckus that there could be no business as usual.
When police moved in and threatened arrest, the crowd of mostly
immigrant workers moved outside and rallied. Meanwhile five volunteers,
two union activists and three members of an interfaith solidarity
committee, engaged in civil disobedience by refusing to leave the lobby.
They were cuffed and arrested on suspicion of trespassing.
This was the fifth day of the strike. Yesterday downtown janitors, whose
month-long strike in 2000 won them health care benefits and raises,
called a one-day solidarity strike. And today members of several other
unions marched in solidarity with the janitors, including professors
from the California Faculty Association, AFSCME home care and domestic
workers, and city workers from SEIU Local 2028.
Today’s action was designed to turn up the heat on US Metro, One Source,
South Coast, San Diego Janitorial Services, and four other maintenance
companies who contract to clean La Jolla’s high-rent office towers.
Contract negotiations have collapsed since the employers have refused to
back off their proposal of an indefinite wage freeze with no health care
and cuts in sick leave benefits.
The companies are stone-walling, but with the level of determination and
solidarity this strike is seeing, they will have to cave in and grant
these workers the health-care benefits and wage increases that have been
won by janitors everywhere else in the state. |
