Houston Janitors Win Contract

NOVEMBER 20—After striking for one month against five national cleaning companies, Houston janitors organized by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 5 settled today, winning a three-year contract. The strike by the 1,700 overwhelmingly immigrant and women workers, part of the SEIU’s national Justice for Janitors campaign, posed key questions for the entire labor movement: the unionization of the racist, open shop South and the defense and organization of immigrant workers, whom the capitalists seek to maintain as a desperate, low-wage source of profits.

By winning a contract, the strike cemented the SEIU’s victory last year when it won union recognition for 5,300 janitors in the city. Under the new contract, pay will increase by January 2009 from $5.30 to $7.75 an hour. The janitors, who are now mostly limited to four hours of work each day and allowed no time off, will be guaranteed six hours work as well as paid vacations and six holidays. Health benefits, a central demand of the strike, won’t begin until January 2009.

The bosses fought hard to break the new union. Prior to the strike, the companies threatened workers who signed union materials or talked to union officials and ordered workers to sign petitions that they would not honor picket lines. At least 14 workers were fired during the strike. Democratic mayor Bill White’s cops arrested 79 unionists and supporters engaged in civil disobedience actions. On November 8, more than 500 janitors protesting the arrest of three strikers gathered outside police headquarters and a police substation, chanting “Up with the protest!” and “Arriba, revolution!” (Houston Chronicle, 8 November).

On November 16, cops on horseback violently dispersed a pro-union protest, arresting 46 and severely injuring five. Among the injured was 83-year-old New York janitor Hazel Ingram, one of many from around the country who have traveled to Houston to support the strike. Bond was initially set for almost $1 million per person, and protesters were released only after two days of abuse in jail.

While the SEIU has won victories in Houston and other cities, SEIU president Andy Stern is an ardent proponent of class collaboration, promoting a “cooperative strategy” between the workers and the bosses. Along these lines, the SEIU tops have long pushed civil disobedience actions intended to “shame” the landlords and their corporate tenants. But make no mistake: hard class battles are not won through public sympathy but the exercise of labor’s power. Key to the effectiveness of the strike was that the picket lines disrupted business operations in Houston’s office buildings. When the SEIU dispatched traveling picket squads to commercial buildings in Chicago, Los Angeles, Jersey City, Sacramento and New York City, janitors honored and joined their lines.

The SEIU picked Houston as a beachhead for organizing service workers throughout the South. This strike victory can give a powerful impetus to organizing other service workers in Houston, which already has a sizable union presence among oil workers and longshoremen, and beyond. Industry has expanded in recent decades in the South, where both foreign and domestic capitalists have taken up shop to evade unions and take advantage of low wages. Organizing the open shop South will require fighting against the entrenched racial oppression of black people as well as the victimization of immigrants, a rapidly growing section of the working class. As the Houston strike and other labor battles have shown, immigrant workers can play a crucial role in revitalizing the labor movement in the U.S.