During a 1990 strike against cleaning contractors in the Century City office complex, Los Angeles police confront and beat janitors and their supporters. The confrontation led to a city inquiry into police officers’ actions, and a settlement between janitors and their employers. This video compilation was produced by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and shared with other locals on VCR tapes before being converted to digital and distributed via YouTube.
The City of Angels was booming in the 1980s. Los Angeles overtook Chicago as the nation’s second largest city, but not everyone benefited from this growth. Bankers, lawyers, and businessmen made comfortable salaries in the new high-rise office towers during the day, then returned to the suburbs where they basked in the luxury of the entertainment capital of the world. At night janitors scrubbed bathrooms, vacuumed carpets, and lugged trash down to the bottom floors of the same buildings. As the sun rose and suburbanites climbed into their cars to pour back into the city, the exhausted janitors rushed to finish cleaning so they could head to their second jobs. Underpaid and overworked they saw Los Angeles for what it really was: glamour by day, but a sweatshop by night.
Janitorial work had not always been like this. After World War II, the Building Service Employees International Union (they later dropped the “B” to become the SEIU) Local 399 established a strong presence in Los Angeles. As financial firms asserted more control over building owners, pressures to drive costs down led to the spread of non-union contractors and wages plummeted during the 1980s. As experienced janitors moved jobs to stay in the shrinking union sector downtown, contractors eagerly recruited new immigrant workers at lower wages. Local 399 began to research new approaches to win just pay, benefits, and better conditions for the new immigrant workforce. In 1985, SEIU created the Justice for Janitors campaign in response to the new problems the union was experiencing with the exploitative work arrangements of the non-union contract cleaning industry. The campaign’s model had been widely praised for its innovation, success, and flexibility. In 1987, Justice for Janitors was initially assigned to Local 399, the Los Angeles branch of SEIU, with a small pilot team consisting of two organizers, a servicing representative, and a researcher. The team worked to research the LA-specific intricacies of the building services industry. Understanding the structure of the industry was essential to the success of the campaign.
In this cartoon from the Justice for Janitors campaign, two workers worry about the cost of healthcare. The superhero Mopman tells them that having good health insurance is like “having extra money in your pockets.” In cartoons and street theater, the character Mopman was part of the union’s strategy to reach rank-and-file janitors.
AFL-CIO pamphlet on the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) passed in 1986.
The AFL-CIO published this information for unions and workers in the wake of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. The law created a process for many undocumented residents to regularize their status, and the pamphlet highlights organized labor’s role in helping “undocumented workers attain legal status and prevent discrimination by employers.” In Los Angeles, the Labor Immigrant Assistance Project (LIAP) supported workers’ amnesty applications, and the California Immigrant Workers Association (CIWA) served as a general union for immigrant workers without collective bargaining in their workplaces. IRCA also created a new federal prohibition on hiring undocumented workers, something immigrant rights advocates and organized labor in Los Angeles had strongly opposed, but the national AFL-CIO supported. The AFL-CIO abandoned this policy in 2000. View the Document.
Los Angeles activists announce a meeting to recruit factory-based committees to defend immigrant workers against raids by immigration authorities. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries
After years of fighting deportation sweeps in Los Angeles, activists associated with the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA) formed special committee to address workplace raids by the INS and to advocate for the rights of undocumented workers generally. The Comité Obrero en Defensa de los Indocumentados en Lucha (CODIL, or in English the Workers Committee in Defense of the Undocumented in the Struggle) joined with the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and a group of unions in an ad hoc Labor Immigration Action Center to coordinate immigrant organizing and legal defense.
On May 17, 1978 an election among over 700 workers at the Sbicca shoe factory in El Monte resulted in a narrow loss for the Retail Clerk’s union. The union filed objections contesting the result, but the next day immigration agents arrived at the plant and ordered the immediate deportation of 120 workers. CODIL charged the raid “was carried out in a selective manner looking principally for those who supported the union” and then pressuring workers to sign voluntary deportation orders even after they requested a lawyer. As the workers were aboard buses en route to the border, the union appealed for help from the Labor Immigration Action Center. Lawyers with the NLG filed suit in federal court and secured a temporary restraining order halting the deportation until the workers could have individual hearings. The legal victory energized immigrant worker advocates and encouraged progressive unionists. For a time, the number of factory raids and worker deportation dropped significantly.
Following the victory at Sbicca, CODIL activists recruited participants in workplace committees through regular meetings held at the Peoples College of Law near MacArthur Park. The committees aimed to organize nonunion workers and also to challenge existing unions to defend immigrant workers. CODIL identified their membership as those who “have been deported repeatedly because we have claimed our rights in front of the exploiting bosses.” CODIL trained workers to assert their constitutional rights during raids, and encouraged unions to write into their contracts protections against workplace raids and the right of workers to return to work after deportation.
CODIL Asemblea General, from the papers of CASA-HGT, Box 32, Folder 4. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
Goodman, Adam. The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants. Politics and Society in Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/73241/.
