strikers beat Beverly Hills cops
By Harry Brighouse On June 15, 500 protestors, including 140 Latino janitors, marched from Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills to nearby Century City, a cluster of buge corporate skyscrapers.
The demonstration was in support of the janitors of the biggest buildings in Century City, who were on strike against the Danishbased cleaning contractor International Service Systems (ISS), demanding union recognition.
As they reached the turning from Olympic Boulevard into the Plaza, police stopped them without explanation, despite a permit having been issued for them to march into Century City.
Within minutes, police charged at the demonstrators with their night-sticks flailing. They repeatedly struck demonstrators, cutting off individuals and beating them whenever they tried to rise from the floor.
Over 90 people were injured, 19 of them seriously. Injuries included fractured jaws, skulls, arms and legs. Three pregnant women were beaten, one of them while clutching her one-year old child; another subsequently miscarried.
Police showed no mercy, and ultimately arrested over 40 fleeing demonstrators for "remaining on the scene of a riot".
Los Angeles, the second largest city in the USA, is not known as a union town. Less than 18 percent of the official workforce is unionised,and there is a huge unofficial workforce which is almost entirely unorganised.
Until the late 1970s the cleaning industry was largely unionised. The introduction of the contract system, however, together with the large influx of refugee and often undocumented labourers from Central America, enabled bosses to de-unionise the industry and to lower wages and to lower wages from an average of $12 an hour with full health benefits in 1979 to $4.50 an hour with no SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 27, October 1990
UNIONS IN STRUGGLE
Brutal police attack on justice for janitors demonstration benefits in 1987. (Reasonable health insurance cover costs about 20 percent of the after-tax wage of a low-wage worker)
This system provides both an incentive for contractors to break unions, and an excuse for non-union contractors to refuse to recognise unions ('If we recognise you, your members will lose their jobs because we'll lose the contract'). In addition, undocumented workers live in constant fear of deportation.
In response to the deunionisation of cleaning work, the Hospital and Service Employees International Union SEIU (nearest equivalent to NUPE in Britain) began a national 'Justice for Janitors' campaign in the mid- 1980s. Organisers were employed in particular cities to win union recognition for the janitors, often facing police harassment. In Denver, one entire organising committee was deported overnight. But the brutality of June 15 has not been seen against organised labour in Los Angeles since the 1930s.
The campaign had already had some success in organising janitors in downtown LA. But Century City, built in the 1960s as a plush setting for major corporate headquarter build ings, seemed an unbreakable bastion of unorganised labour. JMB Realty, the management of most of the buildings, had already ditched one contractor immediately after it was unionised. And with a billion dollar turnover, ISS is the biggest cleaning corporation in the world.
So the SEIU organisers pursued a corporate campaign for many months previous to the strike. Workers held noisy lunchtime demonstrations in the central plaza. In red "Justice for Janitors" T-shirts, they frequented the local cocktail bars without buying drinks. They mailed rubbish to the corporate headquarters, and had supporters cause massive traffic jams in the early morning rush hour.
When the workers struck on May 29 they were aiming at a short strike that would be part of this "guerrilla" campaign. Picketing
Stephen Callis was bound to be limited in impact because so few workers were involved (each building is cleaned by fewer than 50 workers) and buildings had so many entrances, while scabs were so easy to find. Nobody, including, it seemed, the strikers themselves, thought they could win.
On June 1, 500 people tured out at a lunchtime demonstration through the lobbies of the corporate buildings and over to the posh shopping mall; the police were entirely taken by surprise.
On the night of June 15, however, the whole of Los Angeles (which has no great love for its Police Department) watched on TV as cops brutally attacked defenceless and passive workers.
The police tried to brand the (mainly Central American) janitors as 'illegal aliens hired by the union to disrupt Century City'.
Instead of demoralising the workers, the attack strengthened their resolve. I got an indication of how deep support for the strike had become when I went to my bank on June 18. Having been prominent in the TV coverage, I was greeted as a hero by the cashiers, and unanimously told to get better and to make sure the strike was won.
After the weekend several unorganised workers from other buildings spontaneously joined the strike and the union. With a community support committee, the strikers planned a demonstration to reclaim the streets - and won a restraining order on the police -for June 29.
In the event the June 29 demonstration was to celebrate the most spectacular victory for the Los Angeles labour movement in more than half a century. Local councillors" offices had been flooded with calls, as had the offices of ISS and JMB. Mayor Tom Bradley, an excop, was forced to order a Police Commission inquiry into the June 15 violence.
Finally, a week after the beatings, 10,000 New York janitors threatened a sympathy
Page 23
strike - a move unprecedented in recent years. ISS came to the negotiating table instantly, and three days later a meeting of strikers ratified a contract granting union recognition, full health benefits and paid vacations, and a 10 percent pay rise.
As part of the agreement all law suits between the Union and ISS were dropped, though the Union is going ahead with a S10 million civil suit against the LA Police Department. Rocio Saenzone of the organisers, said "The victory was more complete than we could ever have hoped".
This struggle has already inspired other workers in LA. Soon after June 15, striking nurses at Kaiser Permanente Hospital held an aggressive mass picket which was swelled by bandaged janitors. Bilingual Teaching Assistants in the LA Unified School District are using similar tactics in their campaign for regular hours and better working conditions, and are looking to the janitors' strike as a model of organising.
The Century City strike is symptomatic of what might be called a real new realism' among US rank and file organisers. In the past five years the rank and file caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and the New Directions Movement in the United Auto Workers union, have had some spectacular successes. On top of these challenges to conservative union bureaucrats came the victory carly this year of a year-long miners' strike at Pittston, Virginia. There is a new militancy in many union campaigns; more workers in struggle have begun to wear red T-shirts and camouflage jackets, and begun to talk the language and use the tactics of a class struggle left.
The real new realists know that community support is often needed if struggles are to be successful; but they also realise that sup port can only be won with aggressive tactics, by showing potential supporters than strikers have the will to win.
Most of all, though, the victory is a tremendous leap forward for the Latino working class in the south west. What the Century City janitors have shown is that, far from being an obstacle to the success of the labour movement, Latino immigrants will be at the centre of the re-organised working class. And what they have shown other Latino immigrants is that with energy, determination and courage, they too can win.
(Harry Brighouse is a member of the Los Angeles branch of the US marxist organisation Solidarity) Page 24