Cleveland public housing workers demand living wage

They install cabinets, repair walls and lay flooring. They do plumbing, electrical work and numerous other tasks. They often have to redo the botched work of higher paid contractors. Their skills place them just a small step below a journey level tradesman or woman.

Yet many of the several hundred maintenance workers at Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority make so little they qualify for Section 8 rental subsidies. They are paid $4 to $6 less per hour than the public housing staff of surrounding counties, even in identical job classifications. Their hourly wage is at least $2 below the prevailing wage established by Housing and Urban Development. This is despite the age of the buildings they maintain being older than average, as CMHA is the oldest public housing authority in the country.

Charging racism, these primarily African-American workers are rallying and marching to demand a 30 percent raise. Represented by AFSCME Local 1355, they have marched on the housing authority and more recently on the home of Mayor Frank Jackson.

“We’re extremely underpaid,” Local 1355 President Dave Patterson, a maintenance worker himself, told Workers World. “We want to be sure that those who serve public housing residents are making a living wage.” Patterson explained that in 2002 a fact-finder recommended a minimum wage of $14.82 per hour for a worker classified as labor grade four. However, the HUD office in Chicago dictated that these workers be kept to $12.51 per hour.

Workers in every other Ohio county housing authority are paid based on recommendations from HUD’s Cleveland or Columbus offices. No one could explain why in Cleveland the wages would not be reviewed by the Cleveland office.

It turns out that CMHA head George Phillips, apparently wanting to keep wages as low as possible, came from and retained strong political connections with the Chicago office. Phillips is currently embroiled in a land deal scandal, having paid three times the value of a land parcel to a developer for the purpose of building a new CMHA headquarters. The developer had bought the land cheap, promising to build an industrial park and provide jobs, but later sold the land to CMHA at a huge profit.

“They’re always talking about what we’re not qualified to do; [Phillips] makes us out to be just janitors,” Patterson stated. “What about his qualifications?” In the eyes of the workers Phillips—paid $200,000 a year though lacking even a bachelor’s degree and willing to waste millions in public dollars—has no right to question the value of the labor they provide.

Even before a potential strike takes place, the groundwork has been laid for a labor/community coalition. Marching alongside Local 1355 has been the organization Black on Black and its founder Art McKoy, a fiery leader in the movement against police brutality. Immediately following the march on Mayor Jackson’s home, McKoy was arrested and held overnight. He was charged with “failure to disperse” after attempting to finish a prayer before closing the protest.

The members of Local 1355 are preparing to vote on the latest fact-finding recommendation, which falls short of the 30 percent raise they feel they deserve but goes beyond the 3 percent initially offered by CMHA. If ratification fails there will be a strike vote. Workers will vote with the knowledge that militant, anti-racist activists are standing by their side.