Houston janitors take center stage

For the past four weeks, 1,700 striking Houston janitors have caught the attention of everyone in this city—from landlords to realtors to other workers to students to religious leaders to Zapatista supporters.

Protesters expose slave wages Nov. 11. WW photo: Gislaine Williams

Each week brings more creative and militant demonstrations, occupations, marches, sit-ins, civil disobedience, meetings and protests. Solidarity is growing daily among other unions, Latin@ student organizations and progressives in the city.

Houston has become a testing ground for a movement to stop the spread of an economy based on poverty-level wages. In November 2005, over 5,000 Houston janitors made an historic decision to form a union with the Service Employees International Union. This was one of the biggest successful organizing drives ever in the private sector in the Southern half of the United States.

Today picket lines are up outside buildings in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, and janitors are expected to honor those picket lines. Internationally, there have been actions by union activists in Mexico City, Moscow, Berlin, London, Panama, and the Netherlands calling on wealthy executive Gerald Hines and Chevron to stop opposing Houston janitors’ efforts to move out of poverty.

At least 50 SEIU janitors and union leaders from around the country will travel to Houston in mid-November to call on national commercial landlords to put an end to poverty wages. These “Freedom Flyers” will continue a popular union tactic of non-violent protest against injustice inspired by the Freedom Riders of the 1960s, who rode throughout the Southern United States protesting racist segregation and denial of civil rights for African Americans.

A nationwide Chevron Day of Action is scheduled for Nov. 15. Since the janitors earn $20 a day, workers and community supporters will hold actions outside Chevron or Texaco gas stations in 20 cities—one city to represent every dollar that Houston janitors who clean Chevron buildings are paid each day for scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets.

Although Chevron made $14 billion in profits last year, the corporation refuses to use its power to settle the strike and direct the cleaning firms in its office buildings to provide janitors with fair wages and health insurance.

SEIU has organized 5,300 janitors in Houston in one of the largest union organizing drives in the South. Janitors here earn around $5 an hour with no benefits. They seek $8.50 an hour and health benefits.

Recently janitors held a candlelight march through the Rivers Oaks neighborhood, the wealthiest in Houston. A house owned by a key real-estate executive there was appraised at $4,800,888, according to county records. A janitor earning $5.15 an hour would have to work 932,211 hours—106 straight years, 24 hours a day, without so much as a lunch break—to pay for that house.

For more information see: www.houstonjanitors.org, www.houston.indymedia.org. and www.chevronwontyoujoinus.org.