S2E2: Stephen Lerner on Justice for Janitors: A comeback story that continues today

In this episode, we’ll hear about how tens of thousands of workers lost nearly all of their workplace protections, and then spent two decades campaigning against some of the most powerful Fortune 500 companies to win them back. Stephen Lerner, architect of the campaign, discusses how a realignment of global capital led the union to lose nearly all its bargaining power in the 1980s (17:47), how a few in the union decided to try a different approach (19:26), how they decided which building owners were the most important to target (38:15), and how they used creative tactics to undermine their political and community support, including blocking bridges the leaders of Congress used to get to work (41:27). 

Stephen Lerner is a labor and community organizer who has spent more than three decades organizing hundreds of thousands of janitors, farm workers, garment workers, and other low-wage workers into unions, resulting in increased wages, first-time health benefits, paid sick days, and other improvements on the job. He was the Director of SEIU's Property Service Division, served on SEIU's International Executive Board and is the architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign. He has published numerous articles charting a path for a 21st century labor movement focused on growth and meeting the challenges of a global economy. In 2014 he helped launch the Bargaining for Common Good campaign. Today he is a Senior Fellow at the Kalmanovitz institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge

Transcript

Andrew Willis Garcés: Welcome to the Craft of Campaigns. I'm your host, Andrew Willis Garcés. In this podcast, we go behind the headlines and hashtags, inviting movement storytellers to share lessons from social justice campaigns. Campaigns are a series of collective actions, focused on winning a concrete demand, beyond one-off mobilizations or election cycles. They have villains and heroes, teams that make plans to win, and activate people on the sidelines. In each episode, we explore one campaign, through firsthand interviews, for key lessons, principles, and practices for organizers today. 

I’m going to go a little out on a limb and say, there are currently at least four distinct strands of the labor movement in the US. The one we hear most about are the unions whose workers have negotiated strong contracts with big companies or public sector employers – the United Auto Workers, flight attendants and airline pilots, healthcare and public education workers. Another one we hear about are unions who haven’t yet bargained a first contract, like the workers at Starbucks and the Amazon Labor Union. There’s another, even within Amazon, represented by groups like Amazonians United and Warehouse Workers United, who are part of a third movement of worker organizations who’ve decided to start “acting like a union” without having a union contract as their immediate goal. A fourth strand consists of workers who aren’t covered by federal labor laws, like domestic and farm workers, and the millions who are improperly classified as independent contractors or are employed by temp agencies.

Today’s episode shares how a national labor union that had been part of the first strand, whose members had been covered by strong contracts, lost nearly all of those contracts almost overnight, and then spent over a decade using ambitious “acting like a union” strategies before finally regaining significant power over their workplaces. The union was SEIU, and the wave of campaigns was called “Justice for Janitors.” These campaigns brought together janitors, largely undocumented immigrants, and new union organizers to take on billionaire office building owners and transform working conditions for tens of thousands of janitors. 

In many cities, like Los Angeles, the union lost 75% of their membership over just a year and a half in the mid-1980s, after a realignment of global capital meant bigger and bigger companies bought downtown office buildings and outsourced janitorial staff to non-union contractors to maximize their profit. After a decade of struggle, with simultaneous campaigns in LA, Denver, DC and other cities, SEIU began transforming the working conditions for janitors, while simultaneously connecting the labor conditions at office buildings to citywide issues of tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and school funding.

There haven’t been many stories like it. And now, with the biggest private companies exerting more power than ever over our economy, there are so many reasons to reflect on how they did it. To illustrate just how different the approach of the Justice for Janitors campaign was, and still is compared to most private sector labor organizing today, here’s a quote from one of the campaign strategists, talking about how they tried to pull some of the big corporate tenants of these large office buildings over to their side by leafleting outside the buildings at lunchtime. 

That strategist, Jono Shaffer, said in a recent interview: 

“One of my favorite and most powerful leaflets we ever put out had a photo of a worker’s hand that was completely broken out with blisters from sticking his hand in and out of buckets of chemicals, without gloves, to clean. We took a photograph—this is before digital and the internet—got it developed, stuck it on a piece of paper, and wrote, “Shake the hand of the worker that cleans your building every night.” We passed it out in front of the buildings so that the people going in and out had to confront the fact that these workers weren’t being given the supplies they needed to work safely. And not surprisingly, we started seeing people getting gloves.

A traditional union organizing approach to something like that would have been to fight to win a union election, win that election, and then sit down at the bargaining table to try to win gloves. So, two-and-a-half years after the workers decided they needed gloves, there may be bargaining to win a pair of gloves, where the next day out in front of the building saying this guy needs gloves—we call that “being union” or “acting union” from day one. That’s how you do it, and it takes a long time. The unions themselves, the institutions, have to be willing to forego short term wins and traditional measurable outcomes like union elections.

Before I myself worked at SEIU in the mid-2000s, I thought all movement campaigns relied on just one form of leverage. 

• Thousands of people blocked traffic, and the International Monetary Fund conference couldn’t happen. 
• One city councilmember was sufficiently shamed by the tenants that lived in his district, and then he flipped to support their housing bill. 
• At my university, students showed the board of trustees there was broad opposition to a planned new Starbucks, as part of a nationwide fair trade coffee movement, and got an independent fair trade only store installed instead. 

But this story, and many of the campaigns against the most dug-in opponents, needed to pry open multiple points of leverage. What’s most interesting to me is, the architects of the Justice for Janitors campaign openly admitted then that they didn’t know how they would turn it around. And they had to adapt to the reality that the building owners could ban them from the workplace, and that the five janitors who cleaned an office building at night couldn’t easily disrupt the building’s operations. So their disruptions had to be especially creative. In the Los Angeles campaign, the organizers took aim at a real estate developer from Chicago, going as far as inviting people around the country to ship him their garbage. 

They had to create a real threat of chaos at the workplace, as all union recognition campaigns do. But they also had to cut off the financing to some of the country’s largest building owners who relied on tax breaks and investments by union pension funds to buy up or redevelop their properties. They had to elect pro-janitor champions to key city councils. In DC, they even had to get congressional leaders to feel so threatened by the janitors’ campaign that they, too, put pressure on the most anti-union office building owners. These are corporate campaigns or comprehensive campaigns, which squeeze an opponent from many sides all at once. 

You might be asking yourself, what do janitors organizing for better wages and working conditions have to do with me, if I don’t organize in a union? I think there are at least three big lessons for any of us campaigning to move a truly tough target to do what we want. 

The first: doing whatever it takes to win, sometimes means expanding way beyond your original campaign goals. The most successful Justice for Janitors campaigns ended up taking aim at corporate tax breaks and even school funding as a way of creating a crisis for corporate CEOs, much as the highest-profile teachers union fights in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities engaged way more parents and community members as active supporters by including demands for affordable housing and mental health services. These combined labor-community fights, which are often referred to as the “bargaining for the common good” approach, show the importance of using campaign demands to recruit specific constituencies we need to upend the pillars of support upholding the status quo. 

And the second is: When the game is rigged, don’t follow the rules. The janitors’ union refused to follow the NLRB election process, the same process that has seen Starbucks and Amazon workers stuck in neutral following a wave of high profile workplace organizing, struggling to win store by store and facility by facility against incredibly effective harassment keeping them from negotiating a first contract. Instead, SEIU strategists decided early on that they would either cost real estate developers the money, political and community support they relied on to do business, forcing them to hire union cleaning contractors, or they wouldn’t win at all. 

And third: Have the courage to say we aren’t winning, even when that causes friction with our comrades. When this story begins, SEIU’s leaders at locals that represented office building cleaners were, as Stephen tells it, in a liar’s club together, pretending everything was fine, even as they were dramatically losing membership, unable to respond to the sharp changes in the industry itself. Many of the campaigns in our first season started this way too: a few visionaries dissatisfied with what counted for effective organizing, who had to find a few more accomplices willing to try something new. 

Here’s a spoiler for how the Justice for Janitors campaign didn’t really end, but continues today: as a result of this incredible comeback story, over 150,000 janitors are now protected by strong contracts. As just one example, after the most recent contract fight, DC janitors won an additional month of unpaid leave to resolve immigration-related issues, bringing the total to 120 days per year, and have access to the union’s Legal Services Fund, which is fully paid for by the cleaning contractors the janitors work for. The fund subsidizes English language classes and legal assistance for matters of immigration, family, and housing, all free of charge.

Stephen Lerner is a labor and community organizer who has spent more than three decades organizing hundreds of thousands of janitors, farm workers, garment workers, and other low wage workers into unions, resulting in increased wages, first time health benefits, paid sick days, and other improvements on the job. He was director of SEIU's property service division, served on SEIU's international executive board, and is the architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign. Lerner currently works with unions and community groups across the country to break the stranglehold Wall Street and big banks have had on our economy and democracy.

In his previous role as director of the SEIU's private equity project, Lerner launched a multi-year campaign to expose the over leveraged, unsustainable feeding frenzy of private equity firms during the boom years and the economic disaster that would follow once the bubble burst. He's published numerous articles, charting a path for a 21st century labor movement, focused on growth and meeting the challenges of a global economy.

And in 2014, he helped launch the Bargaining for the Common Good Campaign. Today, he's a senior fellow at the Kalmanovitz Institute at Georgetown University.

Andrew Willis Garcés: All right, Stephen Lerner, thanks for being with us on the Craft of campaigns podcast. 

Stephen Lerner: Thanks for having me. 

AWG: So we're about to hear this story about janitors, the Justice for Janitors campaign or a specific part of it. Can you tell us if this campaign were a movie, what would be the trailer for what we're about to see?

SL: The trailer would be how the poorest and most exploited workers who work invisibly at night that most people never see took on the biggest global real estate titans, beat them, transformed their lives, and in doing that not just doubled their wages and won health insurance, but really were a key part of building an immigrant rights movement that's transformed huge parts of this country.

AWG: Can't wait to hear more about it. What would be the beginning of the campaign story?

SL: Going backwards in time, for many years in most big cities, being a janitor was a union and decent job, and people made a decent living at it, and you could raise a family and you had health insurance. And in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the union was devastated and wages dropped and conditions got worse, cities went non-union. So the Service Employees International Union, in the mid ‘80s decided to have a campaign, which became Justice for Janitors, which was, how do we stop the bad things from happening, which is, work is getting worse and worse conditions. And how do we then figure out how to organize on a mass scale to really bring the poorest people in the country into better conditions?

And so the context is we were losing everywhere. And the first step was we had to be honest and say, we're too weak, we're losing. We have to say, how do we win? What does it take to win? And in order to win, we realized we had to understand something that seems both complex and simple.

So the simple answer is, janitors work for a cleaning contractor that pays them terribly and we should make the cleaning contractor pay more money. But what we then realize is if you go to the top of the tree, if you look at who really has power, it's the building owners who hire the cleaning contractors.

And this is like a key point. The cleaning contractor is really just a payroll agency. You have the richest and most powerful building owners. They don't want to employ workers anymore. They hire somebody else to do it. And the thing that's so infuriating is they then say, well, it's not our fault that the cleaning contractors pay minimum wage or some minimum wage. That's just the market. 

And so what Justice for Janitors was about was both understanding who had power, then figuring out how to take them on. And then how you did that in a way that built a movement that wasn't just about wages and benefits, but how you build a movement which is about how people are transforming their lives in the country.

AWG: That's really helpful. And when you say that this sort of movement had been good union jobs, then they had gone downhill in terms of quality, what cities were those?

SL: New York, Boston, Chicago, LA, the major northern cities had all been union in what we call master contracts, meaning there was one collective bargain agreement and everybody in that area got paid the same wage rate. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, there was a transformation of the real estate industry and a couple things happened. 

One is, building owners decided they no longer wanted direct employees. So they started bringing in what are called cleaning contractors, the middleman. The second thing that happened is, buildings in the past had commonly been owned by a local company, a local rich person who saw the workers every day.

But there was a monopolization of the real estate industry with giant players who are buying real estate all over the world. And as they bought real estate, they looked for every way they could save money and increase their profit. And the easiest way was to say, we're going to hire subcontractors, cleaning contractors.

And in doing that, they not only stopped directly employing the workers, but then that took the industry from being a full time job with health care to being a part time job. The other key thing that happened is that this happened simultaneously with a huge arrival of immigrants into the country. And so building owners and cleaning contractors in many cases displaced the existing workforce, and brought in undocumented workers as a workforce that they thought they could exploit the most. The initial reaction, to be honest, was people got angry, these undocumented people are taking our jobs. And one of the key things that we did in Justice for Janitors was say, it's not the workers fault. We organize anybody who works, it's the building owners, and it's the contractors that are trying to divide workers. 

When we started the campaign, everybody said, there's no way you can win.

Workers are part time. They're undocumented. They work for cleaning contractors. They have five other jobs. There's no way you can win. And then after we started winning, people would say, well, anybody can organize janitors because they don't really care about the jobs, because they're part time and they're undocumented and they know they can get a new job.

So I think one of the most important things about Justice for Janitors was that everybody said it was impossible. What we did was really, in some ways, quite simple.

One, we had to understand who had power. Then we had to understand how we impact it. Then we needed to figure out how workers could deeply understand their industry. And, you know, one of the first stories I remember actually was in Denver, Colorado, where we went to a building called Republic Plaza and we met with the workers and we said, we're from the union.

And they all said, I don't want a union because if you get a union, the building owner just throws out the cleaning contractor and brings a new one. And we came back literally to the same workers a month later and said, well, we have a new idea. What if we organized all the buildings in Denver at one time and all the contractors had to pay the same thing. And so the building owner couldn't bring in a different contractor and replace you and the exact same workers were like, well, that's a great idea. Of course, that's what we should do. 

And so a key part of the campaign when we think about corporate campaigns, comprehensive campaigns is they're not a substitute for organizing workers. There's no magic to them. It's how you combine worker organizing with identifying other levers to support them. That combined, is the magic that lets you take on some of the most powerful companies in the world. 

AWG: Okay, so there was all of this power that the union had, there were good jobs, then the industry transformed, our opponents got stronger, and they figured out how to undermine our power and that the story of most unions in the U.S. is that's the end of the story.

Just lost power. Just lost worker density. Contracts faded away and it's old history now. But there was a point where within S.E.I.U., just the people who started Justice for Janitors, some version of you all said, wait a second, we can do better than this. And I'm curious about when that was. 

SL: So in some ways, for many years, the union, to be honest, was a giant liar's club. We, everybody from the different local unions, would meet and claim everything was fine, and then there was actually a, a heroic and terrific battle in Pittsburgh, where Mellon Bank led the first attempt to totally break the union.

And there was a long strike and the union actually won. And that opened the door and the union to saying, well, maybe there is something we can do. But one of the unique opportunities we had is - since many people in the union had given up and thought it wasn't the, really the attitude was we can hold New York, we can hold Chicago, we can hold San Francisco, but the rest of the country is going to go non-union - is, after the Mellon Bank experience, we first did an honest appraisal, we actually did an internal report that documented that in almost every city in the country, membership was down, wages were down, et cetera, et cetera. And out of that grew something called the Rebuilding Resolution with the union committed internally with a lot of work.

So the first part, it was almost like an AA meeting. Let's admit how bad it is. Alcoholics Anonymous for those who don't know that. Then the second part was, well, why is it so bad? And then the third part that was really interesting was then sort of a deep internal analysis, we realized that we were organizing mainly immigrant workers of color.

And almost every local union was run by a white male. We didn't even have staff that spoke the language of people. So some of this is so basic and obvious now, but at the time seemed kind of revolutionary. And so the first big victory we had, which was, I think, ‘86-’87 was in Denver, Colorado, and it was just an experiment. And we had a lot of freedom to try whatever could work. And in a year, organized 1000 people and got what we called a master agreement, which is one contract for the whole city. And that within the union created some excitement, well, maybe there is hope in ohow to organize these workers.

 And we started in Denver, learning all sorts of different ways to put pressure on. And it was around that time that we made what I think is one of the best and smartest things that we did, which is real estate, which is who controls janitor's lives, gets most of its capital, its money, from public employee pension plans. And we started in the mid eighties, ultimately got a trillion dollars of pension capital to agree that they would only invest in office buildings where the janitors were paid and treated decently.

Now for fiduciary reasons, they then justified it by saying, we have a better quality product if people are paid and treated decently. So that one of the steps was at the very beginning, we figured out, aha, they're getting money and, and they're getting their money from union members because public employee pension plans are the deferred income that people take out of their checks for their retirement.

So what Denver showed us was we were able for the first time to take some major building owners and start having their investors say to them, well, we don't want this kind of fight in our building. Your saving a little bit of money in janitors is not only bad for our reputation, it actually leads to all these kinds of problems.

And so that was one of the things that we did that got us to really think about, how do these guys get their money and then how do we impact what they do with their money? When we won Denver, that quickly led to starting a whole series of other campaigns. And those would be specifically Washington, DC, Atlanta. You know, the campaign that in some ways is most famous, the Los Angeles campaign. We started multiple campaigns all over the country with winning being a great way to get resources. Like all of a sudden people said, Oh, you could win. And what's interesting is, the campaigns all played out very differently based on who the workers were. 

In Los Angeles, workers worked full time, which made it much easier to organize them. In DC, they were working three hours a night, which made it harder. But in all the cases, we were learning different lessons on how do you both excite workers and get workers to see there's a pathway to victory. And to me, in some ways, that's a starting point that nobody wants to work for minimum wage.

No one wants to be, you know, have their boss telling you have to sleep with me to have a job. But if you just say to them, that's a bad thing, get a union. People's reaction is, great, I'll get a union, I'll get fired. The magical moment was when we could really map - literally physically, we had a wall chart up - and we could sit with workers and say, actually, your building is significantly owned by California Public Employment Retirement System, and we've got 100,000 members in that system. And people and workers say, aha, there is leverage.

And so I think the one thing, if I would stress for anybody who's never done a corporate or comprehensive campaign: don't think of it as a magic box of tricks. Think about it as how you're moving simultaneously with workers and on multiple fronts to understand who the bad guys are, how they got their money, what the susceptibilities are, and then how the two feed off of each other. That there's no substitute for organizing workers. It just happens to be, in this capitalist country, workers wanting a union is insufficient for victory. That you need to find many other levers to pull to really be able to dramatically win change.

AWG: And so we were going to talk through how you all ended up organizing from a very few unionized janitors in office buildings in Washington, DC, very high priced, you know, expensive real estate to having a majority, I think, of the downtown janitors organized under contract and what it took to get there.

SL: And what's interesting about DC, is it was our longest and most difficult campaign, you know, we won relatively quickly in Denver. LA had the climactic event in 1990 when the police attacked us in Century City. And DC, first, was harder, as I said before, because the workers worked part time. And second, the city had never been a strong union city. LA had actually been a strong union city. But the first thing we did when we started the campaign in DC was, we had, it was as simple as we had to figure out, how do you make, I think there were like 500 office buildings and how do you make the campaign manageable because you can't do 500 things at once.

So the first step was we researched who owned every office building in Washington. We said who owned buildings of above a certain size. My memory is that we really said that it was buildings over 400, 000 square feet. That’s what we would call market drivers, meaning that's where tenants wanted to be, that's where the rent was the highest. So we then figured out who owns those buildings. And then we went through a process where we said, what are the smallest grouping of building owners and buildings we have to organize to have the most impact? 

And it turned out - I don't remember the exact numbers now - that by sort of focusing on a third of the key buildings, that you could drive the market, if you know what I mean, that they drove what was going on.

Generally it was a combination of size of building, because the size meant there were more janitors because these are workforces and then it was, they were prestige buildings or premier buildings. We'd look at who the tenants in each building were, and were these tenants that would care about it, and you know, were these tenants that would be sympathetic 

And so we really had to sort of figure out what the universe was and make that universe manageable, because the core thing we knew was the building owners and the cleaning contractors did not care one way or the other whether workers wanted a union.

The issue wasn't to convince workers to want a union. The issue was, what was a strategy that workers could understand and embrace that would allow you to take them on. And so the building owners very quickly organized, you know, through their association, the office building association, to oppose the campaign.

And very early in the campaign we got a letter banning us from every office building in Washington. Just as an example about how the overstepping of the other side can help you, it turns out that under the DC human rights law, it's illegal to discriminate because of source of income. And we were able successfully to file a complaint under that, saying that they were discriminating because our source of income was working for the union or being union supporters. 

So, very quickly, while we were trying to figure out who the key people were that were leading the fight, the entire office building industry united and said, we're going to stop the union. And their internal argument was we don't want to end up like New York, because in New York City, the same building owners operated in New York City as in DC, many of them, it was the same contractors. One of the first public reports we did was something called A Tale of Two Cities, where we told the story of two sisters who could have moved from the same town in Mexico or El Salvador, one went to New York, one went to Washington, one made minimum wage, worked three hours and had no benefit, one worked full time, made I think three times what DC had, had health insurance training and all of that. 

And one of the first things for the public and for workers was to say, there's nothing natural, there's nothing in the nature of economics or humanity that means janitors need to be paid terribly. That this happened because a set of very wealthy, powerful corporations decided that

this was a way they could become richer. And so our first part was to sort of figure out who they are and then, and then start to both at each level, understand how do we both win worker support and then start to understand how to put pressure on the building owners for what our very simple demand was - that it didn't matter what building you worked in, wages should be like electricity. All the buildings paid the same for electricity, all the buildings should pay the same for janitors, and buildings should compete on quality, not on who can lower wages for workers the most. 

AWG: You're doing both of these things at the same time in terms of understanding your opponents and how to bring the right leverage to bear also understanding workers and what they'll respond to, because in a basic organizing conversation, you have to give them a plan to win. So at that stage where you're already getting banned from these buildings, what are you telling workers? Like, what's in the rap?

SL: Where we started was going out to the buildings every night. You know, people got off, and actually a lot of the early organizing work was done on the bus that goes up 16th Street. And so obviously the first step was to talk to workers and hear what their issues were and how they saw things. And then what we did, we slowly did the hard work of building committees, and we opened up with a worker convention, where 500 workers came together, people were each delegates from different buildings and where we developed a list of what became demands. And at the time I think our demand was that we wanted to go to $5.25 an hour. That was our sort of opening demand and that we wanted more work and people wanted more hours, et cetera, et cetera.

So if part one was sort of, let's understand the industry, simultaneously, while we were doing that research, we were also talking to workers. What are their issues? What do they know? It's also amazing how much you can learn from workers about the inner workings. People leave a lot of memos. People leave garbage out. Workers are a key part of figuring out how to research who the bad guys are. And then we brought workers together in a convention where we developed a program and a plan about what we wanted to win. 

Now I think there's been a number of states that have established wage boards to raise wages for specific industries, like New York did it for fast food, one of the first things we did was we tried to reactivate The DC wage board for janitors. And so while we were talking to workers and doing their research, we also were saying, well, actually, the district does have the authority to move people to $5.25 an hour.

And then even to bring home, at the local union, we established the organizing union became local $5.25. So we were, on every level, embedding the idea that there's something very concrete. We wanted to win in terms of economics while simultaneously, you know, the subtext

for the campaign and what workers also talked a huge amount about is what it meant to be invisible workers, what it meant to work at night when nobody sees you, what it meant when the air conditioning is turned off because it's not needed because the tenants aren't there.

AWG: And some part of it, I'm sure, was we need a certain level of active worker participation. That was 500 workers of about how many in the market at the time, you think? 

SL: For some reason, 5,000 comes to my head. I think it was that kind of magnitude, you know, one of the huge problems in DC and, you know, a lot of people ask why it took so long. Because workers were part time, people didn't stay very long and people would quit all the time. We found out that most workers skipped work a lot because it was a terrible job. And we've been trying to do traditional organized workers. To go on strike, we did no elections to the National Labor Relations Board. We didn't use the government process because it was meaningless in this industry. Because if you want an election for a cleaning contractor, the building owner would just throw them out and get a new one. And one of the things that we, one of the things we started experimenting with early on was saying to workers, well, since everybody sort of takes one night off a week anyway, and skips work because it's such a horrible job, what if we all did it on the same night? 

We didn't call it a big strike. What if we all just on the same night, we'll have pizza out in front of the building. And it was, and so a big part of it was like sort of getting into the heads of how people thought. And, and that became instead of a traditional, you know, battle, are you on strike or not on strike became one of the first time that workers started to go public and express, you know, how they were being treated. And we found a tactic. That allowed them to get a little bit of a taste of their own power, which was a really important thing. And also to realize that, in quote, “good organizing,” which normally would be months and months of committee building, couldn't work in the same way with people who often didn't stay for months and months.

There's some theories, but then you have to adjust them to the reality of what you're doing. And then what we found is as we started, workers started to move into motion and start doing job actions that then forced employers, employers responded.

They fired people, you know, they banned us from the office buildings. They sued us. They did all those things. And that in turn opened the avenue for us to start talking to both the tenants to talk to investors and say, well, look what they're doing here. They're going to spend more money fighting the union than it would cost to be unionized.

So one of the funniest moments early on was when we filed unfair labor practice charges with the labor board when we were banned from all the office buildings. And I actually remember her name, Joanne Oxman, I think was the company lawyer or the association person. And she accidentally sent us their internal communication about it. And the internal communication said,

you don't have to worry about this unfair labor practice charge, because even if the labor board finds it's illegal, it really doesn't matter. They don't do anything. And there was another instructive lesson about understanding that the way U.S. labor law is currently constructed, it was a key tactical decision. Not only was it not beneficial, but it was hurtful if we follow the normal procedure, which is to petition for an election, wait months for the election, then go into bargaining. And so that that was another key part of the campaign was understanding that we needed to have workers doing things that made sense.

AWG: So this is the end of the 80s now and you guys have spent however much time, months, riding the S2 bus up 16th street, talking to workers, starting to scout, it sounds like, campaigns by just trying to create tactics that would just create organization and committee building that ended up also kind of being public and allowing you to experiment and probably have leadership tests for workers. So at this point, having sort of power-mapped the industry, how did you all think you would win? And what was the leverage that you thought you needed and what were conversations with workers about how we were going to win our demands.

SL: Well, we were incredibly naive and we were wrong in almost everything we thought. We had successfully organized a couple thousand people, I think, that were janitors in publicly owned and federally owned buildings. And there's a special law called the Service Contract Act that basically sets up a prevailing wage rate for those workers and those workers in the government owned buildings, we organized relatively easily. They were primarily African American and were fired up about the union. And this is also at the time where the workforce was transitioning from African Americans to more immigrants.

And so naively at the very beginning of the campaign, we had momentum. We were excited. We were the cause of right. We had the fantasy that Jesse Jackson was going to be marching down the street with thousands of workers behind us. And the building owners would say, okay, I give up. I mean, that was before we really dug in and understood what we're getting into. And in fact, because we had won Denver relatively quickly, I think we thought this was going to be a couple year campaign. And in the end, you know, it was over 10 years till the majority of the city was union. But what was key is that we were able to win some small victories along the way. 

And so one of the first things that we were able to do is there's a company called the Charles E Smith company. That was another very big building owner here. We actually relatively early on got them to commit that they would raise wages for janitors. It wasn't even that we got the union yet, that they would raise wages for janitors. And so that, for both workers and us, showed that at least some building owners, because of public pressure, this was not deeply sophisticated would change.

And then we were able to take a set of buildings that for unique reasons were less likely to be anti-union. Who owned them, relationships, and we were able to negotiate with cleaning contractors what we called site agreements, which is an agreement just for one building.

So, while we were building the bigger campaign, we were doing the hardcore work and winning in some buildings and getting those agreements. And then the next step was, we then, when we had contractors that we had multiple, when I say site agreement, agreement just for one building, we then were able to say, well, let's combine that.

So we have one contract for all of the buildings that the one contractor has at a union. So we're now establishing a pattern. There was years of just sort of slow grinding work of building a union base, where it was better than non-union, but it wasn't the kind of breakthrough initially we had in LA where we literally doubled wages. But it was those kinds of victories that then allowed us to both have credibility that it could make a difference, but also to have more of a worker base that would fight to help build the union. 

AWG: At what stage do you all decide Carr Properties? Now, if we could just get to them, that would really be, unlock some things for us.

SL: On the one hand, we had a couple of building owners, Charles E. Smith, that did not seem brutally anti-union. We also identified some other people that we were able to win some victories with.

And then we saw that Carr was really the biggest non-union building owner in DC. When you looked at who his cleaning contractors were, he used the cleaning contractors that were the most anti-union. Meaning some building owners use cleaning contractors that were unionized elsewhere in the country. We were able to use that pressure. 

My memory is that Carr had a different set of cleaning contractors and we realized that. His critical role in the real estate industry, but more than that, this is when DC was teetering on bankruptcy. It was the height of the crack epidemic. It was when the city was really in many ways a disaster. One of the reasons the city was a disaster is because the real estate industry had so many tax breaks. So what led us to Carr was not just his importance, but how did we tell a story in the city about why poverty was growing? How did we tell a story about why the schools were underfunded?

And we came up with a pretty good slogan, that DC had Carr Trouble. We figured out that the building owners basically kept two sets of books. They kept one set of books, for their investors saying, we're making lots of money. And they kept another set of books for the city tax people saying, oh, we're not making any money. We successfully passed an initiative battle initiative that basically would have opened up how much tax they paid and how they determined it.

And that then was being litigated for years. 

At this point, we also were able to pass a law somewhere in this period that said that when a new contractor took over the work of the old contractor, they had to keep the workers, which meant that if a building owner dumped a union cleaning contractor, the new contractor had to recognize the union if we did it right, cause they had to keep the workers. So we were simultaneously with the worker organizing and identifying Carr, looking for very concrete things that pressurize the entire industry. 

We were trying to do two things cut simultaneously. Split certain building owners off from the industry because they would say they just want to make peace, but simultaneously we knew we ultimately had to break the entire industry if we were going to get to what we wanted, which is what we have now, which is a master contract that covers, you know, I think 90% of the market in DC. So there's a terrible law in this country called Secondary Boycott.

And I need to spend a second on this, so it may be confusing, but essentially what the law says is I have a first amendment right to hand out a leaflet. That says Oliver Carr is a bum. But if janitors picket the Oliver Carr building with picket signs or demonstration saying Oliver Carr is a bum then that's unlawful because I'm putting pressure on a non-employer, on a secondary employer. 

And so we started having legal charges, injunctions, and all of these kinds of things in California and DC. We realize if they're going to make it illegal for us to picket where we work if we can't picket there and we're not allowed to do what we need to do, it let us, in Carr, then to do what became sort of the signature events. I think it was like ‘92, when we actually blocked for the first time, the 14th street bridge shutting down traffic. But it was built around the city has Carr trouble, Carr needs to pay us taxes. The problem with Carr wasn't just that janitors weren't paid decently. The problem with Carr was all the impact of a business model of tax subsidy, low tax payments, et cetera, et cetera, in a city that couldn't provide basic services. The restrictions of the law led us to do much more creative things that were much more impactful than normal picketing.

We parked the school bus across the 14th Street Bridge, and then people handcuffed themselves to the school bus. It was actually quite an elaborate action in terms of cars that went first, who stopped. It was like a military operation. The key thing about the bridge blocking was it was making a crisis for the entire city and the ruling class of Washington. And all these people said, well, isn't everybody going to be furious at you? And two things were pretty amazing - is one, we had done enough work in the previous years to show how terrible conditions were for janitors, that the level of sympathy, even though we did something that disruptive was incredible. Meaning we didn't just jump to something massively disruptive. We were able to tell our story about it because we had already spent years going at it in another way. 

But the other thing about the bridge blocking is we didn't realize the impact of rocking the 14th Street Bridge. And to be honest, I'd sort of forgotten to mention to some people in union leadership, we were going to do this because better to beg for forgiveness than be told no, but Congress didn't meet on time. The Supreme Court was delayed and it actually led to the federal government passing a law, making it a felony to block bridges into DC.

But what that tells you is we caught people's attention in a dramatic way. And so what happened with when we made it about Carr trouble and blocking the bridges was now the whole city of Washington and the ruling circles had to say, this fight of the janitors is now impacting how we're seen as a city. It's impacting everybody's business. And it started, and it started to create the environment. That ultimately led to us having the breakthrough where a significant number of the building owners agreed not to fight the union, to give enough money to cleaning contractors, to pay people more, and that led to the first master agreement covering a significant amount of the city. 

AWG: So Carr Properties was the largest non-union office building owner at the time. Of 5,000 janitors ballpark, is he employing like a couple hundred in his buildings? 

SL: I'm guessing 500. 

AWG: So he had like 10% of the workers working in his buildings, roughly. He's the big non-union player. And you thought that if we can get his 10% unionized, dominoes basically will fall, but you needed to flip him.

SL: We did not put all our eggs in just the Oliver Carr basket. We were slowly picking up other building owners. I think the cleaning contractor was called PNR, which is union now, they were a key contractor. We struck them and then had a group of workers who I didn't remember it's 50, 60, a hundred, but a small group of workers who basically stayed on strike for months.

And picketing, doing delegations, demonstrations. This is also a period where we went through all the office buildings and identified every violation of disability rights in terms of stairs and all of that. You know, we researched what we called “rat and roach,” what were all the health violations in each building.

One of the things that we figured out that was totally counterintuitive is our initial assumption was that if tenants were supportive of the union, that would move the building owner. And it turned out that wasn't true. That when tenants were supportive of the union, it was nice, but the building owner had a lease.

What we found out was that tenants really hated disruptions at their buildings. And so a lot of the picketing and other activity was making lots of noise, shakers. It's like, we're basically saying, we work at night when we're invisible. We're now bringing our crisis directly to you. We did lots of civil disobedience.

We took over lobbies of buildings. The campaign really became larger than life. And that all proceeded the bridge blockings. We were able to say to everybody, we’ve tried everything else. And then this was simultaneously we were reaching out to key investors that were invested in the office buildings that there were multiple tiers going on.

And then the final additional thing I think I haven't mentioned yet is then we looked at other cities that were unionized and in those cities, the union started putting pressure on cleaning contractors and building owners that operated in Washington to be union in Washington also. So, you know, that's why I refer to this more as a comprehensive campaign than a corporate campaign, because we were looking at every possible lever.

One of the core things we said early on, I think it was a penny a square foot, is that the percent of the cost of an office building that goes to paying janitors is insignificant. And so, as we analyzed our tactics and, you know, one of the things you try to do tactically is say, well, what makes somebody change their behavior?

Some people really care about reputation, you know, so there's reputational damage. Some people don't care about that at all. Some people are trying to lease space, and if at a key moment where they're trying to lease space, having regular demonstrations  might lead tenants to say, well, why would I want to be in that building? You know, another part was obviously going to their investors and saying, why would you invest in this kind of person? 

AWG: If I'm Carr Properties and I want to save as much of my tenants’ money as possible for my own bank account, the reputational damage is happening. You guys blocked the bridge, I should point out by building a schoolhouse on the bridge with school buses. You had already had this, DC has Carr Trouble, DC, they're not paying their fair share, the deadbeat, like they're impacting schools. So that's happening. You're reaching out to their investors, but if I'm Carr Properties, what other pressure am I experiencing? 

SL: Well, what's interesting about this is the actual negotiations. There's sort of two sets of negotiations. There's sort of the behind the scene messaging with the building owners who desperately don't want to talk directly to us because their whole thing is that these aren't our workers.

So the way you can change, see that a building owner is changing is by how the cleaning

contractors behave. Cause all of a sudden the cleaning contractor who was fighting the union says, maybe I won't fight the union.

In DC, it was a combination of making some  breakthroughs and owners seeing it's not the end of the world to pay janitors more. But I think one of the things that happened when we started blocking the bridges is other business people started saying to Oliver Carr, there was a discussion, you know, among the business community about this is not a good thing for DC. So it was a funny mix of, there were a bunch of strategies and tactics that are very targeted and concrete going to this investor and saying, you should tell Oliver Carr, you won't invest in the future unless he fixes it.

And then there was like, who is their peer group? Who are they talking to? Who is the ruling group in DC, in a city in crisis? And part of our analysis of the time was that the reason it was so hard to win in DC is because the city was in such disastrous shape that the level of disruption and crisis that we were creating, that in another city would have been a big deal, the city had so many other problems that it almost didn't get up high enough in the food chain.

AWG: What was your assessment about why Carr Properties said, okay, now we're going to do this. And then what was the impact on the overall fight for the industry and the market as a whole? 

SL: You know, I think, I think we warm down to be honest. Sometimes you have the magical moment. In LA, it was the police when the police attacked us, they're beating us, two women miscarried, one person ultimately died, 60 people were jailed. And the initial story in LA was, you know, “union attack police,” but the traffic cameras filmed it all and it became a global story.

And literally Mayor Bradley, I know this is true because I was there, called the biggest building owner and said, my city is not going to burn because you want to pay less in LA than in Chicago. We did not have that sort of magical compression moment where you then in DC, it was, it was part of it was just demonstrating that we would never give up and that there was an unending set of things.

The way we looked at it is, you fight your way to get to 10% of the market. It's just clawing. When I say the market, I mean of the key buildings. You claw your way to 10%. There was no magic to that. Then if you get that 10% to then agree that their other work will be union, that takes you to 30%. And it's a 30% where you're strong enough to really then have the fight to set the standard for the whole city. So I don't remember exactly where we were during the Carr Trouble, percentage-wise, but that was the time where it then led to a whole series of multiple level discussions between different people. And then ultimately, it led to the key cleaning contractors agreeing that they would recognize a union based on card check recognition and, you know, bargain a contract for the city.

AWG: So that was 1994 that you all blocked the bridge. 

SL: The first one, I think was ‘93 or ‘94. And then that was actually just a school bus. We then actually built a school house on another bridge. We did multiple bridge actions. Then overlapping in California where we've been socked with huge fines for allegedly engaging in secondary picketing. We actually blocked the entrance ramps into Silicon Valley, and we, which is where we were organizing and said, well, if we can't pick it where we were, then nobody will get to work.

And in a way, what the bridge blocking was our proof that we could sort of indefinitely engage in massive disruption to the business life of the city and that so some people sort of have missed that there were, they thought it was a neat tactic, but there was a real strategy involved in it. 

AWG: Not only that, but if I'm right in summarizing sort of the public stages of the campaign you all had a part where it was just educating the public about the terrible working conditions and living conditions and issuing the report. And people were talking about that. And that was several years before you were saying, we started to say, we tried everything in this sort of existing channels, business as usual to do something about this. That's not working now that we've got the public on our side, let's disrupt. 

SL: We were able, in the media. I mean, I still remember, it's actually, it's like this wild story the news report they did on a woman who said she felt sick at work, she was pregnant and then she miscarried, and then part of the way through the report, she actually had kept the fetus, and it's like, just, I mean, in a jar, I mean, it just breaks your heart, so that, a key, key part was, the public generally just like, how do you justify treating people that way?

And that's really why Justice for Janitors was correctly seen as a battle between the poorest and the richest. I think you have to think about this in the context of DC at the time. We were also saying it didn't have to be this way. You know that there was a solution to this and that was that the richest folks should pay more and should pay their taxes.

AWG: And at the same time, it sounds like we're figuring out how to cultivate political relationships with candidates, with elected officials, so that they would also choose you all over some office building owners. 

SL: Yes, we absolutely did that. Though, I think one of the things that was fascinating about DC: real estate so much drove the city that literally there were churches, that would say they couldn't support us because they had sold the air rights to fund their church to building owners.  that the level of corruption.

I think this is true in every city that building owners are often sort of in quote, “politically liberal”

and cultivate the Democrats and all that.So in DC, and we experience this even more in Atlanta, so that it wasn't a simple equation of, oh, somebody is a liberal Democrat, therefore they'll support the union. And so even for our allies, they had to see a level of activity that would encourage them to do more because they weren't going to take on the real estate industry.

AWG: You all were bringing this political pressure to bear public image pressure, talking to investors, economic pressure disrupting. The tenants are getting pissed, probably and it's not a good look if you're thinking about, do I rent in this building or a Carr Properties building, and I don't know, more disruptions could happen? And also, making it impossible to operate anywhere non-union; you're going to get disrupted. You're going to have threats to your business. In some cases, probably, Carr Properties were invested in other cities, but might've even had capital from other countries. 

So how do we make our footprint, our disruptions, even bigger? And at what point does it expand beyond Carr Properties? We’ve gotten to 30% to 40% to 50% in DC, and sort of where is it, as far as you know, today?

SL: I have to go backwards for a second. We were winning all over the country much more quickly than DC. So another thing that the building owners were viewing, if we had just done this campaign in DC alone, I think we'd still be at it or have given up. But one of the things that helped was we had the 1988 Democratic Convention. We put the Justice for Janitors t-shirts on the majority of all the delegates of that convention. So I think it's important to say we're having a war in DC, that's part of a national battle, that's being won all over the place. So I think that had a huge impact on it, on how people are seeing it. 

The other part of it is because the cleaning contractors, you know, you really have these multiple layers of power. You have the investors, you have the building owners, then you have management firms, and then you have cleaning contractors. Because we were able to squeeze all of them in multiple places around the country; we had huge fights in Philly, in New Jersey, we opened up Atlanta. This is when we broke LA, then all these other cities that it started to, it goes back to where I started in the beginning, that I think for both the employers and for the general public, it went from janitors are impossible to almost like, why would somebody have this battle with this set of people, for, this reason?

So, but I guess what's hard in sort of summarizing DC is it didn't have that climactic moment of other cities. It was just we got to 50% at some point. And then now I think almost every major building, I don't know of any major building that's non-union, but the other thing to remember is we, in addition to all the corporate leverage, all that, because we pass this law called the the Displaced Workers Act, it meant that it made it much harder for buildings to go non-union. Because the way buildings always went non-union is they would just hire a new contractor, all the workers would get fired. And then in our contracts, we negotiated that when a cleaning contractor took work from another cleaning contractor that they had to keep the workers and 

honor the agreement.

So we basically started to build in, I guess you could call it a safety net, that took away the tools of how building owners forced wages down. And then the other key thing that's happened in DC is we've now increased the hours of workers and that became a huge fight throughout the country, which is how do you take this from a four-hour job to a six- or seven-hour job at night?

And so in DC, people have many more hours. The wages are much higher. And then I'd even take the story a step farther. By 2000, because of all the different campaigns, we had lined up so almost all the cleaning contracts in the country expired at the same time. A microcosm. It was sort of the testing ground for all these tactics. Some worked, some didn't, but because we were winning in multiple places, it created the combined power to ultimately force the building owners to say to the cleaning contractors, hey guys, you better figure this out.

AWG: I think there are a lot of lessons for us in 2023, 2024. What would you say from where you sit with Bargaining for the Common Good, but looking at organizers around the left, what are some key lessons that we should take away that feel especially relevant for us today?

Stephen: You know, it's interesting you mentioned Bargaining for Common Good because some of the key pieces of Bargaining for Common Good, and our key principles, come out of what we learned in Justice for Janitors. 

So one is, who's really got the money and the power and that's rarely who's signing your paycheck. For most workers in this country, you're working, you're either outsourced, you're contracted out, you're working for a subsidiary. So one lesson is you have to fight the right person. And because our labor law is so bad, there's lots of limits in how you legally can fight them. But that's lesson number one. Who are the powers? 

And then lesson number two would be where did they get their money and what influences them? Because just finding out that somebody is rich and powerful doesn't mean you have any way to beat them. So what are the various levers you can pull that then get that building owner or that powerful entity to say, aha, it's more expensive to fight than it is to settle. And in the end, it almost is, that's what it comes down to. People are evaluating what are all the costs of fighting the union versus what is the cost of settling.

The other key lesson is that you cannot maintain or sustain significantly higher wages for a small percentage of the workforce, that you have to organize the whole market. Meaning you might have in the short term the leverage to raise wages for 20 buildings. But you'll lose that if you don't organize the rest.

So if lesson one is, who's got the power and the money? and lesson two is, who can influence them and where did they get it? Then lesson three is that you can't really fundamentally change wages and benefits in a dramatic way unless you make wages like electricity. Everybody pays the same rate and employers are forced to compete by the quality of the work they do, not how much they can screw the workers.

Another lesson is you need broad public support, but people liking you is insufficient. People have to be incentivized to say, yes, janitors are treated terribly and I'm now going to take action because as a result of their being terribly treated, I don't just feel bad, I'm also impacted by it.

When I think about the work right now, and to be honest, what's really frustrating to me as as the old guy organizer here, which I think I can officially be because I'm entering my 50th year of being a full time organizer is that people now think that when they think of corporate campaigns or comprehensive campaigns, they really think this is mainly name, what we call name and shame.

Which is, tell a story about how bad they are, and then we get into poverty porn, and we have workers tell how terrible their lives are, and oh please Mr. Rich Man, won't you pay us better? That's not a corporate campaign. That may be a good public campaign. That may be useful with a very small slice of people that really are very public. But in the end, if you can't figure out ways that concretely cost them money, and as you said before, it may be that it's a developer. In Oliver Carr’s case, he was mainly a DC developer. It may be that the fight is in a totally different place that you've identified, but they have to see that they can't operate their business as usual, that there's a financial cost at multiple levels.

And I'd say one of the most frustrating things right now to me is there's 6 trillion dollars, I think that's the figure, of pension capital in this country, which is workers’ money. That money primarily is funding all the bad guys. It is funding the fossil fuel companies that are destroying the earth. It's funding, in the case of California, a company called Blackstone, which is a huge developer. They fought the rent control ballot initiative and then charged the public employee back the fund, the cost of it saying, well, it was our fiduciary duty to increase your return by keeping rents high, that there's this fundamental contradiction that it is workers capital that is funding some of the worst activity.

Unless we understand where that money is and how to impact it, we're fighting, you know, with both hands behind our back often. 

AWG: And are there any campaigns right now, whether Bargaining for the Common Good campaigns or others, that you feel like are using some of the principles that you unpacked in this campaign story that we should keep an eye on?

SL; Yeah, absolutely. There's a really interesting campaign developing in California with the AFSCME (American Federation of State County Municipal Employees) Local 3299 that represents the workers in the blue collar workers in the UC system, University of California system. They're partnering with the Teachers Union and with ACE, a community group, and they are simultaneous and the university just invested, I think it's 6 billion dollars in Blackstone's real estate fund.

Blackstone is then using that real estate fund to buy up housing, making it unaffordable. So they're simultaneously campaigning that the universities should divest. They shouldn't be giving capital to those people. And they're campaigning for a $25 an hour minimum wage for those workers, because that's what it costs to rent an apartment in California.

And they're wrapping it all around a broader housing campaign in California. And so they're looking at pension capital. They're looking at legislation. They're looking directly at the university. And then what we do in Bargaining for Common Good is we look at moments in collective bargaining when workers are negotiating to add the kind of demands in that unions don't historically add in.

So when the Chicago teachers went on strike, one of their demands was around homeless students. Unite Here, their hotel workers union is on strike in LA. They have demands around hotels agreeing to taxes to fund housing. So what I think made Justice for Janitors bigger than life wasn't that were there's lots of workers that are treated terribly. But my biggest takeaway Is that capitalism experiments with the most vulnerable people and so I think we really tapped partly in Justice for Janitors is what was happening to janitors then started to spread more into the economy. Meaning the use of subcontractors, the part-timing, the loss of health care. 

One of the things that wasn't our intent, but I think that we tapped, was a growing anxiety in the country about how the super rich were controlling all different parts of people's lives. And it's sort of the irony is that janitors re-won health care. Janitors re-won pensions. They re-won a lot of that at the same moment other workers continued to lose that. I think the reason that we were able to win is because we had this comprehensive approach that was both in the US and global that created an excitement and. It's almost like in the union movement, we've been so beaten down that we're afraid to talk about the promised land, that it becomes, how do I make a little bit more money?

Many janitors who are key in the movement wouldn't even have called it a union. You know, they really thought of that as an immigrant rights movement. That we were able to tap this idea that there is a better world we can create. And the way we create that is understanding how capitalism works, doesn't mean you like capitalism, but you have to understand how it works. 

And then figuring out how we pull those levers, how workers understand those levers, so they can build the kind of movement. And one of the most exciting things has been looking all over   the country and the transformation of that who's running unions now? And that, you know, we've gone, what was all white leadership has changed to almost all people of color leadership. That the other key part here is that once you win, you can't go to sleep and say, Oh, it's done. That it's the ongoing battles that keep building, that keep building it.

AWG: Stephen Lerner, thank you for offering these lessons and for being on the Craft of Campaigns podcast. 

SL: Thank you. Thank you.

The Craft of Campaigns Podcast is a project of the Organizing Skills Institute at Training for Change and made possible by grassroots donors. Visit TrainingForChange.org for workshops, training tools, and other resources. We welcome your feedback. If you like these episodes, please consider donating to keep the show running.

This podcast is produced by Ali Roseberry Polier. I'm Andrew Willis Garcés. See you next time.