Support the Striking Janitors

Several thousand Boston janitors have been on strike for the past three weeks, marching through the streets of Boston every night demanding justice. These janitors belong to the same union as the janitors who clean Harvard’s buildings and who won a better contract last winter after a protracted struggle with the Harvard administration. Many of them are employed by the same companies that employ Harvard’s outsourced janitors. Earning only $39 a night, with no health care and no sick days, they face the same abhorrent conditions Harvard workers have faced in the past (and still often face today). These mainly immigrant janitors deserve living wages, health care and full-time work.

The main demand of the strike is health care. Well over 70 percent of the 10,000 janitors covered under the current contract are ineligible for health care because the cleaning companies do not provide health care to part-time workers. The creation of many part-time jobs instead of full-time jobs is a seemingly conscious strategy on the part of the cleaning companies to avoid paying health care benefits. These companies try to shift the responsibility for health care onto another company, where the worker presumably works full-time. But many janitors cannot find full-time jobs, or at least not ones that provide health care and living wages. At Harvard, all workers who work over 16 hours a week are eligible for health care. Similarly, all Boston janitors, including those who work part-time, should receive health care coverage from their employers.

The cleaning companies’ cost-cutting strategy exacts a terrible human toll. One female janitor, screaming into a megaphone before a march at the Park St. T stop, described the situation she and her family face. Her son is often sick and needs a lot of medicine to stay healthy. But if she buys his medicine, she can’t buy food. So the question every week is whether the son will be healthy and the family can’t eat, or whether he’ll be sick and there’ll be food on the table. These same questions do not confront the office workers and executives who work in these same buildings during the day and often earn six-figure salaries. These people are able to afford doctors and medicine to cure the slightest sneeze. The policies of cleaning companies, and the eagerness of institutions and buildings to subcontract work at the lowest cost, has helped to create a hierarchy of health, in which the lives of some are declared much more valuable than those of others.

The largest cleaning company in Boston, and the most intransigent in its opposition to the janitors’ demands, is UNICCO. It employs over half of the 10,000 janitors currently seeking a new contract. Although six contractors have signed an interim agreement with the janitors that would give them health care and full-time work, UNICCO remains openly defiant, employing hundreds of replacement workers as strikebreakers and continuing an ad campaign aimed at discrediting the janitors and their union. UNICCO is widely despised by Boston janitors for their abusive employment practices.

Harvard has many ties to UNICCO. Harvard is a tenant in a number of buildings cleaned by UNICCO. Harvard is also a major landowner in the Greater Boston area, and owns a number of buildings cleaned by UNICCO Most importantly, over 400 janitors at Harvard are employed by UNICCO, making them the largest subcontractor on campus. As such, UNICCO and Harvard deserve much of the responsibility for the horrendous decline in wages and benefits Harvard janitors saw in the mid-to-late 1990s. The Living Wage Campaign was formed in response to Harvard’s willingness to use companies like UNICCO on campus, companies which refused to provide their workers with a minimum standard of living including living wages, health care and full-time work.

Although at Harvard UNICCO now pays higher wages to its janitors, wages equivalent to those earned by Harvard’s direct employees, Harvard still plays a role in supporting UNICCO’s exploitative practices by continuing its contract with it. UNICCO can continue its exploitative practices only due to the support of institutions like Harvard, which provide it with capital through contracts.

Yet there is growing pressure on UNICCO to agree to the janitors’ demands. Two weeks ago, Acting Governor Jane Swift announced that UNICCO will lose its contract to clean the State House if it does not meet the janitors’ demands. Earlier in the strike, the California Public Employees’ pension fund decided to terminate UNICCO’s contract in a Boston building which it is part-owner, and it is considering doing the same in two Washington buildings where it is majority owner.

Harvard must use its extensive ties with UNICCO to pressure the company to agree to the janitors’ reasonable demands. Harvard should recognize that health care is a human right that must be provided by employers. If UNICCO refuses, then Harvard has an obligation to cut its contract with UNICCO. As was negotiated in the Harvard janitors’ contract last winter, all janitors would retain their jobs were this to happen. The practice of subcontracting is generally harmful to workers, and it has always been a demand of the Living Wage Campaign that Harvard discontinue this practice. Rather than hiring another contractor, Harvard should again directly employ all the janitors currently employed by UNICCO in order to end the threat of future wage erosion caused by subcontracting, and to encourage other institutions to follow this example.

In 1912, Harvard gave students academic credit for going to Lawrence, Mass. and helping to break a strike of immigrant textile workers. Those workers were fighting to establish a humane standard of living. Ninety years later, after many struggles including the Mass. Hall student sit-in during spring 2001, it’s time for Harvard to atone for its past mistakes and demonstrate that it is now truly committed to helping provide at least a minimum standard of dignity for working people. In this spirit, Harvard should pressure UNICCO to meet the striking janitors’ demands, or else sever all ties with the company. Harvard students, in a complete reversal of the actions of their 1912 counterparts, should join the janitors on the picket lines and in the streets to demand justice.

Daniel DiMaggio ’04 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. He is a member of the Progressive Student Labor Movement.