Janitors work in relatively small clusters and out of the public eye, so the major strike now going on in Los Angeles may come as something of a surprise. But it is part of a long-term plan which may bring similar actions to cities up and down the West Coast and moving East. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes widely on immigrant and labor issues.

LOS ANGELES -- This is the millennium year for janitors -- the year they plan to get their wages back.

Their battle started two weeks ago in Los Angeles, when janitors took a strike vote on April 4. That night, they walked out of the gleaming glass towers from downtown to Century City. Within a week, the strike had spread south to the Mexican border, as janitors struck in San Diego.

Silicon Valley workers are next -- their contract expires at the end of April. Meanwhile, a thousand Chicago janitors announced they were beginning a hunger strike, and ten thousand marched through the streets of New York City.

The pressure is building, and if contractors in Los Angeles don't settle soon, a wave of janitorial strikes could sweep across the country, involving tens of thousands of workers. If they do settle in L.A., the pattern they set will lift wages from coast to coast.

Five years ago, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) locals from San Diego to Seattle, and inland to Denver and beyond, began lining up their contracts, demanding agreements that expire this spring. In Oakland and Silicon Valley, workers even struck to get the year 2000 expiration date.

Big building service companies, who clean office buildings around the country, fought because they knew what the union had in mind. And they were right.

The eighteen contractors who are signatory to the Los Angeles master agreement were ready as well. Confrontations escalated in the parking garages below the skyscrapers, as police attempted to escort strikebreakers through the picket lines.

In many cases, big mobilizations of janitors backed the police off. When contractors tried to get an injunction to stop the picketing, Judge Dzintra Janavs turned them down, Teamster UPS drivers and garbage collectors refused to cross the janitors' lines.

In the days following, marches of thousands of janitors and supporters swept west to Century City, headed by Jesse Jackson and California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, demanding that the contractors negotiate.

Century City has become the target of the L.A. strike for good reason. In the mid-1980s, building service contractors throughout the city simply dumped their union workforce of primarily African-American janitors, and went non-union.

Taking advantage of a wave of immigration provoked by wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua and economic crisis in Mexico, the contractors assembled a new workforce. Immigrants, they assumed, could be intimidated into accepting the minimum wage of $3.85/hour, instead of the $7 union scale.

They miscalculated badly.

Immigrant janitors responded to the appeals of union organizers, who developed a strategy called "Justice for Janitors." In 1989, thousands of immigrant workers marching through the towers of Century City were attacked by the Los Angeles police. Dozens were badly beaten and the city-wide uproar over police violence produced sufficient pressure to force the biggest contractors to sign union agreements.

Once again, SEIU represented some 8500 L.A. janitors, who clean 70% of the county's office buildings. After a rough struggle over leadership of the L.A. union, janitors from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley to Oakland to Sacramento were consolidated into one union -- Local 1877.

But the wage scales of a decade earlier had been lost. Throughout the west, building service companies broke wage scales or kept wages low by keeping the union out. The union kept buildings under contract and wages intact only in the largest cities.

To reverse the tide, organizers through Justice for Janitors used civil disobedience, corporate campaigns and community coalitions to keep pressure on building owners, holding them responsible for the conditions of those who clean their buildings.

In Silicon Valley and Sacramento, Local 1877 first trained its sights on Apple Computer, and then Hewlett-Packard. After grueling campaigns, including a hundred-mile march through torrential rainstorms, the union finally regained contracts covering a big majority of the industry.

The Silicon Valley wage demand is even higher than in Los Angeles. Reflecting one of the nation's highest costs of living, Santa Clara County last year adopted an ordinance calling $12.50/hour the minimum livable wage for a working family in the valley. Janitors currently earn $8/hour. With an acute housing shortage in the South Bay, that income level has some workers living in garages.

Some building service companies have become multinational corporations, themselves, like OneSource, the principal target in Century City. The company, based in tax-free Belize, has contracts in 38 states, and last year had revenues over $800 million.

But it is the building owners that have all the power and economic leverage. The owners -- large real estate combines or huge corporations -- play contractors against each other, pushing cleaning rates lower. The contractors compete by cutting wages.

In Century City, office tower rent averages $2 per square foot. A janitor normally cleans 17,000 square feet of office space a night, including four bathrooms. Space that rents for over $34,000 a month is cleaned by a worker earning $6.80/hour, or $1178 a month.

The union demand in Los Angeles is a dollar an hour raise for each of the next three years. In Los Angeles, that would bring the top scale close to what the old union rate would be today -- $12 -- taking inflation into account. That is roughly the union rate in cities where the union kept control.

Contractors are offering much less -- 50¢, 40¢ and 40¢ for downtown, and 0¢, 40¢ and 40¢ for outlying areas -- but they won't even negotiate, until the workers "come to their senses," according to Dick Davis, negotiator for the 18 contractors who have signed Local 1877's L.A. agreement.

Not only is that unlikely. The strike is set to spread North and East very soon.