Leader of the Revolutionary Pack

Need help understanding the new dynamics of power in Los Angeles? You might start with the men and women vacuuming the convention hall carpet every night. Or the uniformed janitors dumping trash at the airport. Or the cleaning crews filing into downtown office towers at dusk.

L.A.’s immigrant janitors are the shock troops of a union offensive that is shaking up local politics and forcing major economic players to rethink their behavior toward folks at the bottom. And, just as European immigrants did on that other coast a century ago, the janitors are breathing new life into the U.S. labor movement. Politicians of both parties would do well to take note of L.A.’s newest trend.

Leading the charge is a modest and methodical labor activist, a man who was born for this revolution.

His name is Mike Garcia, and he runs a statewide janitors’ local with 22,000 members. He’s been busy lately--staging a groundbreaking three-week strike in Los Angeles in April, negotiating a contract with titans of the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley in May, then skipping down to nonunion office parks in Orange County to recruit new members.

If he were one to drop names, he would tell you that he’s friendly with Mayor Richard Riordan, half of the City Council, scores of state legislators and a bevy of religious leaders. But Garcia is more likely to mention Rosa Alvarenga and Pablo Inocente, married rank-and-file activists who came north from El Salvador a decade ago and now clean offices for the entertainment industry, or any of the hundreds of janitors Garcia counts as friends. “They’re the real heroes,” he insists. “I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”

Perhaps. But even Garcia will concede that every movement needs a leader, someone who’s able to shape the restless energy of individuals into a tangible and focused force for change. For that, he is perfectly suited.

He was born in East Los Angeles 49 years ago to a working-class family. His father was a factory hand and proud union member who earned enough to support a stay-at-home wife and three children and eventually move the family to a quiet suburb in the San Fernando Valley.

Garcia began work when he turned 16, holding a series of low-wage, low-skill jobs that taught him to respect physical labor. One of his first was as a night janitor. “I’ll never forget the tedium of those menial jobs and the exploitation I saw there,” he says.

For several years, Garcia wandered in and out of college with no clear goals. Then he had a fateful meeting with Rudy Acuna, a demanding and inspiring professor of Chicano Studies at Cal State Northridge, who, more than 20 years later, still preaches the importance of giving back to the community. Garcia took that message to heart.

He graduated and went on to San Jose State to pursue a master’s degree in social work, but he soon grew frustrated with the limitations of community organizing. He found himself drawn to the labor activists he’d met during a school-related internship, and bucking the tenor of the times, he took a job as an organizer at the Service Employees International Union, Local 77, a struggling janitors’ group in San Jose.

The year was 1980, Ronald Reagan was president and organized labor was taking a beating. “There weren’t too many victories,” Garcia recalls. “Elections were almost impossible to win, especially with an undocumented work force.”

He encountered another hostile element in a surprising place: the leadership of his own movement. “In those days, Latinos were pretty much barred from the labor movement. Outside of the United Farm Workers, it wasn’t easy for any of us.”

Memories of his own days pushing a mop, as well as the gratitude of the immigrant janitors he tried to help, kept Garcia at his SEIU job. But it was lonely, dispiriting work. By the mid-1980s, labor was in a tailspin. Manufacturing jobs that were once solidly union disappeared almost overnight, lost to defense cutbacks, new technology or the draw of cheaper overseas labor. The national economy was showing signs of weakness. Anti-immigrant sentiment was growing.

Struggling to protect what they had left, few unions were actively recruiting new members. Those that did were often confronted by sophisticated management consultants whose trade was flourishing. Labor was forced into a wrenching period of self-reflection that would lead to profound changes in the movement. And by a stroke of luck, or fate, Garcia found himself at the cutting edge of that change.

John Sweeney, the son of a maid and a bus driver who would eventually lead the national AFL-CIO into an era of aggressive growth, had taken over the helm of SEIU. Andrew Stern, the current SEIU president, was Sweeney’s organizing director. They had a plan to resuscitate labor, and they chose the janitorial industry to start.

In 1985, Sweeney and Stern hired Stephen Lerner to draw up the national Justice for Janitors campaign. Lerner, in turn, plucked Garcia, one of the few Spanish speakers on the union’s staff, to be his point man. Garcia was sent first to San Diego to save a foundering local. Two years later, he was off to Denver, where the strategy for organizing janitors through militant, strategic campaigns was being refined. In 1989, Garcia--by then married with three children--was asked to return to San Jose to launch the effort on a grand scale.

To build strength, his old Local 77 merged with Local 18 of Oakland, forming what is now the statewide Local 1877. Their target: Silicon Valley. “At that time,” says Garcia, “less than 40% of the [janitorial] industry was union. We needed a high-profile target, so we picked Apple Computer. And we did all kinds of crazy things, like a 12-day hunger strike, to get attention.”

Garcia said the campaign was beginning to bear fruit when Apple’s janitorial contractor was suddenly audited by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Garcia maintains that the timing of that audit, in which all workers were asked for residency papers, was no coincidence. Some 200 janitors were deported, including all of those who had expressed strong union sympathies.

The audit only made Garcia more determined. He reached out to churches, synagogues, immigrant-rights groups and other community organizations. “We put a lot of heat on Apple and eventually they had the contractor settle with us,” Garcia says. “Then we turned to Hewlett-Packard. They didn’t want the same kind of trouble, so they asked us to give them a few months and they turned union. After that it got easier. By ‘94, the industry was 80% union.”

Down in Los Angeles, however, SEIU was in trouble. A similar public campaign had organized thousands of janitors in downtown L.A. and Century City, but internal power struggles were tearing the local apart. Once again, the national union stepped in, and in 1997 asked Garcia to serve as trustee. One of his first actions was to split the local, which had been an amalgamation of janitors, health-care workers, stadium ushers and others. The janitors joined Local 1877, making it a formidable statewide entity, and Garcia began setting the stage for the biggest fight of his career.

Organizers identified leaders within the ranks and offered intensive training. By the early spring of this year, when a master contract covering 8,500 office janitors was due to expire, Los Angeles janitors were ready for a strike.

The vote was April 2. By then it almost didn’t matter what the janitorial contractors offered. L.A.’s fast-growing labor movement needed to win a public fight. The contractors merely made it easier by suggesting a wage freeze for some janitors, who were then earning about $7 per hour, and opening the door to higher insurance co-pays. Thousands of janitors gathered in their union hall parking lot, eagerly waving authorization cards. The strike was on.

For three weeks they were a defiant army in photogenic red T-shirts, snarling traffic and dominating nightly newscasts, forcing their way into the city’s consciousness. Stories of individual janitors living in converted garages and overcrowded apartments highlighted the human costs of recent economic trends. The stories struck a nerve with many affluent Angelenos.

Cardinal Roger Mahony celebrated a Mass for the janitors. Before long, local, state and national politicians--from Mayor Riordan, a Republican businessman, to Vice President Al Gore--were tripping over each other to appear helpful.

Midway through the third week, negotiations broke down. The livelihoods of thousands of members were at stake. The union strike fund was dwindling. And the contractors had drawn a line in the sand.

Garcia gathered his members and community supporters in downtown’s Pershing Square for a candlelight vigil, a last-ditch effort to shame building owners into pushing their contractors to settle. “I looked around and saw thousands of members out there holding their candles. They were full of hope and strength, and I fed off of that. That helped me reach down inside for a little bit more. And I said, ‘OK, let’s go.’ ”

After days of tense negotiations that pulled in building owners and civic leaders, a settlement was reached, giving the janitors an unprecedented 25% wage increase over three years. Contractors downplayed the significance, saying they were prepared to give almost as much from the beginning. But union leaders hailed it as a watershed victory. Overnight, L.A.’s janitors became national heroes, sparking what many hope will become a labor renaissance.

A handful of local labor leaders, such as Miguel Contreras, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, Maria Elena Durazo of the hotel workers union and Eliseo Medina of the SEIU’s Western region, are leading that charge. Garcia says he’s lucky to be among them.

“We were all in college in the early ‘70s, when the Chicano movement helped bring us to believe that change was possible through strategic action,” he explains. “In the last five years, things have really exploded. We’ve assumed positions of authority, and we’ve been able to put a common strategy together, to do things like bridge the Latino vote with the labor movement.

“We’re starting to see the dividends now, and the janitors are a good example of that. They represent so much more--the millions of working poor families here in Los Angeles. With the strike, we called the question on what are we going to do to help spread the prosperity around. That’s why the politicians were forced to respond. If it happened here, it can happen in Chicago, Texas, New York and other places where immigrants work. But this is the place where it must happen first. All the dynamics are here, and the whole country is watching what we do.”