Give us health care and respect, or you can clean your own damn
mess!” chanted the members of Service Employees International Union
Local 6 (Justice for Janitors) at a rally at Westlake Park earlier this
summer.”We want it all!” janitor/poet Thomas Bailey declared to a
cheering audience.
“We mean business!” shouted Charles Pannell, a grandfather, veteran
janitor (17 years), and vice president of SEIU 6. “If we don’t get what
we want, we are going to get it anyway.”
What in the world could give this class of marginalized workers such
confidence, such an audacious sense of certainty and power after 30
years of ruthless and relentless deunionization in America?
Unlike food production or car manufacturing or copyediting or sales
(“Young men and women [in India are] basically selling credit cards,
tracing your lost luggage on Delta Airlines, and also providing tech
support for big American computer companies from IBM to Microsoft,”
says journalist Thomas Friedman), janitorial work cannot be shipped to
other parts of the world. It’s immune to globalization.
“SEIU is the only union [that] does anything worthwhile these days,”
a commenter recently wrote on Slog, The Stranger‘s news and arts
blog. “Janitors will always have bargaining power because rich people
don’t like to clean their own shit. And you can’t outsource it to
China.”
In a world that is dematerializing at an unprecedented rate, a world
that’s transforming real space into cyberspace and substance into
spectacle, it is amazing to see bodies—bone, blood,
muscle—demanding our attention. What’s more, a job that has long
been regarded with little or no respect is suddenly ennobled and
emboldened by the spirit of political activism.
The SEIU Local 6 headquarters is just south of the entrance of the
new light-rail tunnel on the east side of Beacon Hill. It’s an
unremarkable building, but in late June it was the location of a
remarkable meeting. Roughly 200 people gathered in the main room to
listen to Sergio Salinas, the president of the chapter, give a
speech.
What made the meeting remarkable was the diversity of the assembled
janitors. Some were standard-issue American, black and white; others
were Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican; a handful were Bosnian. (I had no
idea a single Bosnian lived in Seattle until I attended this meeting.)
To unify this diverse body of bodies, four translators were posted in
different parts of the room. All eyes were on their president, but many
ears relied on translators. Everyone wanted to hear the latest news
from the front line of the struggle with American greed. Everyone was
eating Vietnamese sandwiches—split loaves of bread, slices of
meat, slivers of succulents feeding a global variety of bodies.
“How much is gas now?” asked Salinas. “Four dollars a gallon. A 185
percent increase over the last five years.”
The body must move.
“How much has rent gone up in Seattle? $171. That’s a 19 percent
increase.”
The body must be sheltered.
“Food prices have gone up by 6 percent.”
The body must eat.
“And what do they want to give us? Twenty-five cents.”
The bodies arrayed before Salinas boo.
“How can you live on a 25-cent increase when things are increasing
by 20 to nearly 200 percent?”
The union’s demands: a pay increase that meets the realities of the
local economy, continued health benefits, and equal pay and benefits
for janitors who work on the Eastside. Eighty-five percent of the
janitors in Seattle are unionized, 20 percent higher than in
Bellevue—so the demand for equality between the Eastside and
Westside workforce is an unabashed show of Seattle’s union muscle.
Life in Bellevue has become more expensive than life in Seattle.
According to a pamphlet distributed by SEIU 6, the average rent for a
two-bedroom apartment in Bellevue is $1,165 a month; the average rent
in Seattle is $1,133. With most janitors earning around $10 an hour,
the average amount of hours of work necessary to survive in Bellevue is
113, compared to 109 in Seattle. A body can move to Federal Way, where
the average cost of a two-bedroom apartment is $776, but because most
of the work is in Seattle and Bellevue, a janitor needs a car to get to
work. And using a car means spending lots of money on gas.
“Let me tell you, I’m tired,” Pannell told me after the meeting.
“I’ve been fighting for 17 years…. This is the richest country in the
world, how come people can’t be paid for the job they do?”
With that goal in mind, this union of janitors confronted their
bosses on June 28, the day their contract expired. If the bosses did
not meet the janitors’ demands, they would minus their bodies from the
work that needs to done, from the work that prevents filth from
thriving on carpets, dust thickening on window sills, trash cans from
overflowing, and smells from suffocating offices.
In Walt Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Mickey Mouse, a
fatigued laborer, steals his boss’s magic hat and transforms an idle
broom into a worker. The broom walks, the broom carries buckets of
water, the broom doesn’t complain.
This famous sequence, which is in Fantasia, expresses one the
most ancient of human desires: full liberation from dull and dumbing
work. Because slavery (extracting free labor from the muscles of other
humans) has always been morally problematic, we have fantasized about
inanimate/unthinking/unfeeling things capable of doing our chores.
We find such robots mentioned in Aristotle’s Politics, which
was written over 2,000 years ago (a weaver that weaves by itself), and
in WALL•E, the latest film from Pixar, which imagines a
society entirely managed by robots. Humans in this world do nothing but
eat, surf the web, and grow fat. WALL•E stands for Waste
Allocation Load Lifter: Earth Class.
WALL•E is a janitor robot.
A friend has a robot that mops her kitchen floor, an iRobot
Scooba.
“It has an iPod design—it’s very friendly looking,” she says.
“It exhibits three floor-washing behaviors: spiraling, wall hugging,
and room crossing. I hate mopping so much that I have embraced this
Scooba robot, which is related to the Roomba, which vacuums carpets.
The Scooba doesn’t do a great job, but there is nothing more relaxing
than drinking a beer while watching the robot do your floors.”
Perhaps one day in the future, robots will mop all of our floors and
vacuum our carpets, but carpets and floors are not the most important
thing a janitor does. The real deal is the trash can. That’s what it
all comes down to: pulling out the used trash bag (decaying foods,
clean bones, snot-encrusted tissues) and replacing it with a new one.
In my office, the one in which this article is being written, if a
janitor decided not to vacuum our gray carpets for three months, I
doubt the negligence would be noticed. But leave the bins by our desks
alone for more than three days and the office would be a hell for our
senses.
The iRobots and WALL•Es can only do so much. Only a real,
living person can come into our offices and empty our nasty little
trash cans.
After giving or listening to stirring speeches on June 20, many of
the workers entered buildings in downtown Seattle, ascended to the top
floors, and quietly worked as the city shimmered below them. This is
what it’s all about: these present bodies doing what absent bodies do
not want to do—clean “[their] own damn mess.”
“Even the vacancies in our buildings we have to clean,” said Paula,
a shortish, fairish, 45-ish mother of one, who has been a janitor for
12 years of her life and currently works in a number of prominent
buildings in downtown Seattle. “Even if they’re empty. We have to go in
there and vacuum shoeprints off the carpet, dust, and it’s time
consuming. Some of us are doing four and a half floors in eight hours.
That’s a lot.
“[The bosses] give you an hour and a half a floor,” she continues,
“maybe an hour if you’re doing it really fast. They want you to dust in
between everything. The chairs, the computers, behind the computers,
the cabinets.”
And sometimes she is not alone.
“I’ve got a good rapport with the people in my building, especially
with the people who work later,” she says. “There are some people who
will come in and might lock their doors before I get there so I don’t
clean their office. But I’ll give them a suggestion: Leave your door
open—I can come in, dust for you and vacuum for you. Sometimes
they’ll do it or sometimes they just leave their trash can outside of
their door.”
As the mailbox is the essence of a mailman’s work, the trash can is
the essence of this line of work. It needs to be emptied. And the
unhappiness caused by a bin that’s full, that grows fuller and
overflows, is not simply due to the food that begins to rot and stink.
It’s that it gives us the uneasy sense that our lives are clogged and
unclear. When we see an empty trash can, we see a new beginning, a
fresh start. The German philosopher Hannah Arendt believed the defining
feature of the human animal was its need to make new beginnings, to
start things all over again. A full bin blocks the feeling of a new
beginning, the fresh feeling of an empty bin is the janitor’s one and
true gift, to the office worker, to the bosses, to the world.
On June 28, the janitors represented by SEIU Local 6 scored a
victory. Every demand they made for their new contract—including
health care—was met. Without a strike. The owners of janitorial
companies did not want to sign the contract; they did everything they
could to break the will of their workers. But if the janitors went on
strike, who would deal with trash cans in office buildings in Seattle
and Bellevue? Without a body, a janitor’s stubborn body, people would
have to clean up their own messes.
“By winning fair wages and maintaining access to affordable full
family health care,” declared SEIU in a press release, “janitors paved
the way for other service-sector workers to make similar
improvements.”
Janitors are at the vanguard of 21st-century labor activism. They
are leading the way: Identify the jobs that can only be done by humans
here, not humans on other continents, or other richer humans will
suffer. Organize these workers and make demands. Not all service jobs
are created equal, however. Security guards, who recently unionized and
became part of SEIU, are vulnerable. Surveillance technologies, the
natural enemy of their line of work, are improving every minute. It’s
only a matter of time before a human body is no longer needed for
security work, before a building is watched by mobile cameras and some
person in India who can call a unionized police officer to the scene.
But janitors, like police officers, have jobs that cannot be done by
computers, or workers in India, or robots. Their bodies refuse to melt
into air. 
