Justice for Janitors

The Justice for Janitors (JfJ) campaigns emerged in Denver in 1986. It spread quickly westward to Seattle and Los Angeles where it has achieved its greatest results in organizing janitors. The success of the JfJ lies in an organizing approach that builds out from the workplace onto the community. It combines resources to pressure employers to recognize the union as the workers' representative, often by shaming employers and devising civil disobedience tactics to disrupt the routine and ineffective way that low-wage workers issues are dealt with by the Labor Board. The JfJ has brought large numbers of women, immigrant workers, undocumented residents, and visible minorities into a persistently white American labor movement. It has redefined organizing and reshaped the social characteristics of many locals of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in the United States. More importantly, the JfJ campaigns are invoked as the contemporary model on how to successfully organize in the expanding service sectors with its small workplaces embedded in a context of regressive labor legislation. It is, therefore, no coincidence that the JfJ (or J4J) acronym is one of the most recognizable labor movement signs in recent memory. This recognizability is attributable to the strength, visibility, and success of its campaigns across the United States in organizing janitors.

Since the collapse of the postwar accord between labor and capital, the U.S. labor movement has sputtered along in developing a vision that is imaginative in redefining its direction and political plans to address a neoliberal context that views unions as outdated, irrelevant, and to blame for U.S. companies' difficulties in competing globally. The American labor movement continues to lose members as the economy deindustrializes, capital flees, aggressive anti-union legislation expands, contracting out and privatization expands, and the firm fragments.

Alarmed by the labor movement's intransigence in adopting more contemporary models of change, the JfJ has sought to bring workers back into the movement. It argues that the traditional practice of going through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election recognition is not only a waste of time and money, but is in reality detrimental to organizing workers as employers' delaying tactics go unpunished by the Board. Its legalistic process alienates rank-and-file workers from their issues and the intimacy of seeing through their resolution. Further, the NLRB stipulates that organizing drives need to take place worksite by worksite. While this might have been a good thing during the postwar era, as a result of the large manufacturing workplaces being organized in one swoop, it does little to help organize workers in a fragmented labor process, and in small workplaces of the growing service economy in the country. Finally, the JfJ argued that a lot more money needs to be shifted from servicing members onto campaigns to organize new workers. The idea of shifting resources from servicing to organizing new members has never been fully accepted by the membership, who often feel that their dues are being improperly used.

In the cleaning industry, in-house cleaning workforces were suddenly things of the past as companies, organizations, and building managers shredded workforces when the neoliberal climate provided them with this opportunity. Building owners and managers turned increasingly to the hiring of contractors to clean their buildings. The latter either hired his [Page 790](almost always a “he”) own workforce, or turned around and tendered bids for the building whose contract he had just won. This form of subcontracting further exploited vulnerable cleaners with little training, poor wages, and often undocumented status. In the context of contracting-out and privatization, many workers lost their jobs. Others were rehired by contractors but at a much lower pay rate and with few, if any, benefits. It was in resistance to this deterioration of janitors' conditions that the JfJ campaign was born.

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