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Hardships
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Continued from PAGE
ONE
The campaign sparked an 18-month standoff in which employers locked
out unionized workers and brought in replacements willing to work
for lower wages. The janitors eventually triumphed, and in the years
since they have bargained their way to health-care coverage, personal
days and vacation time. When Gray recently told a group of
Cincinnati janitors about her wages, health-care coverage and
vacation time, "they didn't believe me," she says. "They wanted to
see my pay stub."
The city appears to have benefited too.
In Pittsburgh neighborhoods
with high concentrations of janitors and other service workers, high
school graduation rates and home ownership rates have risen steadily
over the past two decades, according to Census data. Among janitors
surveyed by SEIU, the rate of home ownership had grown to 57% by
2005, an increase of nearly 20% since 1990. Meanwhile the number of
families below the poverty line has fallen.
As janitors' wages have risen, salaries for other Pittsburgh jobs
have followed suit. Security guards, for instance, working in
buildings where unionized janitorial workers are employed, have seen
their earnings advance in parallel. Over the past three years, the
median household income in the city has grown nearly 3%, from
$39,643 to $40,699, adjusted for inflation. And annual
janitorial-job turnover, as high as 300% in Cincinnati, is just
one-tenth that rate in Pittsburgh. As a result, contractors' costs
for recruitment and training are significantly lower. "For a
community and its families, wage gains for low-income workers mean
the difference between living precariously at the edge of the
economy and having a stake in the American Dream," says Beth
Schulman, author of The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30
Million Americans.
Cincinnati shares many attributes with Pittsburgh. Both are Rust
Belt cities with midsize populations--314,000 for Cincinnati and
322,000 for Pittsburgh--and workforces similar in size and
composition. Each has seen its once mighty manufacturing base
crumble, with Cincinnati losing 17,000 manufacturing jobs over the
past decade and Pittsburgh 22,600. But they diverge in their
treatment of janitors and other low-wage service workers, and
living-wage advocates say the results are telling. In Cincinnati
neighborhoods like Over-the-Rhine and the West End, where Jones
lives, poor wages coupled with high rates of drug use, street
violence and truancy have created a cycle of interdependent
problems. More than half the adult black males in the two
neighborhoods are without full-time work. In the West End alone,
76.5% of the children under 5 are living in poverty, and per capita
income is $9,759 a year.GO
TO END
Still, achieving the Change to Win Federation's goals in Cincinnati
won't be easy. Opponents of living-wage proposals argue that they
will do more economic harm than good. The Employment Policies
Institute (EPI), a Washington think tank known for its industry
funding and pro-business positions, released a study in March
claiming that a proposed bill to raise Ohio's minimum wage (at
$4.25, one of the lowest in the country) could lead to a $308
million hit on the Ohio economy and the loss of 12,000 jobs. John
Doyle, EPI's managing director, says that state and federal
earned-income tax credits and worker training would be more
effective in helping low-wage workers rise out of poverty. "If
employers are forced to increase wages," says Doyle, "jobs will be
eliminated, there will be a decrease in the number of hours worked,
and these low-skilled adults may find themselves out on the street."
Studies cited by liberal-leaning research organizations such as the
Economic Policy Institute, the Fiscal Policy Institute and Policy
Matters Ohio, however, show that minimum-wage laws rarely lower
employment. "We now have 19 states that have raised their minimum
wages above the federal minimum, and nothing like that kind of
effect has occurred," says Jared Bernstein, senior economist for the
Economic Policy Institute. "In the best research done by nonpartisan
academics, the impact of moderate wage increases on job growth and
displacement is about zero."
Daniel Radford, who served as executive secretary of the Cincinnati
AFL-CIO Labor Council from 1984 to 2005, laments that the standard
of living for workers in his hometown has failed to keep pace with
that of similar workers in Pittsburgh. "They've got high union
density, politicians in their pocket and strong community support,"
says Radford. "But Cincinnati is completely different. It's a tough
town for workers."
Craig Jones knows that firsthand. It is 10 p.m., and he is back home
after another four-hour janitorial shift. He microwaves a Stouffer's
dinner and grabs a Coke from his cabinet, which is mainly stocked
with canned corn and some pumpkin filling that Jones got from a food
pantry around Thanksgiving. He has been looking for a better-paying
job during his off-hours but hasn't found one, so he is pinning his
hopes on the Justice for Janitors campaign. "I'm not looking for a
handout," he says. "But I feel like I'm stuck."
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