Caption: Justice for Janitors March, July 10, 2010.
Credit: SEIU local 1

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Stephen Lerner joined SEIU in the mid-1980s and immediately took on the role of designing and directing the union’s most innovative and successful campaign of that era, Justice for Janitors. In this interview, he traces his involvement with SEIU from that campaign until his departure from SEIU in 2011. He assesses both the campaign’s and the union’s strengths and weaknesses, responds to critiques that have been directed at both, explains the development of his own thinking, and assesses the legacy and implications for SEIU’s story for today’s labor movement.

Joseph McCartin: What made SEIU such a nexus of creativity in the labor movement in the 1980s?

Stephen Lerner: SEIU was going through a transition from a completely decentralized union to creating a national program. [President John] Sweeney was expert in allowing creativity to flourish while still maintaining support of conservative elements. He hired [Andy] Stern [as organizing director], and they created the space for all sorts of innovations and creativity. An infusion of new people, who were given space (and protected) by Sweeney and Stern, made it possible to experiment on a grand scale. JM: What led to Justice for Janitors (J4J)?

SL: SEIU’s roots were in building service workers. Cities were going nonunion, the industry was getting contracted out, and immigrant workers were increasingly dominating the industry. As the union expanded into the public sector and health care, there was less focus on janitors. In the 1980s, the union was dying except in cities of historic strength like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. I was hired, in part, because most people had given up on organizing in the sector, so it wasn’t a big risk to bring someone new in. Sweeney was president of Local 32BJ before becoming the International president; he was always invested in building service workers. A key part of his political base was building service locals. Andy was then the new organizing director, he didn’t know the private sector—he had been a social worker in Pennsylvania.

After I was hired, we tried an experiment in Denver, Colorado, to organize the whole city at once, avoid the National Labor Review Board (NLRB), and base the campaign in the Latino community. We organized 1,000 workers into a citywide master contract, despite much of our organizing committee being deported early in the campaign. In Denver, we started experimenting with new strategies and tactics, from building occupations, civil disobedience, to using cars to blockade Denver’s airport over the conditions of airport janitors. Our quick win in Denver created incredible excitement in the union and led to expanding J4J campaigns all over the country.

JM: Was there resistance to the Denver experiment?

SL: Yes. Prior to our breakthrough, everybody said it was impossible to organize undocumented part-timers. Janitor organizing drove the debate in SEIU about the need to organize undocumented workers. Prior to J4J, many locals would call Immigration and Naturalization Services to deport undocumented Latinos who worked for nonunion cleaning contractors. Locals saw undocumented workers as the enemy; in turn, undocumented workers hated the union for being pro-deportation.

In Denver, then later in Los Angeles, we showed that undocumented workers, far from being un-organizable, would engage in militant direct action. By winning, and humanizing undocumented workers, we convinced SEIU to officially adopt a position that we were organizing all workers—with or without papers—which then helped change AFL-CIO policy.

JM: What was the key strategic innovation of J4J growing out of Denver and other early fights?

We were able to get “responsible contractor agreements” signed by close to $1 trillion in pension capital that meant when workers organized or went on strike, building owners knew that their future financing was threatened if they didn’t settle.

SL: Once we understood that building owners controlled the show, deciding wages by how they bid their building service contracts, we needed to figure out how to pressure building owners. One part was embarrassing them: actions at buildings, strikes, disruption. The other was understanding where they get their capital. It turns out that most of their capital comes from public  employee pension funds. We were able to get “responsible contractor agreements” signed by close to $1 trillion in pension capital that meant when workers organized or went on strike, building  owners knew that their future financing was threatened if they didn’t settle. Key to this is the idea that workers’ pension dollars shouldn’t be invested in companies that exploit workers.

JM: Soon after the Denver success, Justice for Janitors had a big failure as the movement tried to organize Atlanta janitors using the run-up to the 1988 Democratic National Convention there as a leverage point. What did you learn from that failure?

SL: First, Atlanta was far from a progressive city—it was corporate-controlled. It was liberal on race but viciously anti-union. We totally misjudged how tied Mayor Andy Young and many civil rights leaders were to business. Then, Local 32BJ refused to pressure their New York City contractors to be union in Atlanta.

Our big compression point and chance to win was tied to disrupting the Democratic convention. A chief sponsor of the convention was John Portman, the biggest developer in Atlanta. After creating massive tension—disrupting events, getting national press, putting J4J t-shirts on the majority of convention delegates—Sweeney cut a deal with Young behind the scenes canceling activity until after the convention, promising that the city and Portman would later allow janitors to organize. With no leverage post-convention, negotiations failed. The union caved to Democrats. We weren’t successful in organizing Atlanta’s janitors, but the campaign helped put J4J on the national map. The campaign built our reputation among building owners and cleaning contractors about how expensive and damaging it was to fight us.

JM: What were J4J’s most difficult moments?

SL: Our difficult moments revolved around people becoming impatient with how long campaigns took and the threat of losing funding and support. In LA, the union was close to giving up before the breakthrough in Century City. Washington, D.C., was the most difficult campaign because it was so long and difficult. Winning victories in other cities allowed us to continue in D.C. until we finally won.

As we started winning, there was enormous pressure to do quicker, less expensive campaigns, and questioning why we struck so much. There was growing tension between using our victories and newfound strength to leverage organizing all over the country and globally, versus the idea that our success now made it possible to have more traditional labor-management relations which didn’t require risking the organized base or taking the battles to cities that were now under citywide master contracts. Many of the difficult moments revolved around pressure to make deals and not to be as aggressive and strike less.

JM: How did J4J’s breakthrough in the Century City campaign come about?

SL: Some in the union were ready to give up on J4J before the Century City strike. Winning this strike and the global press we received after the police riot was the first proof that we could win and organize thousands of workers. If we hadn’t won Century City, there might not have been a J4J campaign. We made the choice to strike Century City over weeks, instead of quick one or two-day strikes. It is where we proved we could run a traditional strike—with workers out for weeks—and a nontraditional strike in terms of tactics. It is also what put us front and center as a union fighting for immigration rights.

As we started winning, there was enormous pressure to do quicker, less expensive campaigns, and questioning why we struck so much.

It also took J4J global. We started deepening our work with unions in other countries both to pressure European cleaning companies, pensions, and building owners to be union in the U.S. and also to encourage janitor unions globally to organize to avoid what happened in the U.S., where a formerly unionized industry de-unionized. We worked with unions in Australia, the U.K., the Netherlands and other countries to launch Justice for Janitors campaigns. We started to develop a theory of global service workers organizing that was greatly influenced by Saskia Sassen’s book, The Global City:[1] There are global cities around the world that were the command centers of global capitalism where the economy was first world for corporations, but workers still had poverty wages. We developed the idea of a “rent to wage ratio”: if rents in office buildings were the same as in developed countries, why couldn’t workers’ wages mirror those in developed  countries? The same building owners and cleaning contractors operate in many of these cities, the rents, their profits, and wages of the managers were all first world—just not the wages of janitors and other service workers. We had a vision of building a real global union of janitors and security officers embedded in the key global cities.

JM: Some critics of SEIU and J4J argue that these campaigns were top-down affairs. How do you respond?

SL: Almost all SEIU locals in the building service division were run by older white men. This didn’t reflect either the membership or workforce we were organizing. They ranged from decent folks who couldn’t adapt to changes in the workforce and industry, to folks resistant to change, to mob-dominated locals. We had a unique window where we both had huge financial resources and internal political support to force change in these locals. Over the life of the campaign, we trusteed almost every local. Almost all SEIU property service locals now have elected leaders who are people of color. We needed to change leadership to make organizing possible. There is no evidence that spontaneous rank-and-file movements could have won this kind of dramatic leadership change in such a short period of time.

One of the key J4J successes was crafting a national strategy to fit a national industry. It was insufficient to have just a local strategy. Local staff and leaders who were upset that  they had to be connected to a national organizing and bargaining strategy—many liked playing the role, even if ineffective, of local dealmaker. We did the right thing in driving “top down” forced change focused on leaders who controlled their locals, instead of waiting and hoping that rank-and-file movements would arise that would force a leadership change.

J4J organized more workers in the private sector in this period than any other union, running huge and successful strikes. That wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have a national strategy, significant financial and human resources, and an agreement that locals were required to put money into organizing and be involved in regional and national campaigns.

We did the right thing in driving “top down” forced change focused on leaders who controlled their locals, instead of waiting and hoping that rank-and-file movements would arise that would force a leadership change.

I originally proposed creating larger locals within geographic areas that mirrored how the industry was structured: instead of multiple locals with overlapping jurisdictions in the New York metro area, having one local that would deal with common employers. This idea was then expanded to create what are now called “mega locals” that in some ways mirror building trades locals in that they align with the industry and oppose ideas like rent control because the industry opposes it. I now think the creation of mega locals was a mistake which cut the heart out of Justice for Janitors. Mega locals became regional fiefdoms, focused on negotiating and organizing regionally, thereby undercutting a national industry-wide strategy. In many ways, we mirrored what happened earlier in the labor movement. The union’s growth and increased power, which came from strikes and militant struggles, led many to believe we could now have a more “mature” relationship with employers, and didn’t need to do all that “crazy” stuff that forced building owners and cleaning contractors to deal with us in the first place. We created the monster that consumed us.

JM: After Century City, J4J started to go global. How would you describe what happened as the union made alliances around the world?

SL: It came organically in the sense that we reached out to various unions and countries to get them to help us pressure cleaning contractors and building owners that operated globally. Many of the big cleaning contractors were European-owned. Once we built relationships and got engaged with these unions, they got excited about our model and launched campaigns in their own countries. We had a culture clash in Europe where some unions were so heavily invested in “social dialogue.” We wanted to fight companies; they believed that social dialogue would lead to victory. We argued, and history has proved us correct, that the European labor movement was operating on the fumes of dying social democratic labor parties and that their countries’ labor relations would come to mirror U.S. labor relations.

JM: You left SEIU for a time in the 1990s. Why? What did you do then, and how did you end up coming back to the union and to the campaign you had designed?

SL: I quit SEIU in 1994 when it became clear that SEIU wasn’t willing or able to make the changes necessary to take our work to the next level. A memo I sent to Sweeney and Stern analyzing the work of the previous eight years said that, in part, without dealing with corrupt and bankrupt leaders of big locals, we couldn’t organize on scale. I specifically cited Local 32BJ and its corrupt leader, Gus Bevona. The memo included seven recommendations of needed changes if the building service division was to succeed. The summary was: “If we are not growing on the offensive, we will end up on the defensive while we are shrinking.”

I now think the creation of mega locals was a mistake which cut the heart out of Justice for Janitors.

After leaving SEIU, I became assistant organizing director at the AFL-CIO when John Sweeney was elected president. Andy Stern became president of SEIU. While at the AFLCIO, we launched the industry-wide strawberry  worker organizing campaign with the United Farm Workers (UFW) in California. I was then recruited to become national organizing director for the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department where we launched the Building Trades Organizing Project (BTOP) in Las Vegas.

In 1999, as Andy Stern prepared to trustee Gus Bevona and Local 32BJ, he said he was ready to implement many of my 1994 proposals and asked if I would come back to SEIU as Division Director of the Building Service Division. With the resources of the New Strength Unity Plan, we dramatically expanded the program, with rolling strikes starting in L.A. in 2000 as part of moving towards national bargaining. In 2002, we trusteed Boston Local 254 after years of corruption. Rocio Saenz became president and we had a citywide strike in 2002. I was elected to the union’s International Executive Board.

JM: Houston and Miami campaigns were the last big wins for J4J. How would you compare them to each other and to the earlier struggles?

SL: Houston showed we could roll picket lines around the country, use pension capital to pressure building owners, and win broad public support in a Southern city. We had spent years regaining the right to honor picket lines in janitor contracts; this language allowed us to spread picket lines from one city to another. We struck the whole city and told building owners we wouldn’t settle with some owners until we had a citywide agreement. The idea was to force building owners we had leverage on to bring other owners to the table. Mike Fishman, Local 32BJ president, at the request of New York building owners that had operations in Houston that we struck, tried to set up a smaller table of owners that would settle—but without other owners. This undercut our strategy. But since we were running the strike and the bargaining table, he was unsuccessful in forcing this.

In this period, the two competing visions of what should happen in property service came into sharpest focus. Mike Fishman argued that New York was the biggest janitors’ union and home to the real estate industry and should control the property service division. He didn’t want to risk relationships with New York building owners and cleaning contractors by using New York’s power to support organizing and strikes around the country. We spent five years getting all the contracts to expire simultaneously, to force national bargaining—and Fishman took New York off common expiration dates. Stern wanted to find a new way to organize and grow that was faster, cheaper, and didn’t involve intense struggle. The very success of the union led them to believe they could have a different kind of relationship with the industry that no longer required pitched battles. We believed in using our base and power to build a mass movement and exponential growth. They believed in incremental gains and showing employers the union could be a good partner.

The very success of the union led them to believe they could have a different kind of relationship with the industry that no longer required pitched battles.

Miami was different. It was a strike against the University of Miami’s contractor UNNICO, not a citywide strike. The university and cleaning contractor ran an aggressive anti-union campaign. After multiple attempts to pressure and negotiate with university president Donna Shalala, we went on strike, setting up a tent city outside the university. As an escalation, workers decided to go on a hunger strike and live 24 hours a day in the tent city. We focused on Shalala, and the obscenity that she, a former secretary of Health and Human Services in President Clinton’s cabinet, didn’t provide affordable health insurance for janitors. The hunger strike brought national attention to the strike and opened up behind-the-scenes negotiations facilitated by people in the Clinton world. Workers were incredibly committed and willing to take great personal risks, including hospitalization. I was privately accused of endangering workers’ lives by not calling off the hunger strike. The union leadership didn’t realize that workers had real ownership of the hunger strike; it wasn’t up to us to call it off, and those who physically could go on didn’t want to quit — they wanted to win. On the ground, and throughout the country, there was tremendous support and excitement for the strike—which we won—but it increased the feeling among Stern and  others that J4J fights were too hard and too expensive. These were the last big J4J campaigns before I was taken out of the [building services] division and moved into the private equity campaign. The irony is we won two huge victories in the South, and these were the swan song for J4J.

JM: How did J4J morph into organizing security workers?

SL: When we started Justice for Janitors, janitors  were the lowest paid workers and primarily immigrants; security officers were higher paid and African American. Over time, the janitors’ wages and benefits passed security officers’ as we continued to organize. This created real interest among security workers in organizing. As janitorial companies expanded, many of them started offering security services in addition to janitorial. There was also a huge consolidation in the security industry. Security organizing came out of an industrial analysis of the property  service sector and a strategy of building Black/Brown unity in key cities. In L.A., linking Latino janitors and Black security officers was a conscious decision to build an urban political base.

This idea of understanding where building owners get their capital and developing ways to use that for leverage was central to J4J. All of our work was based on going up the financial tree.

There were internal debates: one, did we want “rent a cops” in the union? This wasn’t hard to overcome. Two, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)’s rule makes it sound like security officers can’t be in “mixed unions” representing security and non-security workers. It isn’t illegal. The board won’t conduct elections or certify mixed unions, but if you are strong enough to force recognition and a contract, it is enforceable. The industrial argument won out—security workers were in the same buildings as janitors often working for the same companies as janitors.

The building owners initially went crazy, saying there was no way they would allow unionized janitors and security in the same building. We beat the Swedish-owned security company Securitas relatively quickly based on pressure from the Swedish Transport Union. We also won Minnesota because the biggest cleaning contractor, Marsden, also was the biggest security contractor. In addition to global pressure, pressure on unionized building owners and a pension pressure campaign were built around Civil Rights themes: Black workers had been left behind.

JM: How did you move beyond building services and J4J before your departure from SEIU? What impact did the Great Recession have on your thinking?

SL: This idea of understanding where building owners get their capital and developing ways to use that for leverage was central to J4J. All of our work was based on going up the financial tree. Private equity (PE) companies started buying buildings and cleaning/security companies, putting them on our radar. For example, Blackstone bought the biggest office building company in the country, Equity Office. When we started looking at private equity companies, we realized that they owned everything—buildings, nursing homes, hospitals. They got their capital from public employee pension funds. Building owners tried to claim they weren’t responsible for cleaning contractors, saying the latter were “independent.” Private equity made the same claim about the companies they own, portfolio companies. The fight was similar: forcing the company at the top to take responsibility for companies they controlled. We were trying to get ahead of a growing trend of PE buyouts of companies and playing a bigger role in the economy. It offered an opportunity to fight at the highest level for hundreds of thousands of workers, versus the weakness of J4J, where we had fights with huge entities for relatively few workers.

Over time, we realized we were fighting giant corporations for a very small amount of their work. It led us to think about going after their full portfolio of workers.

Over time, we realized we were fighting giant corporations for a very small amount of their work. It led us to think about going after their full portfolio of workers. Our thinking was, let’s not just have a fight with Blackstone over janitors—let’s have a fight with them about all their workers. This led us to security, then private equity and bank workers. Andy Stern proposed doing a private equity campaign. He recognized that these companies were playing an increasingly important role in the economy. But he wanted to find a way to leverage private equity companies to be union through pension and other leverage, without organizing their workers. He thought there could be a grand deal with the industry that didn’t require organizing workers.

Our thinking about banks grew out of a similar theory. In all our janitor campaigns, we ran into banks as players in the real estate industry. Our theory was, let’s try a new sector/industry by focusing on the folks at the top. In addition, banks were key bad guys on consumer and other issues. Globally, we had built a relationship with unions around the world in security and janitorial organizing. Banks are unionized in most of the world except the U.S. These bank workers’ unions, led by Brazilian bank workers, asked us to partner with them in organizing the U.S. bank sector.

From the beginning, we realized the economy had reorganized, and we couldn’t organize by going through the NLRB and trying to win elections with cleaning contractors who were really just payroll agents for the building owners who had the money and power.

I was transferred out of my position as the Property Service Division Director prior to the Great Recession and continued to work on Private Equity and Banks while serving on the executive board. The Great Recession coincided with Stern leaving SEIU, and lots of other factors from internal politics to the Great Recession all happened at the same time. There was a leadership change when Mary Kay Henry got elected president. I argued that with the crash of the economy, the union needed to focus on finance, financialization, and a more fundamental challenge to how capitalism operates. But I lost that fight and left the union in 2011.

JM: What key lessons from Justice for Janitors have guided your work since?

SL: The overarching lesson is there is no silver bullet—no one secret trick to winning. We developed a comprehensive strategy that played out differently depending on local and national conditions. Central to the strategy was understanding how the industry worked—which early on led us to conclude that building owners and their financing had to be targeted versus the  cleaning contractor who was the “legal employer.” From the beginning, we realized the economy had reorganized, and we couldn’t organize by going through the NLRB and trying to win elections with cleaning contractors who were really just payroll agents for the building owners who had the money and power.

We realized that the very thing that made it hard to organize and maintain a union of janitors—contractors worked on 30-day cancelation clauses, which allowed building owners to quickly de-unionize by firing unionized cleaning contractors—also offered the opportunity to pressure building owners to fire nonunion contractors who mistreated workers. Nonunion contractors came to see that fighting the union could cost them work, which gave us great leverage in getting them to recognize the union when building owners were willing to put additional money into contracts to pay janitors more.

On the one hand, we did deep research and identified multiple levels of leverage on the employers. On the other, we organized janitors at work and in their neighborhoods. Leverage is insufficient without real deep worker support and actions. It is mass worker activity, strikes and disruption, civil disobedience, that creates the environment where financial and other leverage can work.

Workers organizing alone is insufficient to win on scale and leverage alone is insufficient. The combination makes it possible to build citywide, regional, national, and global campaigns. We need a grand and inspiring vision to move workers that isn’t just about more money. The union must be the vehicle for uplift and liberation, married to a plan that gives workers confidence to take risks to fight for that vision.

This interview is adapted from Purple Power: The History and Global Impact of SEIU, edited by Luís Aguiar and Joseph A. McCartin, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Reprinted with permission.

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Note
1. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

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Author Biography
Joseph A. McCartin is Professor of History and Executive Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor & the Working Poor at Georgetown University. Among his books are Labor in America: A History, 10th edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2024), coauthored with Melvyn Dubofsky.