The City, Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York

5. The Sun Also Rises in the West

There is a certain irony to the fact that something as public and palpable as the energy a social movement unleashes has flown under our analytic radar screen. —Karen Brodkin, Making Democracy Matter: Identity and Activism in Los Angeles Portraits of Southern California and Los Angeles are prominent in noir novels, and “noir has . . . remained the popular . . . anti-myth of Los Angeles.”1 James Cain, Raymond Chandler, and, more recently, Walter Mosely have written stories with ironic and grim outcomes. In these stories no one is really good. At best, people are all too fallible, more likely they are selfish, criminal, or downright evil; the déclassé among them “invariably choose murder over toil.”2 Contemporary academics similarly portray L.A. In Michael Dear’s accounts we see that “as the modern public expanded, it shattered into a multitude of fragments speaking incommensurable private languages. Thus fragmented, modernity loses much of its capacity to organize and give meaning to people’s lives.”3 Here community is elusive. There are “genuine neighborhoods to be found in Los Angeles,” Edward Soja writes, but they are few and far between. “Indeed, finding them . . . has become a popular local pastime, especially for those so isolated from propinquitous community in the repetitive sprawl of truly ordinary-looking landscapes that make up the region.”4 For Mike Davis, the sorrow of Los Angeles lies in the self-dealing of elites, the selfishness and racism of the affluent, and “fortress L.A.,” the carceral city that is their creation. The Sun Also Rises in the West n Amy Bridges 5 80 Amy Bridges In this essay, rather than echo these presentations, I tell a more cheerful story about L.A. by providing an account of the Justice for Janitors (JfJ) campaign, which began there in 1988. I offer parallels to events in other cities, both contemporary and earlier in the twentieth century. Having shown that in this instance L.A. is not altogether peculiar but an example of processes both current and historical, I turn to the L.A. School and the Chicago School to see how either provides insight into the successes of janitors ’ mobilization for justice. Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles Service workers suffer low pay and a long list of other occupational burdens : long hours, intermittent and unpredictable employment, absence of benefits (health insurance, vacation, holidays, pension), unpaid weeks of “training”or“internship,”failure to receive overtime pay, and lack of equipment for worker safety. Organizing service workers presents particular challenges. In every city and occupation the Service Employees Industrial Union has embraced, many of the workers are immigrants, often unaware of their rights as workers and some especially vulnerable because they are illegal. Although in some occupations service workers toil at large workplaces (hospitals, airports), in others workers are scattered over many sites, individually or in small groups (janitors, home health care workers) and, in the case of janitors, work at night. SEIU is the fastest-growing workers’ organization in the United States. In 2007 the proportion of workers in the United States who were union members rose for the first time since 1979,led by the new unions built by the SEIU.5 In California, SEIU has several victories to its credit. Most impressive was the organization of home health care workers. In 1999, 74,000 home health care providers joined a single negotiating unit, the largest successful organizing effort in U.S. history next to the UAW in 1937.6 The Justice for Janitors campaign began in Pittsburgh in 1985 and the next year began organizing in Denver. Subsequently, JfJ has successfully organized citywide bargaining for janitors in two dozen U.S. cities. 81 The Sun Also Rises in the West JfJ came to Los Angeles in 1988. Janitors in L.A. had a long history of union membership. First organized by the Building Service Industrial Union in 1921, by the early 1980s janitors were earning hourly wages as high as $12.50.7 In the late 1970s, however, building owners began releasing janitors from their payrolls and instead contracting the work out to cleaning companies, only some of which were unionized. A large pool of immigrants provided workers willing to mop floors for the minimum wage of $4.25, and sometimes less.8 In this way, the well-paid, unionized, mostly AfricanAmerican men who worked as janitors in Los Angeles were replaced by nonunionized, poorly paid, mostly...