They work more or less the same job. They work in more or less the same place, separated only by Red Square. And their qualifications certainly don’t seem too different. But Luis, a gentle, courteous native of Mexico City, is earning $4 less per hour than Marta, who has been working in housekeeping and custodial services since she arrived in the United States from Nicaragua 13 years ago.
Together, their situations represent what is evolving into perhaps one of the most important issues facing America’s labor movement. The wage disparity between Luis and Marta is the reason why a year ago 50-plus Harvard students missed three weeks of class to stage a protest in the office of the university president; why 70 Catholic University employees took to the streets two years ago to protest what they called below-poverty wages; and why a living wage campaign is growing in popularity in cities across the country. Workers, politicians and church groups are questioning why people laboring 40 hours per week are struggling to earn enough to live on.
Luis reports to work at 11 p.m. He drops his bags off in a small classroom in ICC and then helps clean the building, along with Cesar and Gabriel and their supervisor. Luis, 47, said he will return to live again with his wife and two children in Mexico City, but he’s unsure as to when he will be able to go back. He’s been separated from them for three-and-a-half years. $7.20 per hour isn’t much in Washington, but it supports his family below the border. He sends to Mexico $700 of the $1,770 per month he earns from holding two jobs, cleaning a building downtown during the evening and ICC during the night. His other job is part-time and pays him $7.70 per hour.
Of the several workers we talked to, Luis’ situation is one of the better ones, as he is supporting only himself in Washington. Jos?, 32, is supporting his wife and two young children in the District. He earns $8.45 per hour cleaning Reiss, where he has worked for almost five years. Jos? makes slightly less than the 2001 federal poverty threshold for a family of four. (His wife stays home, taking care of their two-year-old.) Jos? holds a part-time custodial job elsewhere in the District to make ends meet.
Luis and Jos? work for P&R Enterprises, a contract cleaner headquartered in Falls Church, Va. Several messages were left for P&R seeking comment on the wage rates they pay workers and the benefits the workers receive, but no calls were returned. The University official responsible for the school’s contract with P&R, Executive Director of Facilities and Student Housing Karen Frank, said she was not aware how much the contract employees are being paid.
What’s particularly vexing about Jos? and Luis’ circumstances is that Marta, a custodian in the White Gravenor building, earns 160 percent more doing nearly the same job. She said she doesn’t know the P&R workers, but said that she wished they were earning more.
Why they aren’t being paid comparably has at least something to do with Marta’s membership in Local 1199E-DC, a branch of the Services Employees International Union. The local represents some 300 Georgetown workers, from those doing landscaping to the mechanics who fix air conditioners to the custodians in the residence halls. No one covered by Local 1199 is paid less than $10.30 per hour, according to Local 1199 official Eliyahu Rabin.
Marta’s work is by no stretch fun, but her position offers benefits inaccessible to P&R employees. Cleaning the floors, bathrooms and classrooms from 10:30 p.m. to 7 a.m. five days a week, Marta makes $11.50 per hour and has her health insurance paid for by the University. The P&R employees with whom we spoke said the firm does not cover their health insurance. There was slight confusion among workers as to whether P&R contributes to a pension fund, but only one worker out of five thought it did. The other four said they were sure the firm did not contribute to a pension. All union employees who work on campus, on the other hand, will receive a pension upon retirement.
On top of those benefits, there is another that is harder to price. Most union employees with whom we spoke, Marta included, do not work two jobs. That means Marta has more time at home with her three young children, all of them under eight years old.
She said she has no reason to be concerned about job security, which initially sounds extraordinary given that someone about 100 yards away is doing the same work for much less. Rabin said that it is in the union contract that no in-house employee?anyone employed directly by the University?can lose his or her job to a contract worker.
Welcome to the living wage campaign
The wage gap on college campuses was introduced to the country in spectacular fashion by approximately 50 Harvard students. Seeing that wages had not kept up with cost-of-living increases, the Progressive Student Labor Movement wanted the Harvard to adopt a policy similar to the living wage for the City of Cambridge. After two years of negligible results, the PSLM took over Massachusetts Hall, a first-year dorm where the President of the University and Provost, among others, also have their offices. According to the press release issued by PSLM to the media on April 18?the first day of what would be a 21-day sit-in?the students were occupying the building to “demand a living wage of at least $10.25 per hour plus benefits for all Harvard employees.”
Occupying a building for three weeks is bound to attract some attention, especially from those friendly to labor’s cause. After the first week or so, when outsiders started to believe that the students were in it for the long haul, some prominent voices began to emerge. Harvard students and professors, community members, and janitorial staff members heard from Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), a Harvard graduate, and AFL-CIO president John Sweeney. As the sit-in wore on, dozens?and sometimes more than a hundred?tents sprang up in Harvard Yard as fellow students camped out to show their solidarity with those inside.
On May 8, the 20-odd protesters who remained in Massachusetts Hall left. Their stated goal?$10.25 an hour plus benefits?was unmet, but the PSLM members were optimistic: Harvard University President Neil L. Rudenstine had made what the protesters perceived to be significant concessions. In a statement released May 8, Rudenstine outlined plans for a 20-person committee to be formed of faculty members, students, administrators and unionized employees. The committee was convened with a mandate to “discuss, debate, and make recommendations on the principles and policies that should guide the University’s employment practices in regard to the total compensation and opportunities available to lower-paid members of Harvard’s workforce.” In addition, a moratorium was placed on the subcontracting of “custodians, food-service personnel, museum guards, or parking attendants until the committee completes its work and its recommendations are acted upon.”
The sit-in’s effects were made public on Dec. 19, 2001, when The Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies (called the “Katz Committee” after its chair, Harvard economics professor Lawrence F. Katz) released its final report. Using $10.68 as a benchmark for “low-wage” workers, the Katz report found that all Harvard employees earning less than $10.68 per hour were found in the employment categories of custodians, dining services and security/museum guards and parking attendants. The report also noted, “It is striking that all of the on-campus workers earning less than $10.68 per hour (with the exception of museum security guards for whom outsourcing has not taken place) work in sectors with significant outsourcing pressures.”
Like Harvard, Georgetown also outsources a portion of its labor. In 1998, the Voice reported that 11 employees of the Marriott Corporation would be losing their jobs cleaning the student division of the Leavey Center. The workers, who made approximately $11 per hour plus benefits, were to be replaced by employees of the commercial contract cleaner P&R Enterprises. In October 1998, Frank, who was director of facilities and student housing, said that the decision to contract with P&R rather than Marriott would save $100,000 a year.
How to measure poverty?
The quality of life for contract workers
Guillermo is an energetic 19-year-old who takes out the trash in the Leavey Center and sweeps the grounds. A college-aged kid with a youthful and inquisitive look to him, Guillermo keeps very different hours than most students. He and other P&R workers usually arrive around 11 p.m. As students begin going home, Guillermo and others are just nearing their break period. The P&R workers are out before most students return the following day.
Guillermo came to the United States just a year ago, spending five months in Miami before relocating to Washington late last year. He was working two full-time jobs in the District, but quit after of month of moonlighting. It was too exhausting, he said. For now, he is resting, as he puts it, working only one full-time. He makes $7.25 per hour.
Measuring how well Guillermo and others fair is tough, since there is no definitive way of doing it. Technically, Guillermo is living above the federal poverty line, earning just over $15,000 per year. For a single individual, the official Census estimate for the poverty threshold is $8,900. Alternative Census estimates that better adjust for federal tax credits and other benefits such as food stamps, as well as the rising costs of medical care and differential housing costs across cities, are still considerably below Guillermo’s salary.
There are much larger estimates, including one from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. Even the EPI’s estimate isn’t perfectly applicable for the case of some P&R workers, including Jos?. EPI puts the poverty threshold for a family with two working parents and two children at around $49,000. In Jos?’s case, he is the only working parent; his wife stays home to watch the children. EPI analyst Bethney Gundersen suggested an adjustment that removes child care as an expense. Additionally, even with shrinking the transportation outlay, since the at-home parent doesn’t pay for daily travel to work, the new figure is still much higher, around $35,000. Getting any alternative estimate for a single worker such as Guillermo is even more difficult. Even the EPI report doesn’t include that information.
The two estimates, important for gauging the material well- being of workers, are done using quite different methods. The Census uses actual median expenditures on food, clothes, shelter and other necessities to estimate how much must be required to subsist. EPI’s approach implies that what people spend on necessities may be highly inadequate. Its measure of poverty is based on what it judges as expenses required to “maintain employment and a stable, healthy home environment.” Its standards are, it admits in a recent report, higher than those of the government. For instance, in measuring required spending on child care, the EPI’s threshold is going to be higher because it demands that a relatively high level of quality be met.
For his part, Guillermo, unlike other P&R employees, says he is making enough working for P&R, even though he is remitting $500 per month?over 40 percent of his monthly income?to his parents in Mexico. That means he is living?paying for rent, utilities, groceries and transportation?on $660 per month.
Jos?, 22, is not getting paid enough, he said?and he earns more than Guillermo. Suggesting just how tough it is to measure “basic necessities,” Jos? said he is not content working for P&R, where he makes $9 per hour supervising a small staff in Lauinger Library. Jos? lives with his father and brothers in Washington and sends $200 per month back to El Salvador for the rest of his family.
What do unions do? Georgetown’s in-house workers
Georgetown’s union employees said that earning $7.20 per hour would certainly not be sufficient for them. “I don’t see how they are getting by on that,” Jim Wilmot said.
Wilmot, 49, is a former officer in the Air Force and has worked for Georgetown’s Office of Facilities for two-and-a-half years. Echoing most facilities workers, Wilmot said Georgetown is probably one of the best jobs he’s ever had. Tim Allman, who is an air conditioner mechanic, said the same thing during a roundtable with five workers from Facilities and one employee from housekeeping, Linnette Francis.
Francis, who is now cleaning the halls of Village C, said management tends to be responsive to workers’ needs. “Everything’s in the trash other than a dead man,” she said, and yet the University was providing trash bags that ripped too easily. Within a few days, though, the problem was corrected. In fact, Francis that while the union has helped secured higher pay and job security, the administration has always been accessible to employees.
Rabin tells a slightly different story. Just getting the University to replace worn and torn jackets?it is obligated to provide protective wear under the union’s contract?took months, but they have begun to arrive. Still, Rabin and other Facilities workers at union delegates meeting said that they generally get along quite well with management.
But in one acrimonious episode last semester, a supervisor ordered workers to minimize how much they talk to others on the job. In a message that union members thought harked back to the early 20th century, a supervisor told workers that “any time you are seen in public talking to others you will be considered loafing.” A supervisor had earlier made a similar remark and the union pointed it out to upper management and assumed the matter had been resolved. When a second supervisor said the same thing just two months later, the union took a more public approach. Rabin and Georgetown union employees organized a leaflet campaign calling attention to the statement and demanding that workers be treated with respect and dignity.
At the delegates meeting, Facilities workers Steve Foster, Wally Rahman and Tim Phillips said the episode has had something of a silver lining. That the same statement was made twice indicated to them that the management did not try hard enough to make sure its ranks understood that such a remark is unacceptable, the members said. Since the leaflet campaign, managers communicate more effectively with each other and with the union.
The debate over union benefits
The benefits of the union are not as clear to some other Facilities workers. Allman and Wilmot agreed that the union does not provide $80 per month in services, which is what they cited as the union dues.
Rabin disputed the figure. No union member pays more than $34 per month, he said. Rabin emphasized that the differences in wages and benefits between union and non-union workers exceeds whatever any member pays in dues. He added that the dues are voted by union workers, who also have the chance to approve all salaries for union administrators like Rabin.
“Workers cannot afford not to be the union,” Rabin said.
Rabin is nothing if not zealous about the union cause. “Unions set the standard for America,” he said, referring to union successes at raising wages and benefits while also pressuring for better safety in the workplace. For Georgetown’s local, the current contract guarantees a 12 percent wage increase over three years, beginning in July 2001.
Rebuffing complaints that union wage increases force other job cuts because they raise costs, Rabin and the union hold fast to evidence that suggests that unions actually raise the productivity of workers and firms and save costs. They argue that unions reduce turnover, which cuts down on recruiting and training expenses. It also has been argued that the increased job security in union contracts inspires worker loyalty, thereby encouraging effort and employee-employer cooperation.
There cannot be many more inspiring people to talk to than Cesar Lopez of Facilities. Having arrived from the Philippines, Lopez has worked other jobs in the United States, but his position with Facilities is easily one of the best he’s had. For a while he was working two full-time jobs, both as an building engineer, while attending a class. “It’s tough, but it can be done,” he said. Now, he’s working only his Facilities job.
“It’s about making money for the family,” he said, referring to his wife and three children who are still in the Philippines. With the money he makes working for Georgetown, he can afford to send his children to private school at home. No similar job in the Philippines could pay him enough to do that.
Lopez is, in short, a paragon of the industrious immigrant. He accepts readily the implicit contract that rewards will follow a hard day’s work, and he is doggedly focused on seizing the advantages of his current job to support his family and advance his career. The union contract stipulates that $50,000 be set aside per year for covering classes relevant to employees’ line of work. Lopez has taken two courses in air conditioning mechanics and is set on educating himself up the ladder.
Opportunities for advancement are more elusive for P&R workers. The half dozen employees we spoke with said the firm does not pay for classes of any kind. And affording a private school education on $7 per hour is stretching the possible.
Meanwhile, Rabin is not content with the current training regime. He is pushing Georgetown management to loosen restrictions on what courses it will pay for. Someone in housecleaning should be able to go to school for engineering in order to pursue a higher wage, he said.
An advocate for the contract workers is conspicuously missing.
