Wednesday April 5, 2006
What we've learned from the University of Miami Janitors' strike (updated)
About 900 service workers from the University of Miami went on strike March 1, demanding a living wage, health benefits, and union representation. Of course, that wasn’t the beginning; they had been making those demands for a long time, more recently assisted by the SEIO, who set up a fancy website and organized some community pressure on the school. In particular, the pressure focused on University of Miami President Donna Shalala (who, coincidentally, was director of the Health and Human Services under the Clinton administration), who established a group to conduct a review of compensation and benefits to contract employees on February 23 (source).
Huh? She wanted to know how much her janitors were making, so she “established a group” to “conduct a review?” What ever happened to “making a phone call” to “your human-resources department?” Oh, and how long were we expecting to wait to hear back from this group? The link above says “within a month.” We probably shouldn’t be too surprised, given how these beuracracies work.
Now, the university does not employ the service workers directly; it contracts with UNICCO, which promptly set up a couple of cynical websites, including plain vanilla and blog flavor to combat the bad PR coming out of all this (the fact is, though, that UNICCO doesn’t set the wages – the school does). The blog is particularly hilarious; for example, in responding to this document, “Why the Protest Continues: It’s All About Democracy” (a petition by the UM faculty and students in support of the strikers), it says “I would like to take the time to refute their points one at a time, but since their missive is four pages long and virtually each page has a factual inaccuracy, I’ll stick to the more salient points.” The “missive” takes three screens on my monitor, with a generously-sized font, but even if true, “virtually each page” means that the author found three factual inaccuracies and couldn’t be bothered to address them all.
Anyway, Donna Shalala seemed pretty cool under fire, considering she had no authority to do what was being asked of her; for that, the university’s Board of Trustees has to vote. That they did, exactly a month after the announcement about the study. In a funny coincidence, the decision came down on the same day that the strikers staged a protest at Gloria Estefan’s house (she’s a one of the Trustees). There’s a joke here about “if you want something done, go to Gloria,” but nevermind.
The strike continues; the issue now is how the unionization of the service workers will proceed. UM students have gotten in on the act with a small-scale sit-in. And workers at other universities are talking about similar actions.
It’s nice to see that collective bargaining is alive and well. This gets into a lot of issues, including the labor market vs. housing costs, illegal immigration, and the minimum wage. Market forces are great, but the collective bargaining power of employees is a market force that has to be reckoned with. The salaries we’re talking about here are roughly half of Miami’s $35,000 median income.
Update: A few more sources, which may round out my musings:
- Ana Menendez’s column, very much pro-striker.
- Herald opinion gives credit to UM, but points out that they were partially motivated by the circumstances of the current labor market.
- Another Herald article focuses on Nova and why a similar approach would be slightly less likely to be successful there. Also suggests that the SEIO picked UM, not vice verse, and explains why (bigger university + larger work force + more public scrutiny = higher chance of success).
- A lack of support from the MIA service workers (represented by a different union).
- A Washington lawyer threatened to withhold $300,000 in pledge dollars from UM until they resolve the strike
- In the SoFla Business Journal, an article about the accusations against UNICCO.
- Direct Word-doc link to the UM faculty’s “Why the Protest Continues: It’s All About Democracy.”
- Organization links: SEIU, Yes We Cane, UNICCO, UNICCO Truth, University Truth.
Permalink · Comment [13] · Tags: politics, um, unions · Post to del.icio.us, digg, reddit
