A Broom To The System

SEIU tries to sweep new members into the labor movement.

by Doron Taussig

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Published: Sep 12, 2007

It's good to be the boss. The autonomy of running a business is a rare thing, a treasure. Nobody tells you when to come and go, or what to wear. Nobody tells you not to give a raise to the new guy who stays late every day, or not to fire that guy who looks at you funny.

But then along comes this union, promising to set all sorts of workplace rules, and to implement new, standardized salaries — higher than what you're accustomed to paying. They stand outside your building dressed in purple, chanting your name, and they call your office constantly, asking to "talk." It's annoying and embarrassing.

Still, you think, you can outlast them. No one pays attention to these unions anymore. They're way past their heyday, a fossil from the factory era. They're clinging to an old paradigm of a fixed work force and big, immobile businesses. You, meanwhile, are 21st-century. You're vibrant, dynamic, ready to compete in the global marketplace. You have computers. You have no weaknesses that they can exploit.

But perhaps you do.

Perhaps you are Garnett Littlepage, and your weakness is politics. You were unfazed when the purple mass started accumulating outside the buildings where you hold the security contract, chanting about a living wage for security guards and singing: Hey hey! Ho ho! Littlepage has got to go! But a few days later, the union noticed your friendship with U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, who, at the time, was getting ready to run for mayor and not looking for any dust-ups. Calls were made, whispers exchanged, and now, all of a sudden, you've got a union contract.

Perhaps you're David Grasso, and your weakness is pride. You ignored the union's attempts to contact you about the janitors in 1500 Walnut, which you owned, until the organizers found out about a breakfast you were hosting at the Bellevue. They sent a fax to your office announcing their intent to leaflet the event, and within minutes, you were on the phone with them, using some foul language, yes, but also agreeing to set up a meeting. You sold the building before negotiations were finished, but the next building you bought, you cooperated with the union.

Or perhaps you're Ken Kaiserman, and your weakness is shame. For months, crowds of purple-clad protesters rallied outside buildings you own in Old City. You disregarded them, even when your tenants complained about the noise. Then, one day, you were walking down the street, and some guy in a purple shirt came up to you.

"You give all this money to charity," he said. "One thing I don't understand is how you can stand here, [paying] $6.50 an hour."

"No one is making $6.50 an hour," you replied.

The guy said he could produce a pay stub, proving that one of your employees made $6.50 an hour.

"Well, then somebody's lying to me," you told him.

"Minimum wage is about to go up," he smirked. "You're gonna have to give him a raise."

Now you're bargaining a union contract, too.

Philly is a union town — everyone knows this. No one changes a light bulb in a large building without the help of John Dougherty and his electricians' union, and the public sector remains a labor stronghold. But in recent years, this state of affairs has come to seem stagnant, still. Incidents like those above, where unions triumph over adversarial employers, bring in new members and win them raises are actually quite rare. Organized labor has not, in many cases, reached the Philadelphians working low-paying jobs; it has not rebuilt the blue-collar middle class that left when manufacturing moved overseas.

"I just thought, fuck it, if I'm gonna lose my job, I'll go out fighting," MacManiman says.

The American labor movement, which began with a Philadelphia Carpenters' union, was in its headiest moments about improving compensation and treatment for workers who lack leverage, and building a more equitable society. But that's not what we mean when we call Philadelphia a union town today. We have a few union-dominated industries, and unions have some sway over our politics (though increasingly less — Michael Nutter won the Democratic primary with just one union endorsement, Local 835 of the International Union of Operating Engineers). We also have a class of working poor and all of the troubles that accompany that.

A few years ago, the national labor movement, facing the same dilemma as the local unions, began a shift. Some leaders decided that old manufacturing jobs were never coming back, but that low-paying service jobs, which were harder to move offshore, were ripe for organizing. A few unions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), UNITE-HERE and the United Food and Commercial Workers chief among them, began reaching out to workers like janitors and hotel maids, trying to take unions where they hadn't gone before. They went on the offensive.

Philadelphia was not a frontline in this battle. In part, this was because it was a union town, and had some unionized service workers. But it meant that labor here remained relatively complacent.

Now, however, the fight is being joined. Within Philadelphia's borders, employers are being shaken out of their comfort zones, and workers at the bottom of the economic totem pole are getting raises. This is not yet a widespread phenomenon; it hasn't translated into a new meaning for the term "union town." It's an early signal of a possible transformation, and it's been brought on, in large part, by the agitation of one union. Not the biggest union in town, or the most powerful, but the most ambitious, and the one taking the most meaningful strides into the modern economy: the purple union, SEIU 32BJ.

It's 1991. A janitor in Center City's Mellon Bank Center is sweeping the floor when the building's head of security comes over and steps on his broom. This is his way of telling the janitor that he doesn't want him sweeping right now. The janitor, a Latino man, feels disrespected. He decides to talk to his union "steward" — the representative in the building — about the incident.

The steward is a pale white 25-year-old with a potty-mouth named Wayne MacManiman Jr. MacManiman is a maintenance mechanic; he began working in the building when it opened, in 1990, and got offered the steward job because he was "the first guy to walk through the door." His parents had been in unions but hadn't been adamantly pro-labor, and MacManiman doesn't feel any particular way about his local. He's there for his paycheck.

 

After listening to the janitor, MacManiman goes to a building manager to discuss the situation. The manager looks at him.

"You know what, Wayne?" he asks, "What do you care?"

MacManiman thinks about this. "I have to care," he says.

Sixteen years later, sitting at the long, made-for-contract-negotiations conference table in a profoundly purple downtown office, Wayne MacManiman offers this anecdote as the beginning of his story — his awakening. "That was kind of when I started fighting for the little guy," says the Chairman of 32BJ's 5,000-member Mid-Atlantic District. And surely, if he's telling the tale almost two decades later, MacManiman felt some tug of conscience at that moment.

But he's also oversimplifying. MacManiman, after all, is in an unlikely situation: Now a thick, bald-headed man who speaks in a blue-collar brogue (and still with a bit of a potty-mouth), he emits the air of a classic working-class white labor boss. Meanwhile, the union in which he is an elected official has for the past several years cultivated a "new labor" image: a mixture of black, immigrant and white middle-class progressive. For a man like MacManiman to run a union like his is not the result of an internal epiphany. It's the end product of a long, sometimes chaotic, and fortuitous ascent, at the end of which both he and his union simply found themselves in the right place at the right time.

In the early 1990s, the union that represented janitors and maintenance workers in Philadelphia was known as SEIU Local 36 (there are other SEIU locals in Philadelphia representing workers in other industries, such as health care). Local 36 had a reputation for frailty. When, as a steward, MacManiman would go to confront managers over incidents like the one with the broom, he would go thinking he had support — and then turn around to find he was standing alone.

"I got tired of that nonsense, people not backing you up," he says.

He quit his first steward job in 1993 and returned to doing maintenance. But in 1997, while working as an engineer at Two Liberty Place, he became concerned that management wanted to kick the union out of the building entirely.

"I just thought, fuck it, if I'm gonna lose my job, I'll go out fighting," he says.

PREP WORK: Building leaders for SEIU 32BJ discuss a strike in a meeting at their headquarters last week. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The steward at the time was, in MacManiman's estimation, a tool — "if management said, 'let's fire this guy,' he'd say, 'great, I'll tell him'" — so he went to the rest of the engineers and asked them to make him their steward. Then he went to his adversary.

"You like being steward?" he asked.

"I guess," the guy said.

"Good," MacManiman told him. "Today's your last day."

In his second stewarding stint, he got more involved. Though management didn't try to kick the union out of the building, it made some unpleasant changes to the engineers' schedules. MacManiman went down to headquarters to seek some help. It was his first time sitting at SEIU's big conference table, although the table was in a different room at the time. Back then, the union was run by a guy named Mike Russo, who used one of the smaller rooms in the back as the conference room, and the suite's biggest office as his own. MacManiman asked Russo for help with the scheduling change; Russo told him he couldn't do anything. MacManiman lost his temper.

"You ain't shit," he told his union's president. "Your business agents ain't shit."

Russo offered that if MacManiman thought he could do better ("I know I can do better," MacManiman told him), he would place him on the BOLR bargaining committee. BOLR stands for Building Owners Labor Relations; it's a collective of building owners who negotiate with SEIU as a unit, and it's the biggest contract the union has. MacManiman figured Russo was just trying to shut him up. "I just told this guy to go to hell," he thought, "he's gonna invite me back for some more entertainment?" He left disgusted. But a few weeks later, he received a letter asking him to show up for a BOLR meeting.

MacManiman's blunt, confrontational style proved useful to a union unsure of itself — during negotiations, he brought out an unprecedented crowd of rowdy engineers to a protest — and pretty soon he was being courted to work full time as a rep. But MacManiman made $50,000 as an engineer; the union job paid just $38,000. He took on some part-time work with the union, but remained primarily an engineer until, in 2001, fate intervened. After suffering severe pain in his chest, MacManiman was told he'd had a heart attack and mini-stroke. He was forced onto disability, and found himself no longer capable of blue-collar work. When he finally became a union leader, he did so out of necessity.

By this time, SEIU had begun to take on a more prominent role at the national level. Membership had soared in the late '90s, and chief Andy Stern had set out to rebrand the union. He wanted to make labor capable of competing with capital on a global level, he said, and he wanted SEIU to lead the way. Purple, the union's new trademark color, would become the symbol of a changing labor movement.

Local 36, however, was troubled. Russo left his post in early 2002, setting off a power struggle between two of his underlings. The way MacManiman remembers it, everyone in the SEIU office was preoccupied with the rumors and accusations flying between the two camps — "one of the ugliest wars I've seen," he says — and he was the only one actually representing members.

He happened to be good at that. Using a chummy, backslapping charm, MacManiman developed a good relationship with building managers, a "let's be reasonable" vibe that allowed him to work out a lot of problems informally. But he was also happy to fight. He remembers one janitor who was accused of stealing a watch, and facing termination. The BOLR contract stipulates that in such cases, the union and the management company sit in front of a four-person board, two from the union and two from BOLR, and make their case. MacManiman went to work.

Usually, the management company will send three representatives: the "big boss," the account manager and the manager from the site. That site manager is the guy to focus on. "Like the lion, you always pick on the weaker prey," MacManiman says. The site manager is often a "promoted janitor, who doesn't know how to cross T's and dot I's."

"I think I'll be able to move out of there," Rivera says. "I'll be able to have a bank account."

The site manager in this case alleged that the janitor took the watch from one floor at around 7. But on another piece of paperwork, he'd written that the guy was on a different floor from 6:30 to 7:40.

MacManiman noticed this inconsistency and pointed it out in the BOLR hearing. The guy got off.

After the hearing, MacManiman told the janitor, "I think you took the fucking watch, and if you do it again, don't come to me." But his willingness to go to bat for members was starting to win him a following in the rank-and-file.

MacManiman's success did not ease the woes of the union at large. The aspiring leaders of Local 36 proved unable to resolve their differences, and their tensions finally boiled over in June 2002, in a meeting at the Crowne Plaza, when one refused to turn a microphone over to another.

"They start swinging, chairs start flying," MacManiman recalls. "I got punched trying to separate people."

In Philadelphia, "new labor" was starting to look a lot like old labor. SEIU International decided it had seen enough. It put Local 36 under "trusteeship," meaning, essentially, that the local forfeited its independence. MacManiman held on to his job, but for the next year or so, he treaded softly as the international cracked down.

By late 2003, conditions had improved, and elections restoring the sovereignty of Local 36 were called. Not knowing who would be elected and looking for job security, MacManiman decided to run for the rank of secretary-treasurer. He ended up allying with a presidential candidate named Denys Everingham. They were a white duo running against a black ticket for control of a black-and-Latino union, but they were also running against the people who'd been sent in by the international. They dubbed themselves the "Philly Home Team," and won easily.

MacManiman was just getting settled into his new job when Everingham got sick. Though he'd never balanced a budget or negotiated a contract, MacManiman became acting president (he now makes upward of $90,000). One of his first acts was to visit with Mike Fishman, the president of New York's enormous SEIU 32BJ, a gesture he considered somewhat akin to paying homage to the Godfather. During the visit, Fishman made MacManiman an offer he couldn't refuse. The international union had been working to merge SEIU's many locals into three regional unions to better negotiate with regional employers. Now, Fishman asked MacManiman to merge 36 into 32BJ.

Thirty-six had been struggling financially, even laying people off, a particularly unsavory fate for a union. A merger would provide Philly with an infusion of resources it could never muster on its own. After checking with his members, MacManiman accepted. And so Local 36 became the Mid-Atlantic District of 32BJ; 32BJ became one of the most powerful unions in Philadelphia; and Wayne MacManiman, maintenance mechanic, became the chairman of a rising purple storm.

Blanca Rivera hates her neighborhood. On her block in North Philadelphia, there are stray cats, abandoned homes, parties at all hours of the night, and the partnered sounds of gunshots and sirens far too regularly. Rivera used to own a home in Frankford, an area she liked much better. But she had to sell it two years ago, after paying for her mother's medical and funeral bills.

Shortly after moving, Rivera took a job as a janitor, cleaning the bathrooms at 1525 Locust St. When she started, she made about $8 an hour — just enough for her mortgage payments, utilities and TransPass, and not quite enough for food, which she often secured by eating at her sister's house. Six months into the new gig, a woman named Yvette approached her and told her that a union was planning to come into the building. Rivera went to a meeting, where the union promised to get her more money. She got on board with the plan, and soon thereafter, SEIU signed a contract with her employer.

 

Immediately, Rivera got a 50-cent-an-hour bump, to $8.50. Then she got another bump, and another. Now she's up to $10.38, and in January, she'll get another 75 cents. By the time the contract phases in, she'll make about $14 an hour (minus union dues of about $40 a month), plus medical benefits she's never had before ("If I get sick," she says, "I go to the store and buy me some Tylenol") and vacation days. Already, she can afford to eat a little better, and to go out occasionally with friends. Once the contract is fully in place, who knows?

"I think I'll be able to move out of there," she says. "I'll be able to have a bank account."

All the bad things you sometimes hear about unions are sometimes true: They can be corrupt, intractable, enablers of lassitude. But at its best, organized labor performs a fundamental role in a capitalist society: It makes it possible for people with no individual bargaining power to live economically dignified lives.

At present, union membership is down across the country. Pennsylvania had a lower percentage of its work force unionized in 2006 — 13.6 percent — than at any other point in the 18 years this data has been recorded. Many unions have responded to this trend by trying to protect the interests of the members they still have (some of them do a good job of this). But since MacManiman's Local 36 merged into 32BJ, the union that nearly imploded in 2002 has been trying something else. Following the footsteps of its national union, it's been bringing more Blanca Riveras into its fold.

THE BOSS: District Chairman Wayne MacManiman Jr. came to power in a divisive election. Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

It's best not to think of this strategy as altruism: 32BJ is happy to have as many dues-paying members as it can, and believes it is protecting its members' interests by eliminating non-union competitors who drive down wages. What's more, to watch 32BJ work is to realize that its motivating sentiment isn't so much benevolence as mischief. The union likes to mix it up with low-paying employers.

Though MacManiman helps set this tone, he's more of a background player in organizing drives. There are two other faces that bosses targeted by 32BJ will tire of. The first is Organizing Director Jeff Hornstein. A Brooklyn Jew by culture if not religion, Hornstein is very much "new labor." He lives in Queen Village, has an undergraduate degree from MIT and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland, and recently published a book on homeownership and the American middle class. Hornstein will tell you he joined the labor movement out of political passion, and he probably did. But it's clear he derives much joy from the competitive aspects of organizing. He wears a pleased-with-himself smile when discussing strikes and protests, and particularly relishes outsmarting wealthy businessmen who peg him as a lightweight. MacManiman regards Hornstein as something of a consigliere, the egghead behind the natural political talent. But it's hard to imagine the organizer dispensing calm, measured advice: He appears to like fighting even more than his pugnacious boss does.

Once, a manager nicknamed Big Worm came out of his building and, as the protesters sang "Who Got the Money?" danced around with a fistful of bills.

The other face is Yvette Spence, a Trinidadian former janitor who rose through the ranks of the union by participating in organizing campaigns. Spence is valuable for her ability to sell the union to potential members, but is particularly gifted with a bullhorn: 32BJ is appreciated by regular attendees of union rallies for its "fun chants," in the words of political activist Marc Stier. Her trademark is call-and-answers. "Who got the money? THEY got the money! Who got the power? WE got the power!" Typically, a 32BJ campaign goes like this: The union identifies a work site it would like to organize. Yvette and other union reps visit the workers to persuade them to sign union cards; the union also contacts the employer, usually a contractor, to inform him of its intentions. If a couple of communiqués are ignored (and they often are), the public shaming begins. A crowd of a couple of dozen purple-clad workers converges on the entrance to the work site, singing loudly. They pass out fliers, castigating the employer for paying low wages, and disturb the tenants. Occasionally, a representative of the employer will come out to confront the protesters. Littlepage, the security contractor, came out to hear the union sing his name in front of the Municipal Services Building, and playfully gestured for them to sing louder. Once, a manager nicknamed Big Worm came out of his building and, as the protesters sang "Who Got the Money?" danced around with a fistful of bills. While this is going on, Hornstein searches for angles to play against the employer. Is the owner of the building politically connected, and could the union make those friendships uncomfortable? Is there another union doing renovations on the site, and would the members "drop their tools" in solidarity? A favorite practice is to look for errors or infractions on the employers' part, such as subtracting too much out of someone's paycheck for health care. If such errors exist, Hornstein files Unfair Labor Practice complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, then calls the media and intimates that the company is in trouble. He'll sometimes try to pass off an investigation as definitive evidence of wrongdoing, though it's not: It just means a union has made a complaint.

In terms of tactics, the Mid-Atlantic District is not especially aggressive. Pittsburgh's SEIU chapter has been known to go to the homes of employers and protest there. MacManiman and Hornstein have different opinions on taking such a step. "I used to have the attitude, 'I'll mess with you at your mother's funeral,'" MacManiman says, but "my wife said, 'How would you like it if someone came to our house?'" Hornstein, meanwhile, says that militant action is not necessary in an environment like Philly, but thinks of "going nuclear" as an option under the right circumstances.

With or without the nuclear option, the union has had some success. When MacManiman's team took the reins, the union held about 80 percent of the downtown commercial building janitor market — everything but the "hard cases" who really didn't want a union, and a few older buildings where the rent isn't enough to support union wages. After taking on the toughest janitorial companies, it now has about 92 percent, or 3,000 janitors. It's also made significant headway, in tandem with the regional 32BJ, organizing janitors in the Philly suburbs, and last year unionized its first security firm, Scotland Yard.

For employers, the union tends to be an unwelcome business partner. Bob Martin, a spokesman for BOLR, says that his members are "not all smiles" about being organized. "A lot of them have had their hands forced," and "their costs are going up significantly," he says. Hornstein estimates that between wages and benefits, an employer's costs can triple when its work force goes union. "The amazing thing," he says, "is that they can all afford it."

Janitors work odd hours. Because many members of 32BJ clean office buildings, they tend to start as the traditional workday ends, and finish late at night. They then travel home, and not always to the safest neighborhoods. In the past year, two members of the Mid-Atlantic District have been shot during their return commute.

There's a big difference, in other words, between securing raises for a few janitors and building a new middle class.

For its work to be meaningful in a broad sense, 32BJ faces two main challenges. It needs to push the envelope in terms of representation for its members. And it needs to make itself a catalyst for a wider, more progressive labor movement in the city of Philadelphia.

MacManiman and his team have an opportunity to make a statement about the first challenge in the near future. On Oct. 15, the current BOLR contract will expire. Negotiations have begun on a new one, which will set the wages, benefits and vacation time for more than 2,300 janitors; what's more, it will set the standard for the commercial janitor market. MacManiman will be the lead negotiator for the union.

"I think the wages are fair," he says. "I want to get a modest increase." The sticking point is more likely to be health care. Right now, his members are fully covered individually, but pay $80 a month for dependents. As a result, he says, some have children on the government CHIP program. And that's not the middle-class lifestyle SEIU wants for its people (nor is it what the members want: The union conducted a survey to determine this negotiating priority).

Bob Martin, speaking for BOLR, implies that his organization will find concessions on health care difficult. "There presently is a cadre of benefits in place, and the cost of [health care] continues to go up. We're not immune to that." He didn't want to speculate on the possibility of work stoppage. But last week, at 32BJ headquarters, Hornstein ran a meeting where he surveyed his most active members on their readiness to strike. Going around the conference room, 24 members received cheers for saying that they and their buildings were ready to walk. Only two said they weren't prepared.

The second challenge, building a more progressive labor movement, is more complex. One thing 32BJ probably won't be able to do is continue starting fights with employers in Philadelphia. With much of the janitorial market already unionized, and most of the security market untouchable because of a deal SEIU International struck with Philly's dominant security company, AlliedBarton [News, "Allied Affront," Aug. 30, 2007], the union doesn't have a lot of options for expansion. There are residential janitors to organize, as well as more janitors in the suburbs and potentially parking garage attendants (employers of those attendants can consider themselves warned). But many of Philadelphia's service workers — restaurant employees, bank tellers, store clerks, etc. — are the "turf" of other unions. And MacManiman says he "won't cross jurisdictional lines." He likes to maintain a "mutual respect," he says.

So there's the chance that what seems like the beginning of a new, aggressive unionism could really be its peak. But there's also this: The very balance of the labor movement has been tipped by the emergence of service unions as power players. When the scene was dominated by building trades unions, it was dominated by organizations of white men, many of whom lived in New Jersey. The unions behaved accordingly. Now, observes Kathy Black of Philadelphia's AFSCME, the powerful municipal employees' union, an influx of minority women members from the service industry has "produce[d] a shift in the broader political perspective of the movement" — it's made it more progressive. SEIU and other unions, such as AFSCME and UNITE-HERE, have lent their support to all manner of causes they feel will benefit working-class people, such as transit funding and inclusionary housing.

This doesn't mean there's been a split in the labor movement. Nationally, there has — Andy Stern is regarded by many as a traitor for breaking SEIU away from the AFL-CIO, the unions' union. But locally, MacManiman has retained good relationships with his fellow union chiefs. Dougherty, the quintessential building trades leader, calls himself a "big fan" of the Mid-Atlantic District's leadership, and says "the more unionized workers we have in Philadelphia, the better it is for everyone." The building trades haven't lost ground so much as the movement as a whole has added something: a progressive element with bigger aspirations than just holding its ground. But a lot has to happen before a newly invigorated labor movement updates the definition of the term "union town."

For now, MacManiman's team is taking things one fight at a time. This past spring, a crowd of purple workers gathered out front of the Liberty Bell. The security there, they had learned, was provided by a non-union firm called Wackenhut — a multibillion-dollar global company. It was a perfect target for a campaign: The union could not only publicize the company's wages and benefits, but could bemoan the fact that the government was failing to take security at a potential terrorist target seriously. On top of that, Hornstein had discovered that some guards hadn't received a federally mandated 14-cent-an-hour boost in fringe benefits. So one warm afternoon last spring, he headed down to the Labor Board to file charges. As he was walking in the door, a janitor was walking out. Hornstein paused.

"How you doing?" he asked the guy. "They treat you good?"

(doron@citypaper.net)