"When we fight, we win!"

INDIANAPOLIS.  What was going to be a civil disobedience confrontation between SEIU Local 1 and Mission Peak, the building management company that just hired a new anti-union janitorial service at two adjacent buildings in downtown Indianapolis, turned into a victory celebration instead.  The day before the scheduled civil disobedience action, Thursday, July 13, Mission Peak informed SEIU Local 1 by letter that it was not hiring as its janitorial contractor Bulldog, the contractor Local 1 vehemently opposed as unfair to its workers.   (Local 1 held a union contract with the previous contractor, which was now nullified under Bulldog.)  Mission Peak, as stated in its letter, would instead open bidding for a “responsible employer,” one that the union could work with.  So, at 10 AM, the approximately 75 people gathered at Indianapolis downtown’s City Market to move over to the nearby Gold Building for civil disobedience, remained gathered for a victory celebration instead.  In telling the supporters of the good news, Paul Nappier, SEIU Local 1’s 31-year-old sole paid staff organizer in Indianapolis, shouted out the lesson from this:  “When we fight, we win!”

Represented among the supporters of Local 1, which has waged a multi-year campaign to organize the janitors in Indianapolis downtown janitorial services, were of course, activist janitors of Local 1 themselves, but also security guards supporting Local 1, which is another organizing task in Indianapolis the SEIU local is undertaking.  Also among the activists were members of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), United Steelworkers (USW), AFSCME, and community activist and political groups Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); Labor for Our Revolution, offshoot of the Bernie Sanders campaign; Jobs with Justice (JwJ); and activists from the campaign for justice for Aaron Bailey, an unarmed black man who had recently been shot dead in his car by an Indianapolis police officer.  This writer attended as an activist and as a member of the union he belongs to, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). 

The short but spirited rally featured four Latina activist janitors who had worked at the Mission Peak-managed Gold Building and the adjacent 262 E. Ohio building, and had been dismissed.  They now had their jobs back, and each one addressed the crowd in Spanish through an interpreter thanking everyone for their support.  Of the 75 or so in attendance, a good ⅔ had been willing to perform civil disobedience and be arrested.  The rally ended by everyone joining together in singing all five verses plus the repeated chorus of “Solidarity Forever” to sax and French horn accompaniment, and multiple photo-taking of the participants.

While Indiana’s overall poverty rate is 14% (however, that’s according to federal poverty guidelines, which considerably understate the threshold for actual poverty), in Indianapolis it’s 21% overall, with the poverty rate for African Americans at 22%, and the poverty rate a whopping 28% for Latinos in the city, while the Indianapolis poverty rate for whites overall is 14%.  Also, janitors at the cleaning services often only work 4-6 hours a night, and pay, even under the union contact, is only around $9 an hour; however, with a contact there are benefits, and workers represented by the union do much better than the minimum wage or a little above, with no benefits, that non-union janitors make.  Plus, they have job security.  While SEIU’s demands for a “responsible employer” and “fair wages” with decent working conditions may seem “reformist” or just apolitical pure-and-simple trade unionism to many on the left, these demands are very important to the workers involved themselves, who are enthusiastic supporters of SEIU Local 1, and are heavily black and Latino.

So, Paul Nappier, SEIU Local 1’s young activist organizer, definitely has a point.  “When we fight, we win!”—and sometimes with surprising victories.  And every victory for labor in these hard times is, of course, incredibly sweet.