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This Week in Poverty: Janitors Strike in Houston?
http://www.thenation.com/blog/168183/week-poverty-janitors-strike-houstonn Houston, more than 3,200 janitors clean the offices of some of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world: JP Morgan Chase, Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Wells Fargo, KBR and Marathon Oil to name a few. For their labor, they are paid an hourly wage of $8.35 and earn an average of $8,684 annually. Two janitors together would earn about $17,300 a yearstill well below the poverty line of $22,314 for a family of four.
Yesterday, the contract between the janitors and the cleaning contractors expired. SEIU Local 1 spent the past month trying to reach an agreement to raise the janitors hourly wage to $10 over the next three years. But the contractors countered with an offer of a $.50 pay raise phased in over five years andaccording to SEIU spokesperson Paloma Martinez said that they wouldnt budge. The contractors claimed that the building owners and tenantsthe aforementioned corporationsarent willing to pay anything close to a living wage.
In response the janitors voted to authorize their bargaining committee to call a strike. For workers already struggling on sub-poverty wages, this was no easy decision.
The workers were really insulted by the offer, said Martinez. The contractors said they werent going to move and they blamed it on the building owners, but we all know the state of the real estate market here.
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This Week in Poverty: Janitors Strike in Houston? (Original Post)
xchrom
Jun 2012
OP
Aristus
(66,530 posts)1. Here's to the striking janitors!
And here's to SEIU, my old union. They were great at protecting us during contract negotiations.
Let's see how cocky those corporate assholes are when their offices are squalid, dirty pits...
DemocratsForProgress
(545 posts)2. Thank you for the link!
Aristus
(66,530 posts)3. Welcome to DU, DemocratsForProgress!
DemocratsForProgress
(545 posts)4. Thanks, Aristus!