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Strike looming
By Dave Somerscales - Oct 19th, 2006 at 10:07 pm EDT


Negotiations continued on Tuesday, October 17th. We were prepared to respond to serious offers from the "Big Five" cleaning companies: ABM, Sanitors, Pritchard, GCS, and One Source, but they arrived with absolutley NOTHING! Negotiations that ended where they have started- janitors at $5.15 an hour with no health benefits, no vacations, no full-time hours.

There are no further negotiations scheduled.

We have continued daily street actions including marches in downtown Houston, leafletting buildings, house vists, phone banking and community outreach. Many tenants tha twe talk to in the buildings seem supportive, after all, our message, our goal is clear and easy to support. Most people think $5.15 an hour is unfair.

We have targeted Chevron's headquarters (the old Enron building) for some very specific daily actions. The Chevron building has three large pink breast cancer awareness ribbons attached to the front of their building. We find this both offensive and ironic as one of the key janitor leaders - Ercilia - has advanced breast cancer, not diagnosed because she has no insurance and couldn't afford to go to a doctor. Yet Chevron - and all of the building owners - continue to try and dodge any responsibility for the janitors' struggle. They claim we should take our fight directlt to the cleaning companies, that Chevron, Exxon, et. al merely CONTRACT out for the cleaning. This is a cowardly and specious argument! Chevron shares reponsibility to help come up with solutions when the janitors who clean their bulding have no insurance.

We have leafletted Chevron and chained up a member in front of the building (on public space, but this may change as things escalate)

Tommorow we continue the struggle - get ready for something BIG on Monday!




The message is concise: We are prepared to go on strike next week! I will update the blog as the strike occurs

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