I met Kirk Adams on Memorial Day in 1981 when he walked into the United Labor Union offices at 628 Baronne Street in downtown New Orleans. The first thing I noticed was his outfit: neatly creased khaki pants, button-down shirt, lace-up brown shoes. He reminded me of a Jesuit missionary. (I didn’t know it then, but he had been an altar boy and brought with him the best parts of the social justice Catholic tradition.) I took one look at him and thought, Great-looking guy, nice smile. He’ll last a week. Kirk remembers that I had on a leotard top, a jeans skirt, and flats, which had all been bought at the secondhand clothing store, my go-to in those days. The way he tells it, he fell in love at first sight.
I’d been at the ULU for about a year by then. It was my second union organizing job. The first didn’t work out quite the way I’d hoped; the union had been less than enthusiastic about a young woman who came in questioning everything. The ULU, on the other hand, was a scrappy upstart dedicated to organizing low-wage workers for better pay and working conditions. In New Orleans that meant hotel workers. By the time Kirk showed up, I’d seen many would-be organizers come through town, but few stuck it out. I was in charge of newcomers, so I gave him a list of hotel workers to visit and put him on a bus to the Desire housing projects. He not only came back—he was hugely successful in getting folks to think about starting a union, after they figured out he wasn’t a cop or selling insurance.
Kirk came to us from Massachusetts, where he’d worked on a campaign to unionize home health aides in Boston, primarily women who took care of the elderly and disabled for less than minimum wage. It turned out he was a great listener with enormous empathy. He related well to the people we were organizing, who sensed his sincerity and commitment. That was no coincidence: Kirk’s mom had worked the midnight shift at the post office, and his father was a milkman. Kirk knew what it was like for working-class families because he had come from one himself.
As a gritty little organizing team, we were constantly putting up traveling staff and anyone we could convince to join our merry band. That’s how Kirk ended up staying at my house when he first arrived in town. He didn’t know anyone, so I said he could sleep on my living-room couch until he found a place.
By then I was subletting an apartment in Mid-City from a wild artist who made life-size stuffed puppets. They were scattered all over the apartment, along with about seventy house plants that, in exchange for cheap rent, I was supposed to keep alive.
I learned a few things about Kirk during those first weeks. He would happily eat cereal three meals a day, and sometimes did. He used shoe trees, which my sister, Ellen, always found suspect. And he had no bad habits, except for betting on the occasional basketball game with his brother Jeff, a bar owner in western Massachusetts. In short, Kirk was the most respectable guy I’d met in years, but he fit right in with the rest of us and never blinked at the crazy life we were living. And underneath that button-down shirt, he was a troublemaker at heart.
If union organizing is a foreign concept to you, here’s a quick 101: Unions are one of the main ways workers can fight for good wages and benefits. Employers have a whole lot of power on their side, and the best way for workers to bargain with them is if they all stand together. And by the way, having strong unions doesn’t just make things better for union members: if you enjoy affordable health care, an eight-hour workday, and weekends, thank the labor movement in America.
To win a union campaign, two things usually have to happen. First, employees show their interest by signing a union card or petition, which means they want to unionize. Then, often, a government-run secret-ballot election is held to see if their coworkers feel the same way, with a representative of the federal National Labor Relations Board coming out to monitor the vote. If a majority of workers vote for the union, the employer has to bargain with the employees in order to reach a labor contract, spelling out wages, hours, and working conditions.
That’s union organizing in theory. In practice it’s an uphill battle and frequently risky for the workers who are willing to stick out their necks to fight for a decent wage. During the process, employees are often harassed or fired, or they quit due to the pressure. It can be incredibly hard to win a union election, and even harder to get someone’s job back when he or she is illegally terminated. It might take years for an employee to win his or her case, by which time the union campaign is usually long over. That’s especially true for workers earning the minimum wage.
When I was starting out, union organizing wasn’t much different from the movie Norma Rae. In the climactic scene, Sally Field as the title character climbs up on a table in the garment shop where she works, holding a handmade sign with the word UNION scrawled in Magic Marker, while, one by one, her coworkers shut down their machines in a show of solidarity. While I never witnessed anything quite that dramatic, I worked with countless women leaders who were every bit as gutsy.
As organizers, our job was to go to workplaces—from hotels to hospitals—and talk with folks about forming a union. As you might expect, employers don’t exactly roll out the red carpet when they see an organizer coming, so we wound up spending most of our time waiting around to talk to employees when they got off work.
At my first job I hung around outside a garment factory in Texas and made conversation with the primarily Latina workers either on lunch break or after the workday ended. It’s crazy now to think of grown women, most of them supporting kids and sometimes their own parents as well, talking to me about starting a union. What did an Anglo kid fresh out of college know about the world? It was as humbling as it was eye-opening. Many of these women had already risked so much to come to the United States. They knew they were not being treated fairly on the job, and they could write volumes about their experiences with sexual harassment. Whatever apprehension they felt about talking to me was outweighed by their desire to make something better for themselves and, more important, for their kids. They didn’t want their daughters to end up sewing jeans for $3.35 an hour.
Back when Mom was starting to get into politics, she often reminded me, “People don’t do things for your reasons—they do things for their reasons.” What I learned in that first year, sitting in trailers in rural Texas or at the local church or coffee shop, is that the women I met would do just about anything to improve their lives, including talking to me about banding together with their fellow workers.
On my first day at the ULU, I was hanging around outside the Warwick Hotel in downtown New Orleans when I spotted a young woman dressed in a housekeeping uniform. She looked determined, like her shift had just ended and she was out of there—just the kind of person I was hoping to talk to. As she headed toward the bus stop, I intercepted her and introduced myself. “I’ve heard that the wages and working conditions at the Warwick are pretty tough, and I wanted to see if we can do something about it,” I said. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure no one from the hotel was watching, she asked for my phone number. “I’ll call you later,” she promised, running for her bus.
In my short career as an organizer, I’d had plenty of similar conversations that never actually resulted in the promised call. So I was surprised when the phone rang later that day, and it was the young woman. She told me that working in the hotel was a horror. Hotels were notorious for putting white male employees in the cushy “front of the house” jobs, staffing the front desk or working as a bellman, where they got tips. Like most African American women in the service industry, she was relegated to housekeeping, working long hours for terrible pay. When Mardi Gras or the Sugar Bowl was on, rooms were full and she had to pull double shifts. But in the slow season she didn’t work enough to make ends meet. There were no guarantees of a weekly paycheck, and when she did work, she was cleaning fourteen rooms a day.
After that initial call, we started getting together after work. She said she had friends who wanted to talk too. Soon we were meeting with other housekeepers, busboys, janitors, and cooks from the hotel—all of whom were working for low pay with no hope of advancement. They weren’t naïve; they knew just talking to us could cost them their jobs, but that was a chance they were willing to take. Sure enough, management started firing and harassing people right and left. I quickly realized the hotel owners were not going to make it easy for their employees to improve their lot—and the workers realized it too. One day a cook named Eugene had finally had enough. He decided to go out with a bang, literally. He paraded through the well-attired lunchtime crowd at the Warwick, pounding on a gumbo pot and yelling, “We don’t even have a pot to piss in!”
One of the many wise workers I met was Charles Husband, a maintenance employee at the Warwick and a natural philosopher. The young guys at work looked up to him, and though he knew our odds of successfully forming a union were almost nonexistent, he believed that standing up for himself and his coworkers was worth taking the chance. It was from listening to Charles that I learned a fundamental truth about organizing: despite the terrible wages and working conditions, what mattered most to the workers was gaining respect from their boss. And if they lost their job in the process, as Charles would say, “I was looking for a job when I got this one.” In other words, there was always going to be more work, but nothing was going to change unless someone was willing to stand up and fight back.
I had never worked so hard in my life, yet I had it easy compared to the women pulling a double shift cleaning hotel rooms. I wouldn’t trade those days for anything—working seven days a week, often from early in the morning until late at night. There was no such thing as a time clock or a regular schedule; we followed the schedules of the service workers. I witnessed firsthand the enormous challenges they faced both at work and in their personal lives. The women in particular weren’t just figuring out how to make it until payday. They were the ones tasked with finding someone to take their kids when they got called in at the last minute or looking for a ride to get their mom to church on Sunday. Their jobs didn’t end when they punched out; they just changed venues.
For all the time and effort we put in, we were hardly what you would call successful. The union was running on a shoestring, as were we. We knew all the best deals in town—from $1.25 beans and rice at the original Buster’s on Burgundy Street in the French Quarter to the oyster-dressing special at Eddie’s on Law Street in Gentilly to the fact that you could get any beer for $1.00 at the Saturn Bar in the Ninth Ward, with the best neon sign in town. George Porter from the original Meters played every Thursday night at Tyler’s on Magazine Street. My coworker and roommate, Nancy Cohen, waited tables there, which meant she could get us in for free. Everyone had a side hustle and a way to get free tickets or free food. My fellow organizer Jon Barton figured out that if you kept the “all you can eat” salad plate from Wendy’s, you could just keep coming back day after day. If nothing else, we were a resourceful bunch.
In between organizing twelve hours a day, our team did whatever we could think of to keep the union afloat. We’d get the hotel workers to run fish suppers on Fridays. We took orders; set up an assembly-line frying station; packed bags with donated Hostess Twinkies, some potato salad, and fried fish; then drove all over town delivering them. This was where Kirk put us all to shame. If a group turned away their lunches because we showed up an hour late, he wasn’t about to let them go to waste; he’d hock them at a construction site on the way back. “Kirk, what happened to the last order? They called and said not to bother!” we’d ask. “Don’t worry about it, I found another taker,” he’d answer, and drop the money on the table. He could out-work and out-hustle anybody.
We ate, slept, and breathed the union. We fundraised on street corners all around New Orleans—it was really more like organized begging—and canvassed door to door, which was more respectable but even more uncomfortable. (Nothing is quite so humiliating as asking for money and having the door slammed in your face.) We even made our own advertising flyer for downtown business; we’d sell ads on the flyer and pay kids to pass them out on street corners. I learned quickly that I would never starve, though some days we came a little too close for comfort.
We all found ourselves doing things we might not have pictured. One of my favorite Kirk stories was the time he was standing on a street corner at Claiborne and Carrollton Avenues in New Orleans, looking so clean-cut, shaking a can to raise money for the union. A guy drove up and rolled down his window at the intersection: it was one of Kirk’s classmates from Wesleyan University. Kirk said hi and explained to his surprised classmate what he was doing. At least the guy gave him a dollar—our goal was “No contribution that clinked.” It was a little embarrassing for Kirk, but he took it in stride. Three months later Kirk went back to Boston to help out on a home care organizing campaign for the union. They too were trying to make ends meet, and he was shaking a can on Massachusetts Avenue when the same guy pulled up again. Kirk explained sheepishly that he was an expert at can shaking, so he had gone national.
Somewhere along the way Kirk and I went from roommates to friends and ended up dating—although he never technically asked me out on a date. He recalls that a seminal moment in our relationship was when he got arrested on a Friday night for driving without a license, without insurance, and without an inspection sticker. These were details he hadn’t taken care of, probably because the moment he got to New Orleans we had put him to work knocking on doors. He was cooling his heels in the general lockup, otherwise known as the drunk tank, at the New Orleans City jail and facing a very long weekend. I called around and we found a judge to bail him out. Kirk says that when I arrived, it was like the line in The Band’s song “Up on Cripple Creek”: “a drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one.”
• • •
By the spring of 1982, when it was obvious that we were serious, I brought Kirk home to spend Easter with my family and friends in Austin. That meant he had to:
1. Experience the intensity of a Richards holiday.
2. Wear bunny ears like everyone else.
3. Be cross-examined not only by my mother, which was hard enough, but also by Jane Hickie, Mom’s trusted friend and first lieutenant. (Ultimately Jane announced, “He’s a keeper.”)
After Kirk passed the test in Texas, it was my turn to meet his family in Massachusetts. We went up that summer to see his dad and brothers at his sister’s house in Scituate. Kirk had lost his mom several years earlier from a stroke; it is the heartbreak of my life that I never met Marion Adams. The black-and-white photos show a woman with gorgeous cheekbones, just like Kirk. She was usually holding a cigarette in a glamorous ’50’s movie star kind of way and drinking—she apparently loved her whiskey. She was a working-class mother of four who had enormous compassion for others. With pride in his voice, Kirk described his mother as an early feminist. At the post office where she worked, and at church on Sundays, she saw that women were getting a raw deal. She used to open their home to young, unmarried pregnant women who came to her and needed a place to stay until they gave birth. His father, Bill, was a shy guy who worked as a milkman and always held down at least two jobs all his life. I credit him with Kirk’s unmatched work ethic. It was watching his father toiling for decades to support his family that drew Kirk to the labor movement.
With the parents often pulling double shifts, everyone in the Adams family had to fend for themselves. Kirk’s dad cooked at least as much as his mom did. Every weeknight had its own routine—who had time to think up something new? Monday night was meatloaf, Tuesday was macaroni and cheese, and Friday was “tuna wiggle.” This was before Vatican II, when Catholics couldn’t eat meat on Fridays. Food and cooking were such a big deal in my house growing up that I could hardly imagine eating the same thing each week. That was just one early sign of the culture clash between a Texas Unitarian liberal upbringing and that of a shanty Irish Catholic from western Massachusetts.
There were no hoops to jump through for me, no Hercules-type trials, and certainly no bunny ears with the Adamses. It’s hard to find many similarities between our two families, but one thing was true: both supported our work unconditionally, even if they were slightly mystified by the lives we’d chosen for ourselves. As Kirk’s dad would say to him, shaking his head: “I can’t believe they pay you to make trouble.”
• • •
After two years in New Orleans—one year for Kirk—we were ready for a change. For all of our enthusiasm, our team’s organizing efforts weren’t succeeding. We had taken on the second largest industry in the city, tourism, with a popgun. To organize the thousands of hotel workers in the city effectively, we would have needed at least two dozen organizers and a better way to finance the operation than selling fish suppers. Even the established labor movement, representing the waterfront and the building trades, saw us as a bunch of leftist upstarts—which, for all intents and purposes, we were.
One day Gerry Shea, a big shot with the Service Employees Union, came through New Orleans. They were going to try to organize a union for workers at the largest for-profit nursing home chain in the country. The chain, Beverly Enterprises, had made a fortune buying up nursing homes and cutting wages to the bone—and one of the crown jewels was Texas. Gerry hired both of us. So not long afterward Kirk and I loaded up the Lynx, tying our futon on top. Everything we owned was in that car. (Well, almost everything. We had to leave the toaster oven behind; we just didn’t have the space.) With that, we headed to Houston.
From the moment we started our new jobs we were on the road, traveling all over East Texas. It seemed like every small town had a Beverly nursing home, and we set out to unionize them all. The women we worked with were doing the Lord’s work taking care of the elderly, but making less than $4.00 an hour, which was only slightly more than minimum wage.
I soon learned that there were three kinds of nursing home workers: those who had been working there for years, who were dedicated, patient, and loved by the residents and their coworkers; those who stayed on until they could get a job somewhere else, where they didn’t have to handle the incredibly tough working conditions and frequent abuse by family members and residents; and those who quickly figured out there was no way they were working there. One of the employee leaders we met described this last group as women who on their first day said they were going on break to buy cigarettes and never came back.
Most of the places we organized were in deep East Texas, which was as segregated a world as I’d ever seen. After a few months Kirk and I migrated to Tyler, where there were many more women to organize. We moved into a small redbrick house where we could live in the back and hold union meetings in the front. The house was on Houston Street, in the middle of town, pretty much right on the racial divide between north and south Tyler. The day we arrived, our neighbors came over to bring us some fresh-cut Tyler roses in a mason jar.
“We’re so glad you moved in,” they said, “because before you, there was a Negro family living here.” My jaw dropped.
Much to their dismay, our house became the central gathering spot for African American nursing home workers. Women pulled up in their run-down Chevrolets and parked in the front yard, before and after their shifts. We had our union meetings in the living room, and often they’d bring a cold one in a brown paper bag. Tyler was a dry county, so you couldn’t buy liquor unless you drove thirty miles to the county line at Big Sandy. As a result folks drank more in Tyler than anywhere I’ve ever lived; as long as you were driving a half hour, you sure as hell weren’t going to come back with just a six-pack.
Kirk and I made fast friends with a bunch of progressive lawyers, including Larry Daves, Rick Levy, and Martha Owen, who ran a law firm that kept busy suing all kinds of folks for employment discrimination, wage and hour violations, and any other social justice issue. They often helped us out on the many labor issues we were dealing with at Beverly. And every year a new crop of law clerks would arrive in Tyler from around the country to work for Judge William Wayne Justice, famous for championing the rights of low-income folks, minorities, and people who had no one to stand up for them.
There wasn’t much to do in Tyler, so we made our own fun. Social outings usually revolved around food and beer and music. This is where I reinvented the Richards family tradition of “all-come” dinner parties—everyone was invited. It was also in Tyler that I began my lifelong love affair with pie—a food group that the local café, Cox’s Grill, had perfected. There was coconut cream, cherry, chess pie—you name it. You could even have pie for breakfast.
Most important, Tyler was where I learned that, even in the midst of soul-crushing poverty, people could celebrate and love life. East Texas was a tough place to live—especially if you were African American, and a woman to boot. When we won a union election, it was time to rent a room at the Ramada Inn, get somebody’s son to DJ, and have at it. Those years were full of Luther Vandross’s “Bad Boy / Having a Party” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long.” Even though the days were hard, some of our very best times were celebrating with the amazing women employee leaders of East Texas.
The years we spent in East Texas reminded me of a question the longtime farmworker organizer Marshall Ganz had posed years earlier: What’s the definition of a leader? His answer: Someone who has followers. The women we organized with didn’t have money or political influence, but everybody looked up to them. Jeril was raising her daughters on her minimum-wage salary from the nursing home in Bryan, and her apartment in the projects was the center of the community. Vicki in Texas City was constantly taking second jobs so she could finally buy a home of her own. She never missed a day’s work, and she was committed to her patients. And Georgia Landry in Beaumont was everyone’s grandmother, working the graveyard shift and encouraging the younger new employees to stick with the job. These were women who had earned the respect of their coworkers and, more often than not, the unspoken admiration of their employers.
The organizing campaigns were ugly, and they were tough. Folks were threatened and fired, but they persevered. We held elections in town after town and had the best winning streak in the union. Our leaders took photos with Instamatic cameras, and we produced “Why I’m Voting YES” posters that they passed around to their coworkers. After we won the election, Kirk worked with the employees to bargain for the first time on their union contract.
Beverly Enterprises was as cheap as dirt, and the contracts provided barely more than what the workers were earning before we started. But the women wanted respect and recognition for the work they did, and organizing a union accomplished that. Their boss had to sit across the table from them as equals and talk about wages and working conditions, and that had never happened before.
• • •
After we’d been in Texas for a while, it was time to fish or cut bait, so Kirk and I decided to get married at my mom’s house in Austin. I don’t remember any grand proposal or sweeping gesture; we were in love and I was impatient, and it seemed like a good thing to do. I was twenty-seven, Kirk was thirty-four, and we were ready. For us, getting married was more of a continuation of our organizing life, with the added commitment that it seemed we would now be doing this forever. There wasn’t much time to plan a wedding in between nursing home elections, so we just picked a weekend in June. We obviously didn’t think ahead or we never would have done anything in June in Texas—it was hot as blazes! But it was a great chance to bring together our organizing buddies, my Texas family, and Kirk’s relatives from Massachusetts. In those days we didn’t need much to have a celebration—just a date, a band, good friends, and good food.
Mom’s house wasn’t big, but she put up a tent in the side yard and threw a party. The wedding was hot and raucous; the highlight was a rousing chorus of the labor anthem “Solidarity Forever,” led by the civil rights lawyer Jim Youngdahl. By that point Mom was the state treasurer, so the gathering also included politicians and longtime family friends such as Molly Ivins and Congressman Lloyd Doggett—a progressive lovefest in more ways than one! I wore a white lace dress Mom and I bought off the rack, which later became a dress-up costume for my kids, and some crazy beaded headpiece my mother had bought. Kirk and I wrote our own vows, my sister was my maid of honor, and Kirk’s best friend, Dave Keith, was his best man. Mom had told us that if we wanted a band, we’d have to find one ourselves, so we booked Beto y los Fairlanes and shared our first dance to “String of Pearls.” Everyone hit the dance floor after that, and we carried on until the neighbors shut us down. It was only years later that my father told me he had been hurt when I didn’t ask him to give me away. Give me away? I had been on my own for years, and, anyway, no one was giving me to anyone! It was not a traditional wedding in anyone’s book. Looking back now, I realize that the misunderstanding with my father happened because of a personality trait he and I share: we both believe that our way of thinking is always the only way, and we are often completely oblivious when we’ve upset someone as a result.
As soon as the “I dos” were finished, we raced to Beaumont in Southeast Texas to prepare for the biggest nursing home strike in Texas history. A few years earlier the women at the Schlesinger nursing home had organized and bargained a union contract with the best wages in the state. But when it came time to renegotiate, the employer decided to try to break the union and force the women to go out on strike or work for lower wages. It was against the law, but employers got away with it all the time. We decided there was no option but to strike, and Beaumont was an ideal place. The area was home to industrial unions, since it was in the heart of the petrochemical plants. It was as union-friendly a town as you could find in Texas, and these women’s cause was just.
The women were incredible. Jim Youngdahl came down from Little Rock to do the lawyering; he was brilliant and irrepressible. Jim was a large man, and he loved the ladies. One night after a particularly hard day on the picket line, we all wound up at a bar in Beaumont. Using very bad judgment, we let Jim and the women strikers participate in the bar’s tug-of-war, which consisted of Jim on one side and a dozen large women on the other. Despite Jim’s girth, the women won. The whole ordeal ended with him crashing to the floor.
We threw everything we had at Schlesinger, but they wouldn’t budge. Our last-gasp effort was to create as much bad publicity for the employer and public uproar as possible. So we printed a gigantic banner and signs that shouted “Justice Comes to Beaumont!” We organized a march and even persuaded Congressman John Lewis of Georgia to come and lead us. It was at least 100 degrees that day, but he marched the entire way, and I have loved him ever since.
Sadly, in the words of my friend the late Ray Abernathy, who masterminded the campaign, “Justice may have come to Beaumont, but it left the next day.” We lost the strike, and it was a bitter ending. The company had hired replacement workers in order to keep the nursing home open. Our women stayed out on strike, but once employers break the union, they get to decide who they’re going to bring back. Some women got their jobs back, but others did not. Even if we had won, the women we were organizing were never going to get rich or even make it into the middle class. At its core the campaign had been a fight for dignity—a way for the women to finally have their boss treat them as an equal, to sit down and bargain with them. Now they were back at square one. I learned a very tough lesson that my dad had admonished me about before: Never go out on strike unless you have a plan to get back in.
There’s no way to minimize the responsibility Kirk and I felt. It was a deeply personal loss for so many people who had been counting on us, and for everyone who had worked on the campaign. In a low moment I wondered whether it would have been better not to have fought at all. But while I didn’t know what the outcome would be when we started, I knew for certain what it would have been if we’d never even tried. That is as true today as it was in Beaumont.
After we had run union elections in pretty much every Beverly nursing home in East Texas, the union approached us about moving to Los Angeles, where they needed more organizing talent. By this point we were used to moving every couple of years, so we accepted the job and I flew out to look for a place to live. Someone had recommended I check out Venice Beach. After segregated, Bible-thumping Tyler, Venice was another world. I had to call Kirk. “You aren’t going to believe it. The beach is integrated, and there are women in bikinis Rollerblading down the boardwalk!”
We packed up the car and moved to L.A., where we would run the most important union organizing campaigns of our careers. Kirk was hired to organize seventy-two thousand home care workers, something no one had ever done before. And I became part of the “Justice for Janitors” campaign, with the goal of unionizing the immigrant workers who cleaned the high-rise office buildings downtown.
Here my Spanish came in handy. Eric Porras, originally from Guatemala, and Jono Shaffer, from California, were my partners in the campaign. Eric was a born leader and could talk to anyone. He had worked in and around the janitorial industry and so knew plenty of folks and, it seemed, pretty much everyone from Guatemala. He was tall, dark-haired, and good-looking and could hold a crowd. Jono had been organizing public workers but was looking for something with more energy. He matched Eric in height and his Spanish was perfect—they were an amazing duo. We soon added Rocio Saenz, a young immigrant from Mexico, and Ana Navarette, from El Salvador. Ana called me la chingona, which means “big boss”—I took it as a term of endearment. She was short but mighty, and she was as fierce an organizer on the doors as anyone I’ve ever met. Rafael Estrada, or Rafa, as we called him, was the only mild-mannered one of the bunch, a total sweetheart.
The idea of the campaign was pretty simple: we needed to get the attention of the downtown building owners and shame them into granting better wages and working conditions to the cleaning crews. There were dozens of nonunion buildings housing the most prestigious banks and law firms in town, from O’Melveny and Myers to Citibank.
The janitors worked at night, usually long after all the office workers had gone home, so we would meet them outside at the food trucks at ten p.m., on their dinner break. We would flyer the building lobbies during the day with pictures of the janitors, who cleaned the buildings for minimum wage and no benefits, and their families. The mad genius of it all, Stephen Lerner, was the organizing director for the Service Employees International Union, based in Washington. He was constantly thinking up new ways for us to get in the news and increase the pressure on the building owners. We marched through banks and law firms during the lunch hour, carrying mops and brooms and banging on enormous drums. We used every possible stunt to get in the news, which isn’t easy in Los Angeles. If it wasn’t a ten-car pileup on the Santa Monica Freeway, you almost never made the TV. Fortunately Spanish-language television loved our stunts. For Thanksgiving we would dress someone in a turkey costume and present “Turkey of the Year” awards to the worst building owners.
At this point our first daughter, Lily, had arrived, so she was raised from the start on the picket line. I’d show up at night at the buildings with her in a backpack; she was at more union meetings before she could walk than most people in their entire lives. While Kirk and I ran our organizing campaigns, Jono and the rest of the team became her surrogate parents, and she would roll around the office in a baby walker.
It was clear from the beginning that we weren’t in Tyler anymore. The Latino community in Los Angeles was powerful: there were Latino elected officials, activist priests, and respected community leaders. We were able to get all kinds of political support. There were janitor leaders in every downtown building, the face of the tale of two cities: a booming economy that was supported by janitors making minimum wage.
We decided to escalate, and after one of many building sit-ins, with more than one hundred people occupying the lobby of the O’Melveny and Myers Building, three of us—me, Jono, and a baby-faced Episcopalian priest named Phillip Lance, who was carrying a large crucifix—refused to leave. We had planned this, since we couldn’t have any undocumented janitors getting arrested. We had put together such a mighty campaign; now we just had to tip it over the edge. I was more than ready to go. It was my first arrest, for disturbing the peace. After sitting in the city lockup for a few hours, we were released, but I never forgot the humiliation of being fingerprinted and having a mug shot. Nothing about jail is glamorous.
We succeeded in letting the building owners know we were serious—and more important, we raised the profile of the campaign and highlighted the injustice of the wages and conditions of the downtown janitors. There were many more chapters and arrests to come, but ultimately the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles was a success in getting union contracts downtown and eventually all across the city.
Seeing the chances that our leaders took—being public and bold, putting a human face on the inequity in the city, potentially losing their jobs (which many did) to fight for respect and decent conditions—still inspires me today.
Whenever I asked the janitors about the risks involved, they would tell me what they had already sacrificed to come to the United States. Most were from Central America and had traveled by land hundreds of miles, paying coyotes to smuggle them across the border. Many had left their parents, children, or spouses behind. Despite the shamefully low pay, many counted on their minimum-wage jobs to send money back home. More than any folks I’ve ever worked with, they understood that life is what you make of it, and they were determined to take every opportunity they had to make something better. It was a family endeavor for all of us; there were kids at every march and protest, wearing union T-shirts, carrying balloons, and holding signs.
As for my partners from that campaign, Jono Shaffer is still at it today, organizing service workers in California. Rocio Saenz went on to run one of the largest local unions in the country, in Boston, and later became a national officer for SEIU. And I never work in a building without knowing the janitors. In most cities they are truly the invisible ones, who work long after most people have gone home and do work that no one else would do. I always remember to thank them and make sure they are earning a living wage.
• • •
Kirk and I were on a high. Up until then we had been organizing small, one-off campaigns in which we weren’t actually shifting the power or changing the situation for the workers. Now we were fundamentally changing the landscape, fighting for real equity instead of just fighting for a nickel an hour. Lily was two years old, we were settled into our neighborhood in Venice, living right near the beach, and there was organizing as far as the eye could see, from hospital workers and janitors to home health aides. Our whole life was the fight for respect and justice for the most overworked and underpaid folks in the city. We loved it.
But life happens when you’re making other plans. My mother called to say she needed us back in Texas, so we were soon packing up our California memories to head back home.
Kirk and me as union organizers, saying goodbye to janitors, health care workers, and friends in Los Angeles as we moved back to Austin.