New York Times, April 18, 2000
Janitors Struggle at the Edges of Silicon Valley's Success
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- From 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. each night, Guadalupe Herrera
cleans offices at that pinnacle of high-tech success, Cisco Systems, and
then she heads home to the garage where she, her husband and two sons live.
When Marķa Godinez returns late each night from her $8-an-hour janitor's
job at Sun Microsystems, she slips into the bedroom she shares with her
husband and five children: part of a single-family house where four
families and 22 people live.
Rosalba Ceballos, who also lives in a garage, vacuums carpets and cleans
bathrooms at another Silicon Valley success story, KLA-Tencor, but because
her rent comes to three-fourths of that job's monthly pay she juggles two
other jobs to support herself and her three children.
High-flying companies like Cisco and Sun can rightfully boast that they
have created a new class of employees -- stock option millionaires -- but
they have given rise to another class of workers as well: the invisible
toilers, for the most part janitors, who earn too little to afford decent
housing in a booming region.
"It's not good that these companies are making so much money, while they're
benefiting from the low wages they pay us," said Mrs. Herrera, whose
husband works as a $7-an-hour janitor at a nearby nursing home. "It's not
fair that they do this with us. In reality, we need more."
The janitors, almost all of them immigrants from Mexico or Central America,
many of them here illegally, are whipsawed by two powerful forces: the
influx of immigrants is putting downward pressures on wages while the
region's red-hot economy is pushing housing costs skyward.
As a result, the rent that many janitors pay for garages usually exceeds
half their monthly take-home pay and often equals what people elsewhere in
the country pay for a two-bedroom apartment.
Many high-technology companies said they do not have any responsibility for
their janitors' wages or living conditions. The janitors, company officials
say, are not their employees, but rather those of cleaning contractors
hired by the electronics companies that have made this region symbolize the
New Economy.
Kern Beare, a spokesman for KLA-Tencor, declined to discuss the janitors'
situation, saying, "The janitors are not our employees, and we don't
comment upon other companies' employees."
Mike Garcia, president of a union local that represents thousands of
California janitors, called the companies' position indefensible, insisting
that they were hiding behind subcontracting rules to dodge their
responsibilities to the people who empty their wastebaskets and dust their
shelves. Whether the janitors work directly or indirectly for them, Mr.
Garcia said, Silicon Valley stars like Cisco and Sun have a moral
obligation to make sure these workers do not live in poverty.
"These companies have a heavy responsibility," said Mr. Garcia, president
of Local 1877 of the Service Employees International Union. "They can try
to hide behind their cleaning contractors, but what they should really do
is take responsibility for the plight of their janitors and their poorest
workers. They should give them a fair wage that will lift them out of
poverty."
Mr. Garcia, a leader in his union's Justice for Janitors campaign, said
something was wildly askew when Silicon Valley's elite raked in millions in
stock options, while the workers who hold the grimiest, least desirable
jobs earned so little that they lived in garages.
Amy Dean, director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Silicon Valley office, said,
"Unfortunately, the New Economy is looking a lot like an hourglass with a
lot of high-paid, high-tech jobs at the high end and an enormous
proliferation of low-wage service jobs at the bottom."
Full article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/silicon-janitor.html
Louis Proyect
(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
