In 2014, Hernández received news about both of her cases. In the spring, about three years after she’d filed a wage-and-hour claim with the state, she learned that the government had levied nearly $1.8 million in financial penalties against the companies and their owners. Then, a few months later, the sexual harassment lawsuit was resolved in a confidential settlement. The company did not admit liability in settling the case.8
In the process of claiming her rights, Hernández was beginning to see that by making just demands, winning was possible. When the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund helped lead an industrywide effort to battle wage theft by janitorial companies, Hernández joined the fight.
Wage theft is a phenomenon first articulated by Kim Bobo, the founder of Interfaith Worker Justice, which is dedicated to improving pay rates and working conditions, especially for low-wage laborers. Bobo observed that billions of dollars were being stolen from workers when employers failed to pay workers what they were owed, either by demanding off-the-clock labor, not paying for overtime, violating minimum wage laws, misclassifying workers, taking illegal deductions, or simply not paying workers at all.9
These were wage scams that Hernández had experienced personally, and they were rampant in her community. A 2014 study by the UCLA Labor Center and others had found that the practice of underpaying low-wage workers was widespread, with dishonest employers stealing more than $26 million a week from Los Angeles workers alone.10 According to the researchers, this made Southern California the “wage theft capital of the United States.”11
In February 2015, an anti–wage theft bill backed by the janitors’ union and other labor advocates was introduced in the California legislature.12 It sought to crack down on employers who skirted wage-and-hour laws, and Hernández became a poster child for the cause. She volunteered to go to the state capitol to lobby and testify for its passage. She and her four-year-old daughter became fixtures at rallies in support of the legislation, where she marched alongside her advocates and friends at the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund. She became an unofficial spokeswoman of the problem. “No overtime, no break. No lunch. Nada,” Hernández told a Los Angeles public radio reporter during the legislative campaign. “When I asked about overtime, the manager said I was crazy.”13 She added that she was working to support her children.
That fall, the wage-theft bill passed, and it fed Hernández’s commitment to political activism. She had already won a personal victory by filing her own wage claim, and now she had helped leverage her experiences to help other low-wage workers. Lilia García, executive director of the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, says, “The wage theft work helped her understand and see how people take on problems systematically.”
But Hernández wasn’t done. At a celebration of the passage of the wage-theft bill thrown by the janitor’s union in Los Angeles, Hernández was asked to speak. She started by thanking the politicians in the room who had supported the legislation. Then she stunned the room when she added, “but we still have more work to do; so much more happens than our wages get stolen.” Though she could barely choke out the words, she told the audience that when she was a janitor, her supervisor had raped her at work. She said workplace sexual assault needed to be addressed too.
The room fell silent. Hernández’s words had given the audience a palpable jolt. Like many people at the event, Alejandra Valles, the secretary-treasurer and chief of staff of SEIU United Workers West, was moved to tears by Hernández’s impromptu rallying cry, and Valles vowed to do something about a problem that the union had known about for too long. The issue carried a personal charge for Valles because she, too, was a sexual assault survivor.
For the union leaders, however, this was new territory, and it was not initially clear how they would find their way forward. Valles teamed up with her colleague Sandra Díaz, SEIU United Workers West’s political director, to seek out more information about the problem. As a first step, they suggested that the union leadership watch “Rape on the Night Shift,” the PBS Frontline documentary about workplace assaults in the cleaning industry, at their next executive board meeting. Valles says that for the union leaders in the room, it helped drive home the point that sexual violence for janitorial workers wasn’t a rare, isolated phenomenon.
An opportunity for the union to directly address sexual harassment and assault came a few months later. In February 2016, the union prepared for contract negotiations with all unionized janitorial firms, including California’s largest janitorial employers, such as ABM. As is standard operating procedure, it sent out a survey asking its members about their workplace priorities, which then informs the bargaining committee’s efforts. Following Georgina Hernández’s memorable speech, Valles and her colleagues added sexual violence and harassment to the survey to see if it was an issue that resonated with their twenty thousand janitorial members.
About a quarter of janitors in California who work for private companies are unionized, and when the five thousand survey results were tallied a few weeks later, wages and workload were, predictably, the top two priorities for the rank and file.14 “We tend to fight for things that members can see in their pockets,” Valles says.
To the union leadership’s amazement and horror, however, sexual violence and harassment ranked as the third most important issue to their membership, the majority of whom are women. Worse, about half of the union’s members reported that they had personally experienced sexual violence or harassment. “This was just alarming,” Valles says. “As a union that represents predominantly immigrant janitors and seventy percent of them are women, I just said we can’t be a janitors’ union if we don’t do anything about this. We have to take on this issue that is rampant in this industry.”
First, some of the rank and file needed convincing. With the survey results tabulated, the union held a general meeting so its members could vote on their priorities for the contract negotiations, including the issues the union would be willing to strike for. About five hundred union members turned up for the Southern California meeting, and when wages and workload were presented as strike priorities, there was no disagreement among the assembly. Things took a turn when a union member named Veronica Laguna informed the group that sexual harassment and violence had come in as the third most important concern to the membership and that it, too, would become a strike priority. As she spoke, a low roar emerged from the audience. Some of the men in the crowd were booing her.
Stunned, Laguna handed the microphone to the union president, David Huerta, who silenced the group by saying that their union couldn’t claim to fight for justice for janitors and then turn a blind eye to sexual harassment and assault. “I’ve been in this industry for twenty years and don’t tell me you don’t do it and you haven’t seen it,” he said to the men in the audience. “And now, as your president, I say to you, ‘Ya basta.’” Enough is enough.
Valles says the incident made it clear to the union leadership that they had to overcome the misconception that “women’s issues are not worker issues,” she says. “There was a macho mentality we were taking on. We came out of there saying, ‘How do we engage the men to also be allies?’ So it’s not just the women who are invested in this.”
During contract negotiations, the bargaining committee remained true to the priorities outlined in the membership survey and made demands for improved wages and working conditions, plus a slate of new policies to address sexual violence and harassment on the job.
Now it was the employers’ turn to push back against the union’s efforts to stop the abuse. “They already considered themselves leaders on wages and benefits and they think they’re the good guys, and in many ways, they are,” Valles says of the unionized employers. “They were saying that we should focus on the bad guys. But one of them was the biggest culprit. They knew they weren’t clean, and we demanded that they lead on this. Our duty as a union is to set standards on working conditions and these [sexual abuse claims] are working conditions.”
T
he union successfully negotiated the inclusion of new contract language that would forbid janitorial supervisors from “dating” their subordinates. The new contract also required janitorial companies to provide information about a free crisis hotline and to offer sexual harassment training to all workers within sixty days of being hired.
Before it could be signed, the union held another meeting so that all of its members could ratify what the bargaining committee had negotiated. A thousand members from Southern California showed up and took seats on folding chairs lined up in the union hall. An overflow crowd listened from the parking lot. When it was time to discuss what the union had won on sexual harassment and assault prevention, Veronica Laguna, the woman who had been booed at the last meeting, returned to the stage. She received a warmer welcome this time. As she told the group about the gains the union had made on sexual harassment, female workers threw their fists in the air in solidarity. The contract with the new sexual harassment provisions was signed in May 2016.
Even as SEIU United Workers West tackled sexual violence in its contract negotiations and made headway among resistant factions of the membership, its leaders were still forced to acknowledge that they were in unchartered territory. “Some people said, ‘Well hold on, we’re not social workers. We can’t take this on. What are we going to do? It’s like we’re going to become like a rape center or something,’” Valles recalls.
The union has a history of working closely with the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, which has its office in the union’s complex just south of downtown Los Angeles. They had already been victorious in their collaborative effort to pass California’s new wage-theft legislation. They decided that workplace sexual violence was another issue on which they could work together. Valles and Díaz of the union began having conversations with the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund’s Lilia García about what could be done to support the next Georgina Hernández who came through the door. García suggested that they reach out to the executive director of the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault. After a lengthy phone conversation with the director, the worker advocates realized that their respective organizations did not need to reinvent themselves at all; they just needed to find a better way to collaborate with organizations like the East Los Angeles Women’s Center, which had been working with Spanish-speaking immigrant survivors of sexual violence for decades. The organization is esteemed within the immigrant community of Southern California. In 1976, it had created the country’s first twenty-four-hour crisis hotline in Spanish for sexual assault survivors.
The union and the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund contacted the center, which was eager to help, but it had never examined the problem in the context of the workplace. Its officers agreed to develop a leadership program specifically for sexually abused workers. The center proposed a promotora program to let the janitors’ know that sexual harassment and abuse are not acceptable at work and to give them concrete information about how to seek help.
The center has a long history of cultivating promotoras, public health advocates who come from the community they seek to reach. Promotoras are typically educated on a specific health or social issue and then charged with training others in the community, a peer-to-peer approach used often in Latin America.
The model was popularized in the 1970s by a nonprofit in Mexico that began using this method to provide improved maternal and child health care to impoverished communities in Juárez, on the other side of the border from El Paso, Texas. Prevention and intervention is key to promotora programs, which offer critical public health information to groups that institutionalized medical and government programs cannot easily access.
It’s a strategy that is now widely used to improve public health in the United States, and it has been especially effective in propagating information among hard-to-reach groups because the information is offered in culturally and linguistically relevant ways. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have created materials for promotora programs on health issues such as cervical cancer, diabetes, and heart attack prevention.
The approach was already familiar to the union and the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund because they had used similar methods to empower and train workers like Georgina Hernández on employment issues like wage theft. Hernández, for example, had been taught how to keep track of her hours and monitor her paychecks to make sure she was paid what she was due, and she had shared the information with her co-workers.
At the first janitor-promotora training, which began in March 2016 and ran over the course of six Saturdays, the women learned how to identify sexual harassment and violence at work, as well as what their options are if it happens to them. When they were done, they were asked to reach out and train other female workers in the union and in the community. Given the negative reaction that some of the men had during contract negotiations, the center also created a men’s group so that supportive male workers were better equipped to help challenge sexism and harassment at work.
A half-dozen union and non-union cleaners were picked to participate in the inaugural class of promotoras. They had been chosen because they had already been unusually outspoken on sexual harassment and assault by filing lawsuits or union grievances. Naturally, Georgina Hernández was among them, and she quickly assumed a quiet but powerful leadership role. During one session, she emboldened other women to share their experiences openly after she worked up the courage to tell the group about how her supervisor had raped her, in the back seat of his car, and twice more in a motel. She described how sunken and stuck she had felt when she learned she was pregnant from one of the assaults. And she said that the women at the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund had shown her that she not only had options, but that she could demand justice.
The women in the group followed Hernández’s trajectory from resignation to resistance. For the promotoras in training, who grappled with longstanding taboos around sex, this was the first opportunity that many of them had to speak openly about sexual harassment and assault. A woman named Marta from San Diego shared a story about her supervisor who had shown her pictures of his genitals on his phone. Marilyn from Orange County said that her supervisor openly watched porn on his computer. Others reported that their supervisors had taken pictures of their chests or behinds on their phones and sent them to their male co-workers. None of the women knew that this could be considered sexual harassment. They said, “I didn’t realize that’s harassment because he didn’t actually touch me,” Valles, the union leader, says. They thought that this was “just the culture of buildings at night.”
Even the definition of rape was not clear to some of the women. Many were not aware that rape includes many forms of physical abuse with penetration—and the group had a difficult but illuminating discussion about the legal definition of the crime. “What I learned from some of the deep, quality training we did was that there was a real lack of education and that once you know what sexual harassment is, that it does make a difference,” says Valles, who participated in the first promotora training.
García of the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund was part of the first training as well, and she says that once the group was given answers and information, they were visibly elevated and empowered. By helping the women realize that sexual harassment and assault were neither acceptable nor legal, the training helped them cast out feelings of shame, García says. “It’s like when you’ve been told a lie your whole life and it’s that moment when you realize it’s a lie, and you are not bound by that untruth,” she says. “So all of the limitations that you felt when you were taught that lie, you become unshackled and released from them.”
The first group of promotoras had not yet finished their training when they were presented with an opportunity to put it into action. After Georgina Hernández had made her call to action on sexual violence at the wage-theft law celebration, the policy arm of the union had begun seeking ways to address the problem. These leaders approached Lorena González-Fletche
r, a Democratic state legislator from San Diego who had previously been a union organizer. González-Fletcher agreed to work with the janitors’ union, the SEIU California State Council, and Equal Rights Advocates, the organization that had represented María Bojórquez in her lawsuit against ABM, to draft and introduce a bill specifically to rein in abuses in the janitorial industry.15
Neither the union nor the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund had planned it this way, but through the promotora program, there was a group of activated female janitors who were ready to hold themselves up as examples of why the bill was necessary. “It was very organic,” says García. “I wish I could tell you we had a grandiose plan. But frankly, this was uncharted territory for both organizations.”
As the bill was discussed and debated in hearings and caucus meetings, janitor after janitor came forward to testify about sexual attacks on the night shift. Some were sharing their stories for the first time publicly. Some, like Leticia Soto, had only just begun to admit aloud that they were rape survivors. Soto had come to the United States in 2004 and she took a job as a janitor to support her three children. After three years in the country, she found herself working for a predatory supervisor. For nearly a decade, she had never said a word about being punched, bitten, and scratched by her supervisor as he raped her, repeatedly, after she had clocked in for work.
Soto was a member of the first promotora group with Georgina Hernández, and that training, coupled with the invitation to speak with legislators, pushed her to finally tell her teenage daughter she had been sexually harassed. Days later, at an event with legislators, Soto offered public testimony in support of the bill and shared her personal account of rape at work.
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