Forms of violence, whether expressed through police brutality or the slow violence of racial discrimination and economic exploitation, were shaped by political contexts occurring at many levels but often played out through the spaces of the city. Examples include the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans from East Los Angeles and Little Tokyo during World War II, and the displacement of nearly 2,000 Latinx families during the construction of Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine during the city’s urban renewal in the 1950s. Such injustices fostered resistance, however, as Angelenos of all races sought to claim the city as their own and demand their rights. These confrontations provide us with the basis for L.A’s political and social history.
The L.A. chapter of Justice for Janitors (J4J) formed as an outgrowth of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 399 in 1985, during the union stagnation of the Reagan era. J4J was a national effort to tackle the declining bargaining power of custodians. This problem was urgent in L.A., as the dramatic restructuring of the city, shaped by the need for economic investment in the neoliberal era, polarized economic opportunities for the working class.
As deindustrialization obliterated secure blue-collar jobs, new offices and skyscrapers emerged as part of efforts to revive L.A.’s flagging urban core. These transformed Downtown L.A., heightening security and surveillance, privatizing public space, and projecting new visions of who belonged in these spaces and who did not. All brought new forms of violence, particularly to low-income people of color, as police and private security found new ways of distinguishing between a flourishing urban core and a “crisis” periphery. New buildings needed people to clean them, and owners sub-contracted international firms that used non-union janitors. Such firms recruited from a growing pool of immigrant laborers from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, often at poverty wages. Hourly rates for janitors in L.A. halved over the course of the 1980s, dropping to only $4.50 per hour by 1988.
J4J looked to inject vitality and direct action into the union movement, empowering workers in an industry that one J4J brochure described as “designed for abuse.” The organization built trust and support by employing Latina janitors to conduct home visits in immigrant neighborhoods. They evaded detection by meeting in the city’s clandestine spaces, such as parking lots and toilet cubicles. They encouraged workers to claim spaces in the city as their own by conducting elaborate and theatrical protests. Demonstrators dressed as turkeys for Thanksgiving and Santa Claus at Christmas, and they occupied some of L.A.’s elite golf courses and restaurants to challenge building owners over their exploitative practices.