Poverty wages hurt workers, their families and the community
Janitors aren’t asking for the moon; they seek and deserve fair wages
Twenty-one years ago, I moved as a senior in college from southern Florida to Michigan. As a scholarship student at Hillsdale College, where tuition was nearly $18,000 a year, I had to work for spending money and for the small portion of tuition the scholarship did not cover.
I had been working between 20 and 40 hours a week my entire time in college — cleaning homes, mowing lawns and working the graveyard shift as a security guard for an orange-juice plant in Indian Town, Fla. — so I was more than prepared to balance academic work with a job. What I wasn’t prepared for was the $5 an hour the col- lege paid students, barely above minimum wage at the time. In Florida, I had been making between $12 and $15 an hour, and cutting my earning power by 60 percent was more than I could stomach, even as a college student.
So I went off campus and found a job as a janitor at Hillsdale Hospital, again working graveyard shift but making $10 an hour, or $15.79 an hour in today’s dollars. I worked 24 hours a week, Thurs-
day through Saturday. While I had little time for any weekend parties or other social activities, the job provided for my basic needs, as the scholarship and other financial aid covered my room and board.
Given my wage history, it might come as a shock that in 2016 a janitor in Houston doing the same work I did in 1995 makes less per hour than I made, despite the fact that Houston’s janitors are cleaning the offices of some of the largest and most profitable corporations in the world. If you account for inflation, janitors in Houston subject to the Service Employees International Union contract currently being renegotiated make less than 60 percent of what I made 21 years ago. Janitors not under this contract make even less.
People of goodwill can argue both sides of the minimum wage debate, and we can reasonably disagree about the best mechanism for providing assistance to underpaid families. But after 20 years of rapidly rising income inequality, it is incomprehensible that the Houston business community feels justified in paying our janitors less than $10 an hour. Unsatisfied with even those low wages, the large cleaning companies now seek to roll back the current $9.35 an hour negotiated in 2012 to $7.25 an hour. With the standard fourhour shift — limited specifically to avoid paying janitors any benefits — this decrease would result in many janitors earning a mere $29 a day.
Janitors in every other major city including Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Minneapolis and Baltimore are all paid more than $12 an hour, making all the more stark Houston’s unfair wages. Houston janitors are asking for a reasonable raise that, adjusted for inflation, is still well below what I made 21 years ago in a tiny Michigan town.
In discussing the business need for fair wages, none other than Teddy Roosevelt, a presidential candidate at the time, said employees “driven … ever lower until they accept wages which will not allow them to be decently fed and clothed or com- fortably housed, cannot render to the community the services which should be demanded of all American citizens.” At less than $10 an hour, Houston janitors simply cannot make enough to decently feed, clothe and comfortably house their families without significant subsidies from government or charities. And all too often, those desper- ately needed subsidies simply aren’t available. This unwillingness to pay fair wages, which results in unjust corporate profits, forces taxpayers to subsidize the poverty jobs created by these businesses.
The current negotiations over the janitors’ contract provide a singular opportunity to define the kind of community Houston should be. We could sit silently while unscrupulous cleaning companies push wages so low our janitors cannot humanely live on them. Or we can recognize the connection between the wages we pay low-income workers and the social ills those poverty wages create.
Poverty jobs contribute to the homelessness on our streets, the overwhelming and unmet demand for affordable homes, and the lack of food security for 380,000 children living in poverty in the Houston area. Indeed, addressing hunger among underpaid workers and their families means Houston now has our nation’s largest food bank.
The small raise requested won’t make janitors rich, but it will be a step toward helping them provide their families with the absolute essentials for a humane life, and that is something every Houston worker deserves.
McCasland is a lawyer, a former CEO of Harris County Housing Authority and an advocate for smart, affordable housing and transportation solutions in Houston.