Middle-class dream at stake in union talks

“It’s very challenging for them to find a workforce that is dependable. That’s part of the power that we have.”

Late Monday afternoon, as Lady Mosquera prepared to drive to her job cleaning offices at Travelers in Hartford, I asked whether she considered herself a part of the middle class, whether she felt economically secure.

The 34-year-old has worked as a janitor in commercial buildings since she arrived from Colombia in 2009, as a member of 32BJ SEIU, the sprawling service union. She’s making $18.70 an hour, or about $39,000 a year. Her husband also works as a building cleaner through the same union.

That’s more than $75,000 a year for the Hartford couple. Plus their contract gives them pensions, paid vacation and a strong health insurance plan with no premiums. So yes, the numbers say Mosquera is in the American middle class — a status that matters now that she, her husband and more than 3,000 union janitors in Connecticut have contracts expiring on Dec. 31.

Having spent years fighting for pay above minimum wage along with solid benefits, 32BJ SEIU is looking to maintain that, with higher wages to stay even, or close to even, with inflation. Their current pact brought annual raises of 40 cents to 50 cents an hour for four years.

Mosquera hesitates before answering in Spanish through an interpreter with the union. She hasn’t really thought of herself as middle-class.

“Until now we’ve never really enjoyed that,” she said, in part because her husband did not have papers to work.

“He just started working full-time in August,” Mosquera said. “Last year I only worked eight months. I was incapacitated medically for the rest of the time. So that was a real setback.”

This is a crucial moment for the building cleaners and their union. These workers, largely immigrant and almost entirely Black and brown, as the union often points out, may well be living secure economic lives for their hard toil. They’re mostly not in poverty unless they face trying circumstances.

But they’re not many rungs above poverty — as Mosquera’s situation shows. And they badly want to stay on the right side of that line.

Marches and a strike vote

The union isn’t giving details of the negotiations but on Wednesday in downtown Stamford, and again on Dec. 19 in Hartford, they will stage marches and rallies to call attention to the contract talks. And on Saturday, they will hold votes authorizing 32BJ SEIU to call a strike if New Year’s Day arrives without a deal.

Those are signs the talks aren’t going well. Building owners face the same high costs as the rest of us across the board and many of them are squeezed by tenants taking less space in lease renewals after the pandemic.

Some face pressure from competitors with lower costs, a constant balancing act. We’ve just seen, for example, IBM announce the closing of a 1.1 million-square-foot operations and data complex in Southbury.

Since 2020, the union in Connecticut has lost about one-sixth of its work cleaning buildings. Most of the contracts are with companies that provide cleaning services to the building owners — whether they’re brand-name corporations such as Travelers and Pratt & Whitney or office buildings with many tenants or UConn Health in Farmington, which has 160 union cleaners.

The cleaning companies negotiate as a group, with one contract in Hartford and New Haven counties and another in Fairfield, Westchester, Long Island, New Jersey and the Hudson Valley. One negotiator for the cleaners was unable to talk with me on Monday, citing intense negotiations; another declined to comment, saying, incorrectly I believe, that I had reached a wrong number.

These tense talks reflect the labor markets as a whole. Workers until now have had the upper hand because of a shortage of people, in part because Congress can’t seem to learn that the United States needs more immigrants such as Lady Mosquera, not fewer. That hurts the companies looking to hire. But we know the balance can change quickly.

“It’s very challenging for them to find a workforce that is dependable. That’s part of the power that we have,” Rochelle Palache, the 32BJ vice president who oversees Connecticut for the union, told me Monday. “Longtime workers, they know the building, they care about their clients.”

That argument keeps the higher-paying union contractors from losing work to non-union firms. “We defend the market and we’ve done successfully,” Palache said. “Hartford is 90 percent.”

New Haven is much less unionized and Fairfield is somewhere in between.

‘You need to have a stable life’

In Norwalk, Alcides Caguao, who holds two union cleaning jobs, has been around long enough to recall the sweep of the struggle. “I arrived in this country in July 2000 and I started working almost immediately,” Caguao, from Venezuela, said Monday between jobs at ASML, the technology equipment manufacturer in Wilton, and Merritt 7, the large Norwalk office park where

Hearst Connecticut Media has its main office.

Caguao was involved in the effort by the union to gather signatures for certification. Back then, he said, the pay was just $7 an hour ($12.50 in today’s dollars) with no health benefits and very few paid days off. He still has no pension in his contract.

He laughs when I ask how he can keep up the physical rigor at age 67 with three grown children. “Well, I got used to it and I’m not tired yet. Then again, it’s what I have to do,” he said, also in Spanish through an interpreter with the union.

Caguao’s wife works as a seamstress for a small business but despite the decent pay, he said they’re struggling — in part because of the cost of driving to their jobs and in part because he lost work in the pandemic and is still paying down credit card bills.

Middle class? “We’re getting there. We’re a little bit under it but we work as hard as we can,” said Caguao, who has traveled to Washington D.C. and Philadelphia for union marches.

SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, led the fight for the $15-an-hour minimum wage. Now, with Connecticut’s wage rising to $15.69 on Jan. 1, the struggle is to keep those workers a few bucks above it from losing ground. Without losing those benefits.

That matters a lot to Mosquera, the Hartford cleaner. She came down with a severe case of inflammation in 2015 and was eventually diagnosed with a form of rheumatoid arthritis. Pills didn’t work. Now she gets injections that cost $1,278 a month, fully covered by insurance under the contract.

Mosquera was about to begin at university in Colombia when her U.S. immigration papers came through 14 years ago and she made the move. Her father, sister, husband and brotherin-law all clean buildings under 32BJ SEIU contracts. She would like to do a different job.

“First you need to have a stable life before you can plan much for the future,” she said. “I know with my condition it’s not going to improve and it’s going to become more and more difficult to perform this kind of labor.”

It is the American Dream in a contract, with much at stake for everyone.