Janitors reach settlement, ending strike

So, just short of a month after a group of local janitors went on strike to demand higher wages and health benefits, the strike seems to be over: The striking janitors and the city's five major cleaning companies reaches a tentative agreement yesterday. Which means the strike was a success, right? Well, yes. And no.

Under the agreement, Houston janitors' average pay will increase to $6.25 an hour from $5.30 an hour beginning Jan. 1, with a $1 raise coming in 2008 and a 50 cent raise in 2009. Health insurance will be available to the janitors for $20 a month individually or $175 a month for families beginning in 2009, and work hours will increase to six a day from the current four in 2009. The package falls short of what the janitors were seeking — $8.50 an hour average wages, fully paid family health insurance and full-time work — but some strikers said it was a win anyway: "Nobody thought that poor Latinos of Houston would be successful, but today we can stand up and carry our heads very high," Flora Aguilar, a member of the Service Employees International Union bargaining group, told supporters last night. "We all won today." Though Mayor Bill White said he didn't agree with some of the janitors' tactics — the group held public demonstrations several times, blocking major intersections, disrupting a speech at the Houston Club and throwing trash into downtown office buildings — but he said the agreement is a good thing: "It will lift the lives of many hard working residents who are trying to get by," White said.

The problem, some experts say, is that the payraise the janitors are to get may essentially end up being close to the minimum wage, which the Democrats advocate raising to $7.25 an hour within two years (by 2009, the janitors will be making $7.75 an hour). "Essentially, what has happened is the contractors anticipated an increase in the minimum wage," Michael Lotito, an employment lawyer with Jackson Lewis in San Francisco, told the Chronicle. The raise granted to the janitors was already built into the companies' budgets, he noted. But much of a strike's success has to do with whether strikers consider it a success, UT union expert Julius G. Getman said — and by that measure, the janitors' effort worked. "Houston won big," bargaining committee member Mercedes Herrera said. "We have a better future for working families in Houston."

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Photo: Meenu Bhardwaj/Houston Justice for Janitors