She started her career organizing low-paid hotel and janitorial workers in Texas and other states.
The Service Employees International janitorial workers union, announced last week that it reached an agreement with 23 janitorial firms in Hudson County to increase the wages for close to 500 workers from $5.25 an hour to $10.75 over three years.
Most of the immigrants were janitorial workers, many from Guatemala, who were on their way to clean the parking lot of Gillette Stadium, a lawyer for the Guatemalan Consulate said.
Mention of "Bread and Roses," which follows the struggle of a group of immigrant janitorial workers against their exploitative bosses through the eyes of a Mexican family, also brings a smile to Mr. Loach's face.
Union leaders had maintained that salaries for janitors in Los Angeles were kept down by the huge number of immigrants willing to work for low wages, making them the lowest paid janitorial workers of any unionized major city in the United States.
Late this afternoon Judge Clarkson S. Fisher Jr. of State Superior Court ruled that the action by the district's 400 teachers and 100 teacher aides, clerical and janitorial workers was illegal, violating a state law banning strikes by public employees.
Using tarps, a couple of janitorial workers on the night shift had cordoned off a corner of a state-owned parking garage, which was stocked with sofas, fridges, a TV, and the latest copy of Cannabis Culture.
The commanding officer of the New York State militia was discovered not only to have accepted bribes and falsified official documents but also to have been a bigamist, and two janitorial workers were reprimanded for having had sex — repeatedly — on a desk at the headquarters of the New York State Department of Transportation.
Union leaders said wages for janitorial workers in Los Angeles have declined in real terms from the equivalent of $13 an hour in the early 1980's to an average of $6.80 today, as the face of janitorial labor here has changed in the past two decades from largely American-born blacks to foreign-born Hispanics.
I've come to see a sculpture entitled "Cost of Living (Aleyda)," by Josh Kline, one of a series, for which Kline, who is thirty-six, interviewed janitorial workers and then used 3-D-printing technology to create sculptural assemblages based on scans of their bodies.
