Commentary –

Just Pretend

You Don’t See Them

By William A. Collins

How they live,

I cannot say;

On such lousy,

Take-home pay.

Connecticut merely mimics the rest of the world when we avert our eyes from low-skill workers. Many countries in Europe and the Middle East do worse. They invite in “guest workers” when labor is short, and send them home again when it gets long. In the meantime, they treat them like invisible people.

In the US, we work it differently. Many more of our guest workers stay on, go to school, bring or raise families, and otherwise need to be dealt with by society. Until they get education, learn our lingo, and pick up our habits, they populate our great American underclass, along with millions of African Americans. This makes them somewhat hard to ignore, though Lord knows we try.

Take housing. UConn has just published its quarterly economic review, including an article explaining how home prices are now blessedly more affordable. That’s cheery news for sure, even though we’re still more expensive than most states. But remember, here as in other states, homeowners make up only two-thirds of the population. What’s happening to that other third of us that rents? We read in the papers that they’re in deep trouble. Well, don’t hold your breath waiting to hear about them from UConn. Like most of society, it contrives not to see them.

Nor will you hear from UConn about janitors. This, despite the fact that the biggest economic news in our state this year is the battle by hundreds of janitors (they clean commercial buildings from Greenwich to Hartford) to achieve reasonable pay and benefits. That’s a tough goal, since they’re largely invisible. Understandably, office building tenants want no part of employing them. They just want their offices cleaned. Building owners feel the same way, and so they hire specialized cleaning contractors to do the dirty work.

These contractors operate in happy obscurity, and run what amounts to mobile sweatshops. Most of their workers speak little English, and many suffer from ambiguous immigration status. That’s a weak base from which to demand a living wage and, heaven forbid, health insurance.

But janitors do have a couple of advantages. Everyone has a pretty clear vision of what they do, and most of us have even gotten to know a couple over the years. At the very least we’ve seen them at work and we know how they affect our lives. This makes them sympathetic figures.

They also have a good union, SEIU. In Connecticut it has organized strikes, fasts, picketing, and lots of press. Clergy and politicians have been drawn in, and gotten arrested for blocking traffic. Thus in some towns janitors have already made serious gains, and in the end may actually climb out of abject poverty into just plain old poverty.

Will janitors then become a symbol and model for other low-paid workers? Probably not. There is no union for the guys who blow the leaves off your lawn, or wash the dishes at your favorite restaurant. Telemarketers are not organized either, and when store clerks try to unionize, they generally get fired. US labor law is mostly on the side of management.

So, too, are the business pages of newspapers. An intriguing article in the Hartford Courant recently spoke at length of the hefty signing bonuses and bounties that some companies now pay to hook new low-pay workers. It neglected to mention, however, the deplorable pay scales for these jobs. And just like welfare reformers and industry lobbyists, it described these jobs as “entry-level” rather than simply “lousy.”

So, janitors aside, we Nutmeggers seem pretty skilled at putting low-wage workers out of our thoughts, while gently basking in the glow of our own buoyant economy.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)