We're at an exciting moment in Providence, with the breadth and strength of the progressive movement stronger than they've been in years. As it becomes clearer that a laissez-faire, trickle-down downtown renaissance will not satisfy stark and immediate economic needs, there's a newfound energy behind organizing for and by low- and moderate-income workers throughout the city.
On Labor Day, nearly 500 people from throughout Providence, including dozens of students, rallied downtown for workers' rights and equitable development. We've seen several recent successes, but the brunt of the fight is still in front of us.
The rally's centerpiece was the broadest and most urgent of the current efforts - the campaign by Local 615 of the Service Employees International Union to unionize custodians in downtown Providence. Union janitors in Boston earn about $11 an hour. Their counterparts in Providence make closer to $8 an hour, with nonunion Providence janitors at minimum wage - $6.75 an hour - or slightly higher. A majority - perhaps 60 percent - of custodians in big commercial buildings in Providence are already members of Local 615, working for union contractors. Local 615's contract with those contractors says that if the union can organize 65 percent of janitors in big buildings by Nov. 1, wages for all organized janitors will be renegotiated, with the expectation of an increase of around $2 per hour. To achieve that goal, the union will need to convince a few building owners to switch from nonunion to union contractors within the next six weeks. As the campaign escalates, there are pickets downtown most afternoons, and a rally scheduled for Oct. 1.
In addition to low wages, Providence's janitors face the constant threat of displacement - of being laid off with no warning, as building owners hire and fire the contractors for whom those janitors work. To address the problem, the City Council passed the Displaced Workers Ordinance, which will require an incoming contractor to send notice to - and hire - the employees of its predecessor.
Providence's janitors can look to workers at the Providence Public Library for inspiration in their organizing effort. Earlier this month, the PPL's employees voted decisively to form a union, represented by United Service and Allied Workers, which also represents Brown's library workers. The PPL is nominally public, with only about 35 percent of its annual funding coming from the city. Its private board of directors has given administrators repeated double-digit percent raises - totalling well into six figures - while keeping workers' wages stagnant, laying off several workers and threatening to close neighborhood branches. The union victory was hard-fought, and particularly sweet, as the sometimes penny-pinching PPL was able to muster funds to hire a Boston-based union-buster to fight the organizing effort. Now attention will move to enforcing a new law requiring that PPL board meetings be held in public, and toward adding city-appointed members to that board to help govern how the city's annual $3 million allocation to the PPL is spent.
Providence's new service economy is largely and increasingly built on tourism - and on the hard work of low-wage workers in the city's hotels. Most Providence hotels are nonunion, but workers at the Biltmore and Westin are members of Local 217 of UNITE HERE.
Many devastatingly poor towns try to comeback through direct competition for scarce resources - corporate headquarters, upwardly mobile residents and tourists. The fight to lure tourists has led to the construction of high-tech but half-full convention centers in downtown Providence and throughout the country. The conventional thinking says that more hotels would allow Providence to accommodate ever-larger conventions with ever-more conventioneers. As such, the Westin and Holiday Inn are slated for massive expansions, and there are very serious proposals for at least three other high-rise hotel projects downtown. Local 217 has reached so-called "card count" neutrality agreements with the owners of the recently opened Hotel Providence as well as and the hotel at the Masonic Temple, which is set to open next year. That means that management will recognize the union as their employees' representative if a majority of employees sign cards indicating that they want to join up - without having to go through standard union election processes, which allow room for employer intimidation and misinformation.
As the mega-development driven downtown renaissance proceeds, it's the work of unions like Local 615, USAW and Local 217 that will ensure that its rewards are shared by all of the people of Providence.
David Segal is the city councilman for Ward 1 in Providence.
