It’s been an up-and-down couple of weeks for Mayor Emanuel as he attempts to win back some of the black voters he alienated with closings, cuts, and firings in his first three years in office.
The funny thing is that the mayor probably thought he was doing the politically smart thing this time around.
“We did the same work, but we don’t get the same money,” says a janitor I’ll call Billy, who works for a private firm. “Unfortunately, for me, I got hired right after they privatized the janitors.”
Among union activists, Local 73 is known as the mayor’s—well, let’s just say union activists aren’t too thrilled with Local 73.
In contrast, SEIU Local One has been a spunkier bunch. For starters, it raised holy hell when the mayor farmed out hundreds of janitorial jobs at O’Hare airport to a well-connected firm that isn’t unionized.
Yet Aramark would also be employing far fewer school janitors than the companies that previously had the contract—effectively slashing several hundred jobs. Aramark claimed to have invented a whole bunch of innovations that would enable them to get more work out of fewer workers.
