In New Book, Children Learn the Story of L.A. Janitors’ Strike

Welcome back. Good weekend? Hot enough for you?

Nice being at work again, in a way--at least someone else is paying for the AC.

And the place is clean, carpets all vacuumed.

The elves didn’t do that. While you were maybe barbecuing or napping or watching the game, someone was in your office, at night, or over the holiday weekend, to make it so.

Welcome back to work. Enjoy the fruits of the labors of Labor Day.

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The L.A. janitors’ strike in the spring of 2000 altered the labor landscape.

Just as the 1997 Teamsters strike against UPS succeeded in part because everyone knew those nice young (mostly) men in brown shorts and UPS was a faceless corporate entity, the first victory of the janitors’ strike was the public imagination. It was cinematic, easy to cover, easy to cast--poor immigrants versus rich office people. Janitors marched past skyscrapers downtown and along flower-scented roads in Bel-Air, calling solidarity slogans to maids and gardeners.

From Chicago to San Diego, the L.A. janitors’ strike nudged management elsewhere toward signing contracts. It inspired other unions. It created strike-chic: knockoffs of the red “Justice for Janitors” T-shirts were sold in the garment district like fake Fendi handbags. A British director made “Bread and Roses,” a film about the strike.

And now there’s a children’s book about the strike, “Si Se Puede,” colloquially, “Yes, We Can,” a rallying cry since the early days of Cesar Chavez’s farm workers.

On Sunday, actor Edward James Olmos fought a cold and the traffic from the Valley to the West Adams district to read aloud from the vividly illustrated book to a group of children, many of whose parents are janitors. It tells the story of Carlitos, whose widowed mother is a janitor who helps lead a strike for higher wages. To help her, Carlitos paints his own sign, “I love my mama! She is a janitor!” and marches with her.

They all sat under a marquee outside St. Joseph’s, the grandificent church--one adjective isn’t enough to describe it, you have to conflate two of them--that stands across from the secularly charming Automobile Club building, so I’ve always thought of St. Joseph’s as Our Lady of Roadside Assistance.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, resplendent in creamy vestments trimmed with bright fabrics of Mexican weaving, swept by the group on his way to say Labor Day weekend Mass, the day before he would open his new downtown cathedral. He waved at Olmos, who waved back. (In Mahony’s days as a bishop in the Central Valley, some growers nicknamed him “Red Roger” for his early and vigorous support of the farm workers union. In L.A., he backed the janitors’ strike with equal fervor--but lost ground with labor for resisting the archdiocese’s cemetery workers in their fight to unionize.)

As Olmos read, the book’s author stood nearby, beaming. Diana Cohn just moved to the Bay Area from New York and she doesn’t speak Spanish, but when she read about the strike, she figured this story, she had to tell. Unions, she believes, “are the only anti-poverty program that works.”

She’s written other children’s books but this is the first to be political, so political that her mainstream publisher asked her to “restructure” it--dilute the politics. Cohn went instead to Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso, which wanted it at once, printed copies in English and Spanish--including a paperback version to give to the janitors union--and is giving some of the proceeds to a New York workers’ fund.

The strike was “a really great story where all the threads came together,” Cohn says, “both social justice issues and really important values.” She shared her manuscript with a focus group of janitor-parents and kids, whose suggestions--put in some Central Americans, not just Mexicans, and add some adult men to the story--Cohn took.

One of them was Dolores Sanchez, who led her colleagues in the strike. “I’m glad they wrote something,” she said in Spanish on Sunday, “so our children could understand what we do and why.” The book even helps explain her family: her children are 19, 15--and 11 months old, the youngest conceived before she got the benefits of the new labor contract--among them, she says, health care insurance and family planning.

There’s a small bit about health care in the book: with a new contract and better wage, Carlitos’ mother doesn’t have to clean other people’s houses on weekends. They can go to the park and buy ice cream and even afford medicine, so Carlitos’ grandmother’s “sore bones feel so much better.”

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes. com.