Word: pittsburgh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Less than 300 miles away, Robyn Gray is in the midst of cleaning 48 kitchenettes, dusting 90 conference rooms and scrubbing 40 glass doors at One Mellon Center, a financial building in downtown Pittsburgh, Pa. Although her work is equally grueling, Gray, 44, is paid well, compared with Cincinnati, Ohio, janitors like Jones. For working a 9:30 p.m.--to--6 a.m., 40-hr.-a-week schedule, she earns $12.52 an hour and gets health insurance, three weeks' vacation and three personal days a year. Her $26,000 annual salary has helped Gray and her husband--who works...
...model Edwards and others want to replicate is the Service Employees International Union's (SEIU) Justice for Janitors campaign, which over the past 20 years has helped to raise wages for workers in 27 cities, including Boston, Houston and Pittsburgh. Last week SEIU organized Justice for Janitors Day, with public protests in cities around the country. One of the key battlegrounds of the new offensive is Cincinnati, which gained 8,400 service jobs in 2004 alone. "It's a crucial test," says Stephen Lerner, head of SEIU's property workers' division. "What happens in Cincinnati is more of a lens...
...Pittsburgh is its Exhibit A. Once hailed as America's Iron City, Pittsburgh has gone from a manufacturing stronghold to a service-dominated economy, a shift that is evident in its abundance of converted mills. The Homestead Grays Bridge, near the site of the famous 1892 steel-mill strike considered by many to be the birthplace of the labor movement, now overlooks a Filene's Basement and a Barnes & Noble, instead of the towering smokestacks that once defined the city skyline. The first Justice for Janitors initiative began there in 1985. The campaign sparked an 18-month standoff in which...
...city appears to have benefited too. In Pittsburgh neighborhoods with high concentrations of janitors and other service workers, high school graduation rates and home ownership rates have risen steadily over the past two decades, according to Census data. Among janitors surveyed by SEIU, the rate of home ownership had grown to 57% by 2005, an increase of nearly 20% since 1990. Meanwhile the number of families below the poverty line has fallen...
...janitors' wages have risen, salaries for other Pittsburgh jobs have followed suit. Security guards, for instance, working in buildings where unionized janitorial workers are employed, have seen their earnings advance in parallel. Over the past three years, the median household income in the city has grown nearly 3%, from $39,643 to $40,699, adjusted for inflation. And annual janitorial-job turnover, as high as 300% in Cincinnati, is just one-tenth that rate in Pittsburgh. As a result, contractors' costs for recruitment and training are significantly lower. "For a community and its families, wage gains for low-income workers...