More Protests Downtown

Maybe you were walking by City Hall Plaza today and noticed a strange encampment of sign- and flyer-bearing, Spanish-speaking protesters on the traffic island where State Street meets Tremont. Perhaps you said to yourself, "What gives? I thought yesterday was the big day for immigrant protests!" Maybe you even took a flyer (see right). Still, you would likely have been left wondering, "Why are these people making such a fuss about UNICCO, the Mass.-based cleaning contractor, right now? Didn't that whole Justice for Janitors campaign a few years back clear things up for Boston office-cleaning employees?" Well, Bostonist was asking ourselves these same questions, so we stopped and asked one of the sign-bearers, a nice Cuban lady from Miami. She explained that yes, UNICCO employees are unionized in Boston, but there is a major organizing drive underway in Miami, so the union involved, SEIU (Service Employees International Union), is mounting a national publicity campaign against UNICCO.

The national approach is more and more in vogue among labor unions in this country, especially those that recently split from the AFL-CIO. Since (this) Bostonist used to work for the hotel employees' union in New York and we still translate their weekly newspaper into Spanish, we know that the happily named UNITE HERE, the national union that represents hotel, restaurant, and garment industry workers, is currently in the midst of a big campaign to negotiate all of its contracts with big hotel companies in different cities at the same time (since it's the same companies that own hotels in most cities). That said, as the weather warms up we imagine we'll see more and more solidarity-type labor demonstrations around town. We can only hope that some of them include a giant inflatable rat.