Labor, gender and the politics of citizenship: Organizing Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles

In this study, I examine whether women contest unequal gender relations that intersect with class and racialized citizenship. Existing scholarship has focused on how women negotiate their place within multiple relations of oppression, often reproducing one axis of oppression in order to contest another. Here I am concerned with the potential for challenges to gender relations that simultaneously contest other relations of oppression. I examine this potential through an ethnographic study of Latina immigrant women and men members of the Justice for Janitors union movement in Los Angeles. Using census data, interviews and participant observation. I analyze practices and meanings within four fields of protest brought together by the contemporary J4J movement: the family, the union local, the unionized workplace and urban space. In the family, women who secured a living wage and family health insurance challenged divisions of labor and power of male partners. Without this security, women made compromises by engaging, in activism as a third shift. Whether or not women became significant political actors in the other fields depended on the extent of challenges within the family. Women who challenged gender relations in the family became union leaders and gained political expertise alongside men. However, women who engaged in activism as a third shift remained on the sidelines. In the workplace, cross-gender solidarity enforced the union contract and challenged gender relations at work. However, failed projects of solidarity led women and men to make compromises that reproduced gender inequality to resist class oppression. Urban protests brought together mothering and protest work and made the social reproduction costs of workers visible to the building owners. The value of children at the marches encouraged men as well as women to publicly care for them. As both men and women cared for children, they challenged not only the racialized politics of citizenship and employer "flexibility" but also gender relations. This study finds that simultaneous challenges to gender, class and racialized citizenship are possible and delineates the social contexts within which they are most likely to emerge.