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 Mike Gracia
SOL Board President
SEIU Local 1877, Property Services Union
Mike was born and raised in Los Angeles. His working class family moved from East Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley when he was a kid.
In his youth, Mike worked dozens of low paying, back breaking jobs from warehouse work to canneries, which shaped his commitment to advancing the organization of working people, especially the poor.
Deciding that college was his opportunity to advance himself and an opportunity to change and correct the injustices of the world around him, he pursued and completed a degree at CSUN. Two experiences in college shaped his life: the raised Chicano Studies program and his job as a janitor as member of Local 399, his first Union job. After working with Chicano youths and gangs he went to earn a Masters Degree in Social work at San Jose State University and began his union-organizing career with the janitors union in San Jose. His working experience blended with his social change education drove Mike to commit himself to the Union movement. He rose up through the Union ranks, also working to organize janitors in San Diego and Denver.
Returning to California in 1990 Mike led the new Bay Area Building Service Local 1877 and led the successful janitorial organizing campaigns in the Silicon Valley against high tech giants Oracle, Apple Computers, Hewlett Packard and others. Local 1877 grew from 2800 over 10,000 members during this period. He also became a central figure in the national Justice for Janitors movement that has organized thousands of janitors nationally, using unique and creative strategies that build the power to leverage powerful and indifferent building owners and corporations across the country.
In 1996, Mike led the reorganization of the Los Angeles janitors and the creation of one single Statewide Building Services Union in the SEIU. Today Local 1877 represent 25,000 building service workers across the State with base operations in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco and Sacramento.
If you are Mike, however, he'll say his greatest accomplishment was winning the historic janitors strike of 2000, an action he proudly notes "changed the lives of thousands of janitors and their families and was truly a story of hard working immigrant workers fighting to lift themselves out of poverty and achieve the American Dream." The strike also served as an example for bus drivers and mechanics, county workers, screen actors and others to also take bold action and help turn around the Labor organizations in LA into a powerful voice for working families.
Mike is now fully engaged in leading the Security Officers Organizing Campaign in Los Angeles. Thousands of Security Officers are fighting to organize a union of their choice, but face resistance from the same commercial real estate building owners who have related to the janitors campaigns to win family health care and living wages. Now it is the Security Officers time to lift themselves up. We must all remain committed to these workers until justice in achieved!
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