With Justice for All?

Name: Jane McAlevey
Occupation: Director of the AFL-CIO's Stamford Organizing Project
Aspiration: "We are asking the deeper questions: What's wrong with an economy that fails to reward people who work as hard as these people do? What do people have to do to earn a living wage in such robust times?"

Step off the 8:07 AM express train from Grand Central station into Stamford, Connecticut, and you enter a big-business utopia. Steel-ribbed monoliths fling acres of tinted glass up toward the sky. Images of cloud formations lie captured in reflecting pools at street level. Nine Fortune 500 companies make their homes here in Fairfield County, along with dozens of other only slightly less sizable companies, employing vast collections of crisply dressed, highly skilled, well-paid knowledge workers. This region has the highest median income in the country. The unemployment rate, less than 2%, is so low that it confounds economists.

It's no wonder that Stamford's leaders are feeling downright giddy about what's happening here. "Stamford is the perfect mixture of urban and suburban, of corporations and residential areas, with Long Island Sound to the south, rural country to the north, and the city in the middle," gushes one city official.

But on a recent morning, just one block from the railroad station, a band of 100 or so workers that represent a very different Stamford has gathered together at a makeshift stage in front of a building on the corner of Tresser and Atlantic Streets. The building, 300 Atlantic, is the local address of Equity Office Properties Trust, the Chicago-based real-estate giant. Equity Office, run by billionaire Sam Zell, is the country's largest publicly held owner of office properties, with interests in more than 380 buildings -- including 1.8 million square feet of office space in Stamford alone.

The night before, the janitorial staff at 300 Atlantic, which houses many other well-known companies along with Equity Office, was knocking off after yet another evening shift. Now a stocky gentleman on the stage exhorts the people in the crowd in Spanish: Justicia para los janitors? ("Justice for janitors?") he asks. ¡Sí, se puede! ("Yes, we can do it!") the crowd roars back.

A young blond woman watches intently from the edge of the demonstration. Blue-eyed and handsome, she looks as if she should be strolling along the 16th fairway at one of the posh golf courses that ring Stamford. In fact, she is Jane McAlevey, 35, director of the AFL-CIO's Stamford Organizing Project, a pioneering effort to apply the collective power of organized labor to one of the most troubling realities of the new economy -- the widening gap between those who are prospering mightily from the globalization of markets and the Internet boom, and the rank-and-file low-wage workers who are struggling just to make ends meet.

The office tower at 300 Atlantic stands as a symbol of that gap. By day, it is filled with well-educated professionals who manage money, operate computers, and create marketing campaigns. By night, after many of those workers have gone home, the cleaning staff arrives -- people who show up on time, work hard, and struggle to get by on minimum wage and with no benefits. These two populations work in the same building, but their lives rarely intersect.

"This is such a bottom-line, family-values issue," says McAlevey. "There are so many people who are working incredibly hard and not getting anywhere. For all of the excitement that comes with the dotcom generation, what good is it if the school systems are crumbling all around you, if there are 25,000 prison beds built around you? We must have a bigger sense of responsibility for how all of society will benefit from the wonders of this moment."

McAlevey is a new breed of union organizer. She can trade jokes in Spanish with Central American immigrant workers or share cocktails with Ivy League -- educated power brokers. One evening, she'll be at a meeting with Haitian health-care workers in south Stamford, and the next morning, she'll be in a conference with the senate majority leader of the Connecticut legislature. And while she's quick to criticize the self-centered mind-set of the dotcom crowd, she's happy to use the tools that its companies make. "I love technology," she declares. "I have a pager, and a cell-phone on my hip, and I email every five seconds. And it's absolutely great for me. Now, how do we make it accessible to everyone?"