A bright and warm morning glare hits Juan Campis’ brown skin as he stands near a wall at the back entrance of Sunny Day Car Wash in the South Bronx. He is awaiting the arrival of another dirty car looking to leave clean. But this morning, it is slow.

At the driver’s entrance to the car wash, a huge, inflatable rat with red eyes is joined by community group members and union supporters working to convince drivers not to wash their car at Sunny Day until the company signs a fair union contract with its workers.

These protestors are not new to Campis. He was one of them until recently and hopes their presence will help secure higher wages in a borough where workers are seeing their paychecks going more and more toward keeping a roof over their head.

Still fresh in his mind, the 20-year-old Campis remembers the three weeks worth of missing paychecks that sparked these rat-infested protests in the dark of last winter.

Sunny Day owner Frank Roman had not paid them in three weeks, Campis said. When the Sunny Day car wash workers, known as the “Car Washeros” to their supporters, began demanding their back wages, Roman fired them and they began staging protests with the unions and community groups. After the whole crew joined the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the workers sued for their jobs back and are now negotiating a new contract.

For Campis, the money lost was desperately needed to provide food and shelter for his single mother and three younger brothers. In the Bronx, his story is all too familiar, according to a recent report by the University Neighborhood Housing Program, a northwest Bronx thinktank.

“It’s really critical that when we’re talking about making sure the Bronx succeeds, that we are talking about what’s happening with service workers because these are the people living in our buildings,” said Gregory Lobo Jost, deputy director of the UNHP, at the program’s 30th anniversary forum on housing and affordability in the Bronx held at Fordham University.

“When you think about people making this small amount of money, we are also talking about the neighborhoods where we have the highest concentration of people, in the nation, living pay check to pay check,” he said.

Totaled with the cost of fuel and heating, the average rent in the Bronx is $1,050, according to UNHP’s report. A person spending 30 percent of their income on that rent rate would have to be employed full-time while earning almost $20 an hour. The report said that the number of households spending more than half of their income on rent has risen.

At a rate of $5.50 an hour, Campis works 8-hour shifts earning $44 dollars a day. That works out to about $880 to share amongst five mouths, each month, for Campis and his family.

UNHP’s report points to the decline of manufacturing jobs as a reason for the rise in low-wage sector service jobs. History shows that laborers without degrees or other forms of education qualified for these medium-wage unionized jobs and made a decent living. The problem is those jobs no longer exist and have since been replaced with low-wage jobs that offer no benefits.

In the recession of 2008, low wage jobs accounted for only 21 percent of jobs lost, but 58 percent of new jobs created in the recovery, according to the National Employment Law Project, which is cited in UNHP’s report.

Campis, a high school graduate himself, said that he picked up the job at Sunny Day hoping to save money for a college education. The recession limited his opportunity for a better job and he said he could not afford to decline the job offer at the car wash.

“The legal minimum wage is $5.50 plus tip. The employer is also supposed to make sure they make up the difference,” said Hilary Klein, a lead organizer for Make the Road New York, a Brooklyn-based community organization supporting the car washeros campaign. “So, if they don’t get any tips that day, they [the employers] have to pay them [the workers] the difference between $5.50 and $7.25. But minimum wage is still not to enough live off.”

Klein explained that before the car washeros campaign began, many of these car wash companies were mistreating their workers by not paying them the difference and harboring dangerous work conditions.

New York Communities for Change and Make the Road (two groups protesting at Sunny Day) have worked hard to unionize several car wash companies.

Though Campis’ employer is resisting negotiating a fair contract with the union, which includes a raise in wages and paid days off, six other car washes have signed on to the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union. Klein said that in light of the campaign, more car wash companies have started following the law out of fear.

Although rent is relatively-low in Bronx, people already living here are making far less than others throughout the city, making the Bronx almost unaffordable for many of its own residents.

Community groups who help support individuals like Campis are also dealing with high rent space and, in some cases, are facing evictions. UNHP said that apart from raising the minimum wage, a key factor in making the borough sustainable is ensuring these groups do not disappear. Ensuring their survival means standing strong for them, just as they did when the Bronx was falling apart in the 1970s, Jost said.

It’s not simply about education, jobs, health, or housing, it’s about connecting all these thoughts, Jost said.

Campis still has dream of attending college so he can secure a better job. He knows it can happen. Though Sunny Day has not helped him realize his own college dreams, Campis says he will happily see one of his brothers go to college in September.

CAP: Protesters, accompanied by a large, attention-grabbing, inflatable rat, are pressuring the owners of Sunny Day Car Wash in the South Bronx to negotiate with its newly unionized workers.
Photo by Sara Regalado

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.