Ernesto Guerrero, president of United Service Workers West incites the crowd in Bruin Plaza before the march begins.
Holding signs that read “Justice for Janitors” and “The 1 percent is holding us all back,” more than 1,000 protesters marched from Bruin Plaza to Wilshire Boulevard Thursday afternoon.
The march was organized by the United Service Workers West, a California union of service workers. It was a protest against income inequality, and denounced a series of new contracts that lower janitorial wages nationally and reduce insurance benefits, organizers said.
Pedro Garcia, a janitor who works in Westwood and who participated in the protest, said the contract renewals would make it difficult for him to retire with an adequate retirement fund.
The union works to organize solidarity among members every time there are contract renewals, said Martin Terrones, a communications representative for the union.
“But we wanted (the) protests to mean something more,” Terrones said.
This year, the organization aligned itself with the Occupy movement to take a broader stance against income inequality, he said.
“We’re marching around Wilshire to show the banks that the 99 percent will not be held back by (the banks’) greed or their avarice,” Terrones said. Protesters were joined by several members of Occupy UCLA.
The events began around noon in Bruin Plaza with speeches in English and Spanish. Marchers then walked through Westwood and Wilshire boulevards and stopped briefly in front of the Federal Building in Westwood.
As of Thursday afternoon, there were two tents set up in front of the Federal Building.
The line of protesters crossing the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood boulevards, and that of Wilshire Boulevard and Gayley Avenue, disrupted traffic. Police overseeing the march were forced to create space for vehicles. Officers from the Los Angeles Police Department were scattered in the area, monitoring the situation.
Aside from traffic control, there was no police intervention, said LAPD officer Noah Lowry.
Fewer than 40 members from the union that organized the protest, such as custodial and service workers, work on two UCLA properties ““ the Wilshire Center Business Improvement District and the UCLA Medical Plaza, according to a statement from the UCLA Office of Media Relations and Public Outreach.
These workers are employed by contractors and not by UCLA directly, the statement said.