THERE’S a homeless man living in our street. Or, more accurately, living in his car on our street. I first noticed him early this year. I’m not sure when he moved in – he’s good at it, see.

I know lots of my neighbours, and no one else seems to be aware of him (although I haven’t mentioned him to them, either).

I’m going to call him Danny.

Danny comes and goes. He parks on our street half the days of the week, more or less.

My house is in a row of terrace houses in a pretty, inner-city suburb. We have old trees and green grass. When I sit at my desk, I stare out the window to the street. Danny, like me, is a creature of habit. He usually parks directly across from my room, on the other side of the road.

One morning in summer I was staring out the window when I saw the driver’s side seat of a car slide upright, and the door ease open. Danny stepped out. He wore low-slung, loose jeans with a rock ’n‘ roll studded belt, and a heavy metal t-shirt stretched over a round belly. He had a receding hairline, close shaved, except for a curious long black fringe flicked behind one ear. I watched as he meticulously cleaned his car. From his boot he retrieved a container of Windex and a cloth. Later, he returned to the boot and collected a dustpan and brush. He took a plastic bag full of rubbish to the bin in the park.

Another morning, soon after, I looked out the window and saw Danny leaning on his car smoking a cigarette, speaking to two young women. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I was pleased – from their body language, things seemed to be going well. They talked for some time, ten minutes perhaps. But then the women stiffened a little, and the conversation broke off.

The months have passed. Each evening, when I arrive home, I look for his car. Each morning when I wake, I look again.

In the wee hours one Saturday night, I pedalled home from a party and saw Danny crouching next to the parking meter. I couldn’t tell what he was doing. The next morning his car had gone but the parking meter was decorated with graffiti, in thick black felt-tip texta. Words like death and devil and forbidden, repeated over and over in gothic capital lettering.

The previous week the council had installed new bench seats in the park and I saw that he’d inscribed the timber of the benches similarly; likewise, a ‘For Sale’ board on a house across the road; and, I noticed, the wall of a nearby supermarket.

Within a week, the council had scrubbed the parking meter clean, but his words remain on the bench seats.

I am glad about this. I have rented a room on this street for several years, many of which I worked from home; during that time I knew all its comings and goings. Once, the day after returning from a long hitch-hiking adventure, I bumped into Martha, an elderly neighbour. “Oh, you’re back!” she exclaimed. “Freida told me she thought you were back!” Freida is another neighbour, further down the street. I liked that. I care about place and identity, about the physical and psychological markers we lay down, about the people we know and who know us.

One evening last week, Danny was already in his car – seat fully reclined, window slightly open – when I rode home at half past seven. Periodically, his hand would stretch up and out the window to tap the ash from a cigarette. He was still there the next morning at eight o’clock, when I collected my newspaper from the step. It had rained. That must have been a long, lonely night, I thought.

When I left for work, his car had gone. In the parking bay were his leavings: several cigarette butts, an empty can of beans, an avocado peel. Occasionally, I’ve noticed the remains of vomit on the asphalt. Most days he leaves no trace.

And so the year has passed, and Danny always returns. I’ve never spoken to him. I would like to say hello, if happenstance allows, but otherwise, I have resolved to leave him be. He has a street to call home.

For the last few days, however, his car has been there, but he hasn’t been in it. I walked past it this morning, and noticed a sign in the windscreen: “STUFF OFF WITH YOUR PARKING FINES”. Another sticker, by the driver’s door, said “FUCK OFF”.

I wonder about his life. It doesn’t change anything, but there is someone Danny doesn’t know, who knows he exists. I wonder whether or not he would like that.

Read this story on Right Now

Read a long story about homelessness I wrote for the Big Issue and this follow-up piece on the people I met. 

THIS past couple of weeks I’ve been meeting with striking cleaners in the CBD. My attention was piqued a month or so ago by a news snippet saying cleaners were refusing to change toilet paper. They were advising office workers to bring in their own.

So I went to their noisy protests. All this year, their union, United Voice, has been coordinating protests four days a week. They do it like this: one or two dozen workers materialise in front of a building, armed with wailing megaphones and 20L steel buckets and drumsticks. They make the worst racket they can for 45 minutes, hand out flyers to office workers, and leave.

They’re targeting the biggest cleaning contractor, Consolidated Property Services, which so far has refused to renew the Clean Start agreement, first negotiated with the union in 2009. About half of the cleaners in Melbourne are international students, and almost all were born overseas. But more about all that another time.

For now, follow me through a few leads: last week I met with a Nepalese student and cleaner named Koustup. He is tall and handsome, and endearingly friendly (in our correspondence, he told me to say hi to my girlfriend for him). He’s only been in Australia and working as a cleaner since the start of the year, but he has decided to help front the campaign because many of his co-workers are too scared. It was a bright afternoon and we sat outside a café on Swanston Street. “Have you seen the movie ‘Bread and Roses’?” he asked me. “It’s just the same as ‘Bread and Roses’. Exactly the same.”

So I watched ‘Bread and Roses’. It’s a Ken Loach film, made in 2000, starring Adrien Brody and Pilar Padilla, about cleaners at one building in Los Angeles trying to organise for better pay and for health care. The story is based on the Justice for Janitors campaign by the Service Employees International Union. At one point, Brody, the union organiser, escapes the caretaker by hiding in Padilla’s trolley. Another time, he confronts the building owner at a fancy restaurant, sips his wine, and eats a lamb chop from his plate. Later, Brody and Padilla kiss in a cleaning cupboard. The movie also unflinchingly portrays the dilemmas for the janitors, who are nervous about making trouble, and must decide whether to risk their precarious livelihoods.

Striking millworkers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912

Afterwards, I wanted to know about the title. It comes from a speech by unionist, socialist and feminist Rose Schneiderman, said to have been given at the famous 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Half the employees of the major mill company were women between the ages of 14 and 18, and they’d come from dozens of different countries.

Camella Teoli, a 14-year-old millworker, testified before a U.S. Congressional hearing on the strike in March 1912. She started working when she was 13, she said, and after only two weeks she was in an accident in which the machine pulled her scalp off. She spent seven months in hospital.

Mr. HARDWICK. Why did you [join the strike]?

Miss TEOLI. Because I didn’t get enough to eat at home.

Mr. HARDWICK. You did not get enough to eat at home?

Miss TEOLI. No.

She was among more than 25,000 workers who joined the strike. It was led by the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), and, chiefly, by the 22-year-old unionist Elisabeth Gurley Flynn. At the time in Lawrence, the infant mortality rate was among the worst in the country, and over a third of millworkers died before they were 25.

But in her speech at the strike, Schneiderman argued for more than starvation wages. “What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art,” she said. “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”

After eight weeks, through the bitterly cold winter, the owners gave in. In 2012, a centennial committee commemorating the strike stated that it led to pay rises for 150,000 textile workers. Within a few years, however, the textile companies had undermined those gains.

Schneiderman, who was a Polish Jewish immigrant, died in 1972, at the age of 90, after a lifetime of campaigning for workers’ and women’s rights. She had red hair; her critics dubbed her the “Red Rose of Anarchy”. In the 1930s and 40s she helped European Jews flee to the USA and Palestine.

At the café, Koustup told me that at his building, it’s standard practice for cleaners to begin work up to 45 minutes early, unpaid, to get through the chores required of them. They haven’t had a pay rise for two years, and reports of bullying and intimidation are common.

Nevertheless, he says, the cleaners’ hourly rate – over $24 per hour, for four-hour evening shifts – is “good money” compared to earnings in many of the workers’ home countries, so many of them just accept the difficult conditions. Why don’t you just accept it? I asked.

“I can’t,” he said, abruptly.

Why not?

“Because I know it’s wrong.”