Hey, rich and powerful people – how about some justice for janitors?

February 8th’s edition of The Scanner arrived in my mailbox yesterday. It carries the front page article, “Janitors Protest Loss of Union, Benefits”, which begins:

“Until a few weeks ago, janitors at the Union Bank of California in downtown Portland say they had decent wages and healthcare they could count on.

Janitors at Union Bank say that, after buying the assets of another ServiceMaster franchise, the north Portland company told workers their union days were over.”

The article goes on to report that with the change in authority to ServiceMaster, workers who had been union members with SEIU (Service Employees International) for fourteen years suddenly found themselves without recognition of the bargaining unit. Some workers lost their jobs, others were told their health care insurance and pension benefits had been eliminated. Only full-time employees receive benefits. SEIU Local 49 President Alice Dale is quoted saying, “Companies like ServiceMaster (Swan Island) are now actively lowering standards for janitors and their families in downtown Portland.” In response, ServiceMaster attorney Rick VanCleave is reported to have said only that he “did not know” if his company had changed the Union Bank workers to part-time hours.

This situation is similar to that facing janitors who clean the Fox Tower and 1000 Broadway, two downtown office buildings owned by real estate developer Tom Moyer. Janitorial workers there say the company that employs them, non-union National Maintenance Contractors (Willamette Week‘s Rogue of the Week, 3/31/04), refuses to give them more than four hours work each shift – leading to their chant on picket lines of “Twenty-eight dollars a day? No way!” You might wonder why that is a problem, since the workers could pick up another four hours at a second job. Try lack of health care benefits, irregular and unreliable hours, and rock-bottom pay. By many companies using the same scheme to avoid paying benefits, the employers keep the workers on a continual treadmill of rushing between short term, short hours jobs, rather than letting them gain seniority, job security, health care benefits, and regular hours with one full-time employer. The same plight faces janitors at Melvin Mark, Inc., which contracts with ServiceMaster to clean most of its 1.4 million square feet of downtown Portland properties. CEO M. James Mark told Willamette Week in May 2006 that how ServiceMaster treats its employees isn’t his concern, and refused to comment further.

When affluent people who can afford to donate millions to various high-profile worthy causes in the city, ask the rest of us to pick up health care costs for the people who clean their buildings, isn’t there something whacky in everyone’s sense of priorities? Many Portlanders boycott Wal-Mart because of the way its workers are treated, to cut costs; why are these janitors’ employers’ practices more acceptable?

And here’s the real kicker, again from The Skanner:

“The North Portland ServiceMaster franchise has operated locally since 1993 and has contracts with some of the more prominent buildings in Portland, including the Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Garden Arena.

The franchise has been under fire from labor organizers before. In 2005, janitors from the Rose Garden Arena and Memorial Coliseum filed a class action suit against the company, alleging that ServiceMaster Swan Island forced them to work “off the clock