Law-Breaking Bosses Attack NYC Building Service Workers’ Pay and Health Care

32BJ building service workers rally this week after seeing their pay cut by 30% and their health care vanish. Photo/Steve Wishnia

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By Steve Wishnia

The new cleaning contractor at two recently sold Manhattan office buildings is cutting workers’ pay by almost 30% and eliminating their health-insurance coverage, according to the SEIU 32BJ union.

On Nov. 20, Empire Capital Holdings, a private-equity firm and commercial real-estate investor that had signed a contract in May to buy 373 and 381 Park Avenue South from ATCO Properties for $130 million, sold the contract to Olmstead Properties for $104 million, while keeping an equity interest for itself. But before that deal, Empire Capital had replaced the buildings’ cleaning contractor with Planned Building Services (PBS), a New Jersey-based company that has “a long history of breaking the law,” 32BJ SEIU Executive Vice President Denis Johnston told Work-Bites. 

The workers are covered by the city Displaced Building Service Workers Protection Act, Johnston explained, which requires a building’s new owners to retain service workers for 90 days, except if they’re fired for cause or laid off for financial reasons. But Planned Building Services, 32BJ says, is slashing wages from $30.97 to $22 an hour, and cancelling their health-insurance and immigration-law assistance benefits.

“They’re playing with our lives,” Sejdefa Radoncic, 53, a cleaner who has worked at 381 Park Avenue South for 20 years, told the about 75 people protesting in front of the buildings on the afternoon of Nov. 20, a crowd that swelled and shrank as 32BJ members stopped by before heading off to their night-shift jobs.

“I worry about the job. My health, my income, everything,” Radoncic told Work-Bites. She needs to see a doctor several times a year to check on her high blood pressure and that her breast cancer hasn’t recurred, and her health insurance also covers her husband and son. She also worries about how she’ll keep up her mortgage and car payments after losing almost one-third of her pay.

“We worked through the pandemic and risked our lives, and now they are kicking us to the curb,” Brian Samsingh, who’s worked in the buildings for 18 years, told the crowd.

The union’s immigration-law assistance is crucial, because many of its members are immigrants. One worker at the two buildings, Hajrije Kukic, is “midstream in her citizenship process,” Johnston said. The 61-year-old immigrant from Montenegro applied for U.S. citizenship for herself and her husband in September.

Sadieta Hot, another Montenegrin immigrant who came out to support her fellow 32BJ members, said she and her husband relied on that benefit when they applied to for citizenship. The union paid for all but “a little tiny bit” of the legal and government application fees.

Wage theft and more

Planned Business Services is more than 100 years old and operates in more than 1,000 buildings, primarily in large East Coast metropolitan areas and the San Francisco Bay Area. It touts its acquisitiveness, buying up other building-service companies.

Over the past decade, PBS has run afoul of labor law several times. In December 2024, it and a sister company reached a settlement with City Comptroller Brad Lander to pay $145,000 in back wages and penalties for failing to pay prevailing wages and benefits at two buildings receiving state tax breaks in Williamsburg and Hell’s Kitchen. In 2020, it had to give porters at a Jersey City apartment complex more than $100,000 in back pay for violating the city’s standard-wage ordinance. In 2017, the federal Labor Department ordered it to compensate more than 500 workers in New Jersey for unpaid overtime.

Its treatment of workers during the COVID pandemic provoked two strikes at buildings in northern New Jersey in 2020. Last January, the Federal Trade Commission ordered PBS to stop enforcing “no-poach” agreements, in which building owners would be fined if they hired PBS employees directly or switched to a different services contractor who retained them.

The new owners, Manhattan Borough President-elect Brad Hoylman said, should “sit down with the union to ensure that Planned Building Services doesn’t do what they’ve done across the Northeast.”

Olmstead Properties referred questions about whether it will keep PBS on as cleaning contractor to a company executive, who did not respond to messages from Work-Bites.

“If one building owner does this, the bad example can spread,” Johnston says. “Responsible building owners understand the value of our members—a well-trained, trustworthy workforce that keeps the building clean and the tenants safe.”

The issue is “very important and close to my heart,” Sadieta Hot, a 32BJ member for 29 years, told Work-Bites. “Seven or eight years ago, we had the same situation at 183 Madison Avenue.”

A new landlord, she recalled, “brought in a nonunion company that slashed our wages.” She and her coworkers stayed on for a few months and went on strike. UPS and FedEx drivers wouldn’t cross their picket line to make deliveries, but the walkout eventually failed. 32BJ helped them find jobs in other buildings.

“I really think that every union member should come out when these things happen, to make sure it doesn’t happen elsewhere,” Hot said. “The more united we are, it will be harder to break us.”