NYC Building Cleaners Strike After ‘Low-Road Contractor’ Cuts Pay, Hours, and Benefits During the Holidays
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Striking 32BJ service workers picket outside 373 and 381 Park Avenue South this week after the new cleaning contractor slashed hours, pay, and benefits. Photos/Steve Wishnia
By Steve Wishnia
Cleaners at two Manhattan office buildings went on strike Dec. 17, after the new cleaning contractor not only slashed their pay by $9 an hour, but cut their hours as well.
Planned Building Services, the contractor, reduced hourly wages from roughly $31 to $22 when it took over at 373 and 381 Park Ave. South last month. It also lowered the number of workers on duty from seven on each shift to three during the day and two at night, Brian Samsingh, 55, who’s worked in the building for 18 years, said while on the picket line Dec. 18.
“You have so much more work than before, and they’re paying us less,” he added.
Some previously full-time workers now get called in for shifts of two or three hours during the week, or for just Saturdays and Sundays, Sejdefa Radoncic, 53, who has worked at the buildings for 20 years, told Work-Bites, and Planned Building Services also cancelled paid holidays off and overtime pay for working on holidays.
It also eliminated health and legal-services benefits. The workers’ goal, Radoncic said, is “to get everything back that we had before.”
“We are not going to let Planned Building Services threaten our standard of living,” 32BJ SEIU Executive Vice President Denis Johnston told the about 60 picketers looping under a construction scaffold in front of the two buildings, carrying signs reading “Respect Your Cleaners” and “Unfair to Workers—Right Before Holidays.” One man honked a small orange air horn in time to the chants of “Thirty-two! B-J!”
Johnston calls Planned Building Services a “low-road, law-breaking contractor.” “We’ve been at war with this contractor on and off for 25 years,” he told Work-Bites. “They’ve never agreed to pay the industry standard in wages and benefits.”
The union has exchanged some information with them, he says, but there have been no formal negotiations.
32BJ SEIU Executive Vice President Denis Johnston told Work-Bites that the union is not going to allow Planned Building Services to threaten his members’ standard of living. Above: Brian Samsingh and Sejdefa Radoncic.
Planned Building Services is one of three divisions of Planned Companies, based in Parsippany, N.J. They provide janitorial, maintenance, concierge/front desk, and security services to more than 1,000 residential, corporate, and commercial properties in the Northeast, Florida, Georgia, and San Francisco. 32BJ has had similar disputes with them in residential buildings, Johnston says, and the company has been judged guilty of wage theft and unfair labor practices more than a dozen times in the New York-New Jersey area over the past ten years.
Planned Companies did not respond to a request for comment from Work-Bites.
The workers have received significant support from commercial tenants in the building, according to the union. “You know how many tenants asked ‘Are you coming back?’” Radoncic said.
“Oh, my God! No money to pay my mortgage, to pay my bills, to pay for my car.”
Johnston praised the workers for being courageous after they “suffered a huge economic hit,” and fighting “to keep their jobs good jobs” against a company trying to undermine labor standards in the metropolitan area.
“Oh, my God! No money to pay my mortgage, to pay my bills, to pay for my car,” Radoncic, who commutes from Connecticut, says of the pay cut. As a breast-cancer survivor, she also needs her health insurance.
Samsingh, originally from Trinidad, told Work-Bites that he had been working nights because he has to take care of his 89-year-old mother during the day. She’s blind, has dementia, and injured herself in a fall a few weeks ago, so she needs to be helped in and out of bed. But when Planned Building Services took over, “they wouldn’t give me the nights.”
Radoncic, who works on the night shift, offered to switch with him, but the bosses told her there weren’t any hours on the day shift available for her, Samsingh said. They told him he had to reapply for his job.
“They don’t care about the workers,” he says. “How can they have a good conscience doing this?”