http://www.chron.com/business/texanomics/article/Despite-souring-office-market-janitors-union-7957767.php
Despite souring office market, janitors union secures raises in new contract
3,200 SEIU members will vote to ratify it on Saturday
Published 5:32 pm, Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Office buildings will remain clean and trash-free now that the union representing 3,200 janitors came to an agreement with building service contractors hours after their four-year contract expired Tuesday night.
The Service Employees International Union local had voted to authorize a strike last week, after it said that cleaning companies including ABM, GCA, ISS and Pritchard sought to carve two thirds of their members out of the union by excluding most buildings outside the 610 highway.
Instead, while not releasing details until members vote on the contract this Saturday, the union said the tentative agreement retains all members in the bargaining unit. It also includes "significant" raises and paid sick days.
"This is a victory for our entire city," said Dora Alvarado, a member of the bargaining committee, which spent 20 hours in its last negotiating session.
John Nesse, a St. Paul, Minn.-based lawyer who represented the employers, also declined to release specifics ahead of Saturday's ratification vote. But he expressed satisfaction with the outcome. "I can say that we believe this settlement is in the mutual best interest of the employees, the employers and the customers we serve," he said.
This agreement would only cover those four major companies, but the other three where SEIU has members -- Harvard, Sodexo, and Compass -- may well choose to match it.
Conditions didn't look promising for the janitors last week, with a boom in new office space and a decline in the number of businesses seeking to occupy it putting landlords in a cost-cutting mood.
Overall, however, they may have decided that cutting janitors' wages -- which the previous contract had pegged at $9.35 an hour -- wasn't worth the headache.
According to the Houston chapter of the Institute of Real Estate Management, janitorial costs only come to between 75 cents and a dollar per square foot annually for Class A and B office space. That means the cleaning budget only makes up between eight and 12 percent of overall management expenses.
