Hundreds of San Francisco janitors walked off the job on Thursday, the second day of a three-day strike that workers began on Wednesday.
The unionized workers, represented by Service Employees International Union Local 87, are calling for fair pay, a return-to-work pathway for 3,000 janitors furloughed due to the pandemic and increased workplace safety protections, including sexual harassment safeguards and proper ventilation as the city continues to reopen. The majority of striking workers are women, people of color and immigrants, according to the union.
Striking workers are demonstrating outside various buildings that they clean, owned by real estate corporations Tishman Speyer, Cushman & Wakefield, Boston Properties and Hines, which count Salesforce, Facebook and Google among their tenants.
The strike comes after eight months of negotiations with ABLE Building Services and American Building Maintenance (ABM), two of the city’s largest cleaning contractors.
Ramiro Rodriguez, a janitor working for the Metro Building Maintenance Group at 1 Post Plaza and a Local 87 bargaining team member, works five-hour nightly shifts cleaning and disinfecting offices, bathrooms and floors. He said he is provided with one mask every three months.
Although workers at Rodriguez’s building did not strike, he chose to march alongside his co-workers on Wednesday.
“We’re not counting on a lot of the necessary materials in order to be able to disinfect the buildings as much as we would like to,” Rodriguez said.
"There’s such a lack of materials and PPE that we need for the work that we perform," he said. "What this also does is it puts us at danger, not just for us, but for any potential tenants coming back."
