Minneapolis, MN – On Thursday, August 26, window cleaners in Minneapolis reached a tentative agreement with their employers and ended their open-ended strike after ten days on the picket lines.

The window cleaners – who are part of a master-contract that includes three companies (Columbia Building Services, Final Touch Commercial Cleaning and Apex North) – won major improvements in their new contract after holding strong on the picket lines and organizing several large rallies and actions in the Minneapolis area over the course of the strike.

In the new contract deal, some of the wins include 12% wage increases across the board over the duration of the contract, increased sick days, increased disability pay, and funding from the companies to be used to start a window cleaner apprenticeship safety and training program. Lack of proper training and safety was one of the major issues at the heart of the strike.

In a public statement released by SEIU Local 26, the window cleaners union, Eric Crone, a window cleaner and steward with the local, said, “After the last year, all essential workers deserve more. It’s important that all the workers who kept our state running during COVID fight for what we deserve. Our strike showed that no one will just give anything to us, but you have to stand up and fight for what you deserve. I hope our strike, and our strong new contract, show other essential workers that when you band together and stay the course, you can get results.”

The window cleaners will return to work on Monday.

#MinneapolisMN #PeoplesStruggles #SEIULocal26 #Strikes

Minneapolis, MN – On August 20, the strike continued for around 50 SEIU Local 26 union members who clean the majority of the tall buildings in downtown Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Through their first five days of the strike the window cleaners picketed in locations all around downtown Minneapolis. They also held multiple larger events for members of other unions and the community to show their support for the workers and their strike over wages and safety.

Window cleaning is primarily done during the five-day work week, so the actions and picketing take place on those days. Their next planned action is at 6 a.m. Monday, August 23 at the Minneapolis/Saint Paul airport, where the companies have multiple contracts they clean. The window cleaners say they will not back down until they get a contract that values their work. Bargaining sessions are scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday this week and the strike will continue unless management comes to the table with revised proposals that the window cleaners decide they can accept.

Eric Crone is a window cleaner with Columbia Building Services as well as a union steward and executive board member of SEIU Local 26. He states, “We’re striking because we’ve been fighting for years to improve our industry. We’re done with delays and we won’t back down. If you ask someone on the street how much someone who is up on the buildings gets paid or what level of training they think we get, they always guess higher than what we currently get. It feels like we have been disrespected. We kept going to work even after our original contract expired in 2020, but now they can’t be bothered to bargain with us in a fair way.”

Crone went on to say “The employers came to the table and we made a small amount of progress on small matters. We gave a proposal on the larger matters, and now we are waiting for a response from them that shows they value our work. We haven’t found anything they are offering worth stopping our strike so we’re back on the picket line Monday morning.”

As this story continues to develop, Fight Back! will provide additional coverage.

#MinneapolisMN #PeoplesStruggles #SEIU #strike #SEIULocal26 #Strikes #windowWashers

Minneapolis, MN – On August 17 at 7 a.m. around 50 high rise window cleaners represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 26 in Minneapolis began a strike. The window cleaners are part of a master contract in which three companies bargain together for one large contract.

Members are on strike at Columbia Building Services and Final Touch Commercial Services which are two of the three companies in negotiations. The third company, Apex North, has already agreed to the main principles in question and as a result the union members decided that workers at Apex North will continue washing windows during the strike with support from their coworkers at the other two companies.

SEIU represents around half of the total high rise window cleaners in the Twin Cities market and clean the vast majority of buildings over 20 stories in the area, which are the primary money makers in the industry. They use many types of equipment to clean the skyscrapers including portable hanging scaffolding known as swingstages, boom lifts over 100 feet tall, and by rappelling on boatswain chairs with rappelling racks and suction cups to swing around cleaning windows sometimes as much as 48 stories in the air on ropes and knots.

The window cleaners are essential workers, and they say they are prepared to stay out until the companies agree to a decent contract that reflects the dangerous and uniquely skilled work they do. The workers say that in addition to cleaning windows, many have been asked to clean inside offices where COVID-19 cases were reported. They also say that they received little training or equipment to clean offices in these hazard conditions. The union is demanding the right training an equipment to stay safe as well as pay that reflects the hazardous work.

These window cleaners have a history of fighting for better wages and safety. In 2010 they were locked out by the same companies after refusing to not follow safety regulations when hanging over the sides of skyscrapers and climbing ladders as tall as 40 feet. That lockout lasted five days before the window cleaners stages a civil disobedience where they tied themselves safely using window cleaning equipment to the outside of a fifth story handrail and refused to come down until window cleaners were safe. They were arrested but the companies called immediately after and ended the lock out and returned to the bargaining table where they agreed to the main demands of the strike including significant raises and safety language and funds.

Window cleaners are a small group but tend to be the kind of people who do not back down form a fight when they have committed, and a large majority voted for this strike. This is a developing story and Fight Back! will have more coverage soon on it.

#MinneapolisMN #PeoplesStruggles #strike #SEIULocal26 #Strikes #windowWashers

Minneapolis, MN – Hundreds of workers, members of SEIU Local 26, rallied Feb. 17, as janitors walked off the job in a 24-hour unfair labor practices strike. The janitors clean the skyscrapers in downtown Minneapolis and Saint Paul and office buildings throughout the suburbs. The strike comes after months of negotiations in which management companies have refused to budge on key issues for the union. The company wage offer is only 20 additional cents an hour and management is only offering to create part-time jobs. The union is pushing for a $15 minimum for all janitors and full-time work with livable wages.

#MinneapolisMN #SEIU #strike #SEIULocal26 #janitors #Strikes

Minneapolis, MN – On Jan. 20, dozens of Latino immigrants who were among the hundreds fired from Chipotle Mexican Grill throughout Minnesota last month protested at a downtown Minneapolis Chipotle. At the protest the workers entered the store, while eight of the workers’ allies chained themselves together inside the store until they were arrested. The workers and their supporters are demanding justice from Chipotle.

Chipotle, a large multinational corporation that markets itself as a socially conscious Mexican food restaurant that sells “food with integrity,” abruptly fired hundreds of their Mexican and other Latino immigrant workers in Minnesota in December. At Chipotle restaurants across the state, they fired dozens of workers at a time, showing them the door without giving them a clear explanation for their firing.

Hearing rumblings of the firings, the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAc) denounced the cruel pre-Christmas firings publicly, and the media quickly took notice. Since then the fired workers have continued to speak out. They've organized several protests to demand justice. Their campaign is being supported by SEIU Local 26, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha (CTUL) and MIRAc.

The workers are demanding that they be properly compensated, including all back pay, vacation pay and compensation for years of service. They are demanding the truth from the company, which for weeks refused to make a public statement about the firings. Under pressure from the workers and repeated media questioning, Chipotle now admits in the press that the mass firings were a result of an I-9 Audit by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but they still haven’t communicated that clearly to the workers they fired.

I-9 audits are an anti-immigrant enforcement mechanism that have been dramatically ramped up by the Obama administration over the last two years, resulting in massive waves of unjust firings of immigrant workers around the country. Here in Minnesota, in addition to the hundreds of fired Chipotle workers, 1200 janitors were fired from ABM a year and a half ago and 100 immigrant workers in South Saint Paul who are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union were fired recently from I-9 audits as well.

According to MIRAc member Brad Sigal, “The workers at Chipotle were fired because the Obama administration is ordering more and more of these anti-immigrant I-9 audits. The President can stop them today administratively – it doesn’t need a vote in Congress. If President Obama wants to show he supports immigrant rights like he claims, then not one more immigrant worker should be fired unjustly because of his administration’s policies.”

#MinneaoplisMN #MinneapolisMN #SEIULocal26 #MIRAc #MinnesotaImmigrantRightsActionCommittee #Chipotle #CTUL #I9Audits

Minneapolis, MN – On April 26, 100 supporters of immigrant rights gathered at an emergency protest in downtown Minneapolis. They came together to voice outrage at the new anti-immigrant law passed in Arizona. Arizona's Governor Jan Brewer signed into law the most extreme anti-immigrant legislation in the country, (SB-1070) on April 23, provoking large protests in Arizona and outrage around the country.

The organizers of the April 26 protest in Minneapolis are building toward the May 1 protest for immigrant and workers’ rights, which will start at 2:00 p.m. at Martin Luther King Park at Nicollet Avenue and 41st Street in south Minneapolis. Organizers anticipate that the outrage produced by Arizona's new law will cause many more people to come out and march on May 1.

The April 26 protest responded to the new law in Arizona by targeting Minnesota's Governor Pawlenty, who has proposed many anti-immigrant laws. Pawlenty was speaking at the downtown Hilton hotel, at an event organized by the right-wing religious group, the Minnesota Family Council. The event was attended by national level Republican politicians like former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who was also anti-immigrant during his campaign.

Speakers at the protest included Nick Espinosa of MIRAc, Greg Nammacher of SEIU Local 26, Antonia Alvarez and Pablo Tapia from Asamblea de Derechos Civiles (Civil Rights Assembly), and the Reverends Loren McGrail and Luis Alvarenga of the Interfaith Coalition on Immigration.

The new Arizona law institutionalizes racial profiling, by mandating local law enforcement to check proof of citizenship of anyone they encounter who they think might be undocumented. So anyone who the police might think looks Latino must now carry their identity documents with them at all times or be immediately suspect and subject to police harassment and arrest. Many people have compared Arizona's new law to the Pass Laws in South Africa under apartheid. Those laws required Black South Africans to carry their pass books with them whenever they left their ‘designated’ areas. If they didn't produce a pass, they were subject to immediate arrest.

Ten other states are currently considering laws like the one passed in Arizona.

In his talk at the protest, Nick Espinosa of MIRAc said, “We cannot wait any longer for immigration reform. It's time for Obama to make good on his promises. With racist demagogues like Joe Arpaio terrorizing families and communities every day, we cannot wait. With John Morton of ICE asking for quotas to increase the numbers of deportations every day, we cannot wait...When states like Arizona pass unconstitutional laws reminiscent of Jim Crow, we need the community to come together and stand side by side, immigrants and citizens together, to demand the justice that's been denied to immigrants for so many years...In this moment of national outrage we can push for real, just reform. Not more repression, but legalization and equal rights for all human beings.”

The Minneapolis protest was organized by the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Coalition (MIRAc), SEIU Local 26, Asamblea de Derechos Civiles, FMLN Committee and Workers Interfaith Network.

#MinneapolisMN #FMLN #SEIULocal26 #MIRAc #TimPawlenty #SB1070 #Arizona #AsambleaDeDerechosCiviles #WorkersInterfaithNetwork #JanBrewer

The janitors' union is preparing for a strike and is also mobilizing supporters to take action. Civil disobedience is part of that plan. According to SEIU Local 26 janitor Maristella Chimbo, “We are fighting for justice – for good, clean green jobs. We have a lot of support from other unions, from immigrant communities, from religious groups, from students. If the employer won't move at the negotiating table, janitors and our supporters are prepared to take the actions necessary to win our demands.”

#MinneapolisMN #SEIU #civilDisobedience #SEIULocal26 #janitors

Minneapolis, MN – On Jan. 30, hundreds of janitors, mostly Latino and East African immigrants, held a spirited meeting at the Minneapolis Labor Center and voted nearly unanimously to authorize a strike. When the strike vote was taken, the multinational crowd chanted and held up signs reading “Yes! Sí! Haa! Ee! Oui!” ('Yes!' in English, Spanish, Somali, Oromo and Amharic). With the strike authorization vote, the workers can now strike if the union’s negotiating committee decides a strike is necessary to win their demands.

The workers are members of the union SEIU Local 26, which represents over 4000 janitors who work for 18 different cleaning contractors, including ABM and Marsden. They clean office buildings in downtown Minneapolis and Saint Paul, including offices for major banks, corporations and buildings such as Wells Fargo, US Bank, Target and the IDS Center. Their union contract expired Jan. 8, but according to union negotiating committee members, the employer is still uninterested in resolving negotiations quickly or listening to any of the union's key proposals.

At the strike vote meeting, union negotiating committee members spoke about the disrespect they get at the negotiating table, and why it was necessary to authorize a strike. A statement that the janitors' negotiating committee handed out at the meeting said,

We clean some of the biggest corporations in the world: Wells Fargo, which made $3 billion in the last three months of 2009 alone, US Bank, which made $1.8 billion last year, and Target, which made $2 billion last year...How long will we allow these corporations to use the recession as an excuse to make us settle for less and less, while they make more and more? Many janitors have seen their income cut by as much as 25% through wage reductions in the last two years and the cleaning companies are proposing to cut even more.

The union is fighting for ‘good jobs’ and ‘green cleaning.’ By good jobs they mean keeping the janitors' jobs as full time jobs, as opposed to the employer proposal to return most workers to part time. It also means keeping or improving workload protections that the employer wants to eliminate. The union's green cleaning proposals include changing overnight shift cleaning jobs to day shift jobs, which would save on energy costs while making workers' jobs better. Another union green cleaning proposal is to use more environmentally-friendly cleaning chemicals, which would also create a safer work environment for the janitors. The employer has not taken these proposals seriously, even though the green cleaning proposals would actually save them millions of dollars.

The employer has taken a hard line in negotiations because they seem to think they have the upper hand due to the bad economy and a mass immigration audit, or silent raid, that led to ABM firing 1200 Latino janitors late last year. This is similar to the mass immigration firings that happened in Southern California last year at Overhill Farms and American Apparel and that are part of a national wave of attacks on immigrant workers. Among the fired Latino janitors in Minneapolis were many union activists from Local 26. ABM replaced many of the fired Latino workers with African American workers brought in through a temp agency in North Minneapolis, paying them $2.50 an hour less than the rest of the janitors, and keeping them in 'temporary' status. The African American workers and the union have stood up against the employer's discriminatory treatment. 50 of the African American workers marched to demand that ABM pay them equally, including back pay. The workers also filed discrimination charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to try to bring the African American workers hired through Emerge Staffing up to the same wage as the rest of their co-workers.

In addition to the strike vote, the union is mobilizing workers and supporters to pressure the employer. Workers are organizing a different protest action every day to increase the pressure. A solidarity committee has formed to bring together other unions and organizations to support the janitors. A civil disobedience training is set for Feb. 6 so union supporters will be ready to take direct action in support of the janitors if necessary.

#MinneapolisMN #SEIU #SEIULocal26 #janitors

Minneapolis, MN – On Jan. 13, hundreds of janitors, the majority Latino and Somali immigrants, held a spirited meeting at the Minneapolis Labor Center and voted nearly unanimously to authorize a strike. The multinational crowd chanted, “Yes we can do it!” in Spanish (“Sí se puede!”) and in Somali (“Haa wakarna!”). When the vote was taken to authorize a strike, members held up signs reading “Yes! Sí! Haa!” (‘yes’ in English, Spanish and Somali).

The workers are members of SEIU Local 26, a union that represents 4200 janitors who work for 18 different cleaning contractors, including Marsden, ABM and MSI. They clean office buildings in downtown Minneapolis and Saint Paul, including offices for major corporations and buildings such as Target, Wells Fargo, IDS Center, US Bank and Lawson Commons. The janitors’ pay is low and their health care coverage is so expensive that few of the janitors can afford it. Of 2200 workers who are eligible for family health care coverage, only 14 workers actually take the family coverage plan.

The employer is only offering workers a 20-cent pay increase and is refusing to improve the workers’ health care coverage. According to the union, when wages are adjusted for inflation, full-time janitors earned less in 2006 than they did in 1976. Part-time janitors’ wages have declined by 22% during that time. The employer is trying to move toward more part-time workers, who receive fewer benefits. The union opposes this.

The workers’ contract expired on Dec. 31. Negotiations broke off in late December when the employer presented their ‘final offer’ to the union’s negotiating committee.

With the strike authorization vote, the workers can now strike if the union’s 10-member negotiating committee – which includes three Somalis, one Ethiopian and five Latinos – decides it’s necessary. The union has appealed numerous unfair labor practices for intimidation of workers. If the union does strike, it would be a strike against the unfair labor practices, which means that the striking workers could not be permanently replaced.

SEIU Local 26 members have never authorized a strike before. This strike vote follows on the momentum of recent janitors’ strikes and victories in other states. After the strike vote, the negotiating committee will return to the negotiating table to try to get a better contract. The union is also planning other pressure tactics to try to force the employers to budge.

If that doesn’t work they are preparing for a strike. After the Jan. 13 strike authorization meeting, a group of about 40 people met to form a solidarity committee to mobilize union and community support for the janitors in case of a strike. AFSCME Local 3800 president Phyllis Walker presented SEIU Local 26 with their first check from another union for their strike fund, and pledged to raise more support from the labor movement when a strike begins. The solidarity committee is planning various support activities.

If the janitors in SEIU Local 26 do strike, it would be a significant battle for the labor movement in the Twin Cities. Since 2000 there have been a series of big strikes here involving thousands of workers, some of which have been very sharp battles. Hotel workers struck in 2000, state workers and nurses struck in 2001, hospital workers and university clerical workers struck in 2003, metro bus drivers struck in 2004 and Northwest mechanics struck in 2005-2006.

The janitors in SEIU 26 are among the lowest paid workers in the Twin Cities working class. They are by and large oppressed nationalities and recent immigrants – ‘invisible’ workers who live on the edge of survival with everything to lose. Their willingness to fight is an inspiration to the working class as a whole.

#TwinCitiesMN #MinneapolisMN #ImmigrantRights #News #immigrantWorkers #SEIULocal26 #JanitorStrike