Crippled by Low Wages, Miami Janitors File Labor Charges Against Cleaning Contractor
Miriam Alba is tired of being tired. An immigrant from Nicaragua, she wears her exhaustion like a uniform, juggling multiple jobs to keep a roof over her head and help put her granddaughter through college. For years, Alba's working days have been filled with cooking and cleaning homes, leaving little time for sleep. The few snatches of shut-eye she did get, about three or four hours at most, came after a night shift of janitorial work at CIC Miami, a large co-working space in eastern Allapattah, right next to the interstate.
Alba had always handled her janitorial work at CIC with pride, if unhappily at times: The pay, $8.46 an hour, was poor, and part-time workers like her didn't receive any benefits. But it wasn't until she began organizing for higher wages that she finally decided to leave. CIC outsources its cleaning needs to Coastal Building Management (CBM) and its property management to the real-estate service company Cushman & Wakefield. Last month, Alba was at the center of pending unfair labor practice charges filed against both companies. Since going public with her support for a union, she says she's been surveilled and threatened. CBM denies those charges. Cushman & Wakefield did not return messages from New Times seeking comment.
While Miami's booming real-estate market and nascent startup scene continue to draw attention for their steady growth, it's South Florida's low-wage service sector that's actually created the most new jobs in recent years. That includes janitorial workers such as Alba, who was deflated to learn just how bad janitors in Miami had it. When factoring in the cost of living, the Miami metro area ranks third-worst in the nation for median janitorial wages and dead last in Florida, according to an analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Studies by the workers' union Service Employees International Union (SEIU). On average, janitors working in areas as expensive as Miami make more than $3.50 more per hour than Miami janitors.
Put differently, while the industries that help build, sell, rent, and manage Miami properties continue to blossom, work standards for the people who clean them remain virtually stagnant: SEIU estimates that real annual earnings in the janitorial industry have grown by just 1.6 percent in the past two decades. The poor growth is, in part, a product of a race to the bottom on wages among cleaning contractors, to whom office buildings have happily outsourced their cleaning work, according to Ana Tinsly, a spokeswoman for the Florida division of 32BJ SEIU.
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