The largest US union for building service employees has filed an unfair work practices complaint against the office-share company WeWork after more than 90% of its contracted cleaners in New York lost their jobs following a lengthy dispute over pay and working conditions.
The layoffs came just weeks after the cleaners voted to unionise over their lack of benefits as well as salaries well below half the going rate – part of an ongoing dispute which has dogged the startup in multiple cities for months.
On Monday, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board stating that WeWork “refused to hire approximately 100 janitorial employees because of their support for the Union”.
Along with Silicon Valley giants like Uber, WeWork has become one of a new breed of privately held technology companies – it was valued at $10bn in a recent venture capital funding round – that has struggled with complaints about working conditions as they have grown exponentially.
WeWork allows small businesses and freelancers to rent office space, positioning itself as something between an incubator and a modern-day landlord. (The Guardian has been a WeWork tenant since moving its US newsroom in June.)
Pay for janitorial work in New York is usually between $18 and $23 per hour, according to the Service Employees International Union, which is representing the WeWork cleaners. But cleaners at WeWork were paid an average of $11 an hour when they voted to join a local branch of the union earlier this month.
In a memo to tenants after the vote, WeWork’s chief operating officer Arthur Minson announced that the company would be hiring 100 new “community service associates” instead of using its previous cleaning contractor, Commercial Business Management.
The new community service associates position comes with healthcare benefits, a pension plan and equity in WeWork – but pay starts at $15 an hour, still well below local industry standards. The SEIU said that under the job description for the new role – which calls for the “ability to speak English fluently” and computer literacy – many of the existing janitorial staff were unable to apply.
“These are great jobs with a solid career path, and the wages of these new hires will reflect our commitment to this exciting initiative,” Minson said.
On Monday evening, with many of WeWork’s New York tenants and executives away at the company’s annual summer camp – including activities such as waterskiing and kayaking on a lake in the Adirondack Mountains – the recently laid-off janitorial workers held a candlelit vigil night outside WeWork’s headquarters in Manhattan.
Paula Montaleza, who had worked as a cleaner at WeWork for one year – including this summer at the Guardian’s newsroom, until she found out on Monday that she no longer had a job – attended the vigil. “I was surprised and sad,” she said. “Every time WeWork needed me, I said yes – weekends or Sundays.”
“I think because we were in a union, fighting for our rights, that’s why they decide to leave us with no jobs – like, on the street, with no job,” said Nathalie Torralba, who had worked as a “floating” cleaner for WeWork until Monday, when she too arrived to discover she was out of work.
“They just tell us when we get to the door there’s already people working here,” she said, “and our keycard wasn’t working.”
Rachel Cohen, a spokesperson for the local chapter of the SEIU, said she thought the union activity was directly linked to “over 100 of these workers” not being hired for the newly created position.
“We think that perhaps the English requirement in the job postings were a pretext not to hire some of these cleaners,” Cohen told the Guardian.
While WeWork claimed to have interviewed all of its existing cleaning staff for the new positions, Cohen said just 12 out of the 150 who used to clean the offices – including the Guardian’s – have been re-hired so far.
A spokeswoman for WeWork told the Guardian on Tuesday that the hiring process was ongoing.
“WeWork has interviewed or will interview every CBM employee who applies for one of our new jobs. We hired the best candidates, period. Any suggestion that engaging in union activity hurt applicants is patently false,” the spokeswoman said.
