Janitors Protest Airport Firings : New Cleaning Contractor Cuts Many Workers; Union Pickets

About 50 janitors picketed at San Diego International Airport Saturday, Monday and Tuesday, protesting what they say are “anti-worker, anti-union” hiring practices that have cost them their jobs.

World Service Inc., a Houston-based business, took over a contract to provide cleaning service for the airport Sunday, and most of the former contractor’s employees say that the new company fired them without cause.

“We have members who have been working there for more than 10 years--and now they’re out of a job,” said Sabino Lopez, a field representative for Local 102 of the Service Employees International Union.

Lopez and Eliseo Medina, the union’s chapter president, allege that World Service released those employees with plans to break up the union.

“This company’s method of operations is to come in, fire the current employees, and lower wage rates,” Medina said. “Basically, this is an employer who is anti-worker, anti-union.”

Joseph Mrozewski, the company’s vice president, disagreed. He said the conflict with the union arose because World Service refused to unconditionally accept all of the former employees to fill its payroll.

“We generally have had discussions with the union over the last four or five weeks,” Mrozewski said. “I sat with their employees for two days, taking applications. The union wanted us to take every employee as it stood.”

World Service hired 17 janitors who had worked for the former contractor, Menzies International California, Mrozewski said, adding that the other employees had technically not been fired.

“I cannot fire somebody if I haven’t hired them,” Mrozewski said.

The director of the San Diego Unified Port District defended World Service and downplayed the seriousness of the janitors’ complaints.

“There’s no requirement that the new contractor keep the personnel hired by the old contractor,” said Donald Nay, the port’s director. “Those employees don’t have any right to be hired. The contractor is entitled to hire whoever he wants to hire.”

The Board of Port Commissioners, the body that oversees operations at Lindbergh Field, decided last month to award the cleaning contract to World Service after receiving a number of complaints about the cleanliness of the airport, Nay said.

World Service submitted a bid for the contract that was slightly higher than the amount Menzies charged last year, said David Rippberger, a purchasing agent for the district.

The contract World Service accepted stipulates that the company must pay all janitorial workers a flat rate of $5.93 per hour, Rippberger said.

But Medina said he thought the company might try to circumvent that provision by farming out the work to subcontractors or having fewer people do more work.

As evidence of his charges, Medina cited newspaper clippings about a clash between World Service and a service workers union in San Francisco.

Those clippings detail a 1983 case in which union leaders accused the company of firing unionized janitors at San Francisco International Airport and replacing them.

Mrozewski said the company settled that dispute, after a protracted court battle, by paying compensation to some of the displaced union employees.

“The ownership and management is completely different now,” Mrozewski said. “We have not had any problems in the past four or five years.”

Nay said that controversy happened too long ago to factor into the decision to hire World Service at the San Diego airport.

“The ownership of the business may have changed,” Nay said. And “lots of businesses have union problems.”

Meanwhile, Lopez said another round of picketing is planned for Thursday.

Union representatives also plan to appeal to the Board of Port Commissioners at its July 10 meeting, Medina said.

At that meeting, the union representatives will try to convince commissioners that hiring World Service has interfered with the smooth operation of the airport--a breach of the company’s contract, Medina said.

But Nay said the operation of the airport had not been disrupted during the first days that World Service’s workers have been on the job, in spite of the picketing.

“Everything is going quite smoothly,” Nay said.

Still, World Service’s hiring plans came as a shock to some former employees.

Elvia Jimenez, a single mother of two, said she had no reason to think she would be fired when she and fellow janitorial workers met with a company representative a week ago.

The janitors knew World Service was taking over the contract beginning Sunday, but before that meeting, none of them knew that they would be unemployed this week, Jimenez said.

“The World Service man told us that we were all going to keep our jobs,” said Jimenez, who worked at the airport the past three years.

The representative also told the janitors he would return the next day and make the necessary arrangements to keep them on the payroll, Jimenez said.

“He never did,” Jimenez said. “He brought in his own people--he got rid of us.”