Non-Union Cleaning Firm Loses Contract Downtown

The Service Employees International Union, which last spring won union contracts for janitors in the majority of Century City office buildings, has managed to oust a non-union cleaning company from a prominent office building in downtown Los Angeles.

Bradford Building Services, a large non-union firm that cleans a number of downtown office buildings, is losing its contract to clean the O’Melveny & Myers building at 400 S. Hope St., according to a spokesman for the building’s management firm, Olympia & York.

SEIU’s “Justice for Janitors” campaign, the most extensive union organizing campaign in Los Angeles, has for months demanded that Bradford sign union contracts with higher wages and health benefits in all of the downtown buildings it cleans. The union put special effort into lobbying O’Melveny & Myers to hire a unionized contractor for the Hope Street building. A Bradford spokesman was unavailable for comment.