Janitors Sue Contractor in Wage Dispute

In the first private attempt to enforce Los Angeles’ living wage ordinance, janitors sued their city contractor-employer Wednesday for allegedly failing to pay them the legal wage.

The city’s living wage law requires that workers for private contractors, doing jobs that would ordinarily be done by city workers, receive at least $7.39 per hour with benefits or $8.64 per hour without benefits. California’s general minimum wage is $5.75 per hour.

To encourage private enforcement efforts, the law provides that lawyers who represent successful plaintiffs are entitled to collect reasonable fees from those whom they defeat in court.

In this case, eight janitors, represented by Pasadena labor lawyer Ellen Greenstone, sued their employer, TBM Custodial Services, in connection with a TBM contract to clean city Harbor Department buildings.

The janitors--Ramon Batres, Adolfo Camberos, Rene Cayax, Rodrigo Cayax, Maria Garcia, Aixa Lopez, Magali Martinez and Ascencion Villanueva--allege in the Los Angeles Superior Court suit that they sometimes were underpaid and, at times, not paid at all.

They charged that TBM improperly deducted $75 for uniforms for six of them, but supplied three of them only with shirts or an apron and three of them with nothing.

And they alleged the firm retaliated against some of them for complaining to the city’s Bureau of Contract Administration.

TBM’s co-owner, Mike Meador, denied wrongdoing. Meador, who had not seen the lawsuit Wednesday, blamed the dispute on “a communications problem” and said it has been blown out of proportion.

“We have complied with the ordinance,” he said.

In fact, he said, he actually has paid the workers more than they were entitled to.

Meador denied retaliating against them and said he withheld $75 for uniforms from only two of them and returned the money later, when they returned the uniforms.

Greenstone, whose office has helped draft living wage ordinances in other cities, said she took the janitors’ case after reading articles “about how the living wage ordinance is not being enforced. . . . [I] felt somebody ought to do it.”

Living wage advocates hailed the lawsuit and said they were also cheered by a City Council move last week to improve the city’s own enforcement efforts by transferring responsibility for them from what some saw as a recalcitrant Bureau of Contract Administration to the more receptive city administrative officer.

“It’s a huge, really great thing,” Madeline Janis-Apricio, head of the Living Wage Coalition, said of the transfer.