Jail janitors vote to unionize
Janitors at the Okanagan Correctional Centre are some of B.C.’s newest unionized workers.
Following a vote earlier this month, the fledgling bargaining unit of Service Employees International Union Local 2 was certified by the B.C. Labour Relations Board. The unit consists of just six people — three full-timers and three part-timers — employed by Bee-Clean Building Maintenance.
Negotiations on the group’s first collective agreement are expected to start this spring.
Bee-Clean is one of the contractors that service and maintain the jail, which opened in 2016 under the terms of a private-public partnership between the B.C. government and a consortium of businesses.
The organizing effort was led by Tyler Austin, one of the full-time janitors, who was inspired to act by the lack of health benefits provided by Bee-Clean.
“I have three kids at home and another co-worker has two (at home) and two more on the way. We’re all just people who have families, younger families, and the health benefits is the one thing we all wished we had,” said Austin in a telephone interview Tuesday.
What’s more, when he looked around the facility, he noticed that everyone else, from correctional officers to kitchen staff, already enjoyed the benefits of union membership.
“They all have benefits and unions and everything else, so it was kind of strange that the only people who didn’t were the janitors,” said Austin.
He said he tried to negotiate benefits on his own with BeeClean but never got anywhere. That inspired him to begin researching options, which led him to the SEIU.
Christine Bro, an organizer with SEIU Local 2 who assisted Austin, said the new unit at OCC was approved just weeks after 450 other janitors employed across B.C. by Bee Clean Building Maintenance voted to do the same.
“In general, it’s an industry with lots of immigrants who don’t necessarily know their rights in Canada, a lot of
women, a lot of part-timers,” said Bro. “It’s a very precarious industry.”
Cleaners have long been on the radar of the SEIU, which has approximately 18,00 members across Canada and since the 1980s has run the Justice for Janitors campaign on behalf of all such workers across the U.S. and Canada.
The union’s newest campaign is called Beverage Workers Rising and is aimed at employees of wineries and craft breweries, like the ones at Mission Hill Winery and Okanagan Springs Brewery that it already represents.