News
Time to read: about 8 minutes
Last March, the Palo Alto's elected officials heard an appeal from workers who spend plenty of time in City Hall but who hardly ever appear at City Council meetings.
The topic was wage theft, as experienced by janitors who work for the company SWA Services Group, which has been under contract to clean Palo Alto facilities since 2017. The janitors had recently learned that they had not been getting their contractually required raises. They and their allies were asking the city to do something about it.
Speaking through an interpreter, Magnolia Lucatero, an employee of SWA, told the City Council at the March 21 meeting that the company is failing to pay its workers the 3% raises that they're owed under the contract.
"Sometimes they even lower our wages," Lucatero said. "And we don't even really understand how our PTO (paid time off) works or if we've entitled to sick days. They told us we're not entitled to sick days."
The issue may not have surfaced at all if not for the work of the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, a statewide watchdog group that advocates for janitors. In April 2021, the organization issued a report that was based on 246 surveys and that detailed labor abuses involving janitors across the state. Janitorial employers, the report concluded, "are under intense pressure to cut labor costs, particularly during the pandemic when...
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