The drums were ready. So were the signs, the horns, the purple shirts and the protestors. Enough to fill three school buses, which before the protest at noon dropped off picketers who joined many more arriving on their own.
But on Thursday, NBCUniversal and its subcontractor ABM Industries averted a major protest from janitors by rehiring more than 100 that their union claimed had been unjustly laid off at the beginning of the week. And so a demonstration staged by Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW) at Studio City’s South Weddington Park that originally was intended to shame the major entertainment company became instead a celebration of the deal.
Negotiations between NBCU, ABM and the union continued nearly right up until the protest’s noon start time. After pumping the crowd up in the park, with 10 Universal City Plaza looming in the backdrop, union president David Huerta delivered the news to his members in Spanish that the parties had agreed that janitors could be rehired and would receive backpay.
“They knew the workers were coming. They knew the union was organizing for this and they knew the union was going to continue to organize until which time we got the justice we deserved,” Huerta said in an interview. “And that is making sure everybody got their jobs back [that] were unjustly canceled.”
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to NBCUniversal and ABM Industries for comment.
The union said that more than 100 janitors lost their jobs on Monday after NBCUniversal canceled its contract with facilities services business ABM Industries at three locations: 10 Universal City Plaza, the DreamWorks campus and Universal Studios Lot. The workers were all night janitors and largely “Latino immigrant workers,” per Huerta, with some having worked for NBCUniversal for years.
Huerta said the workers never received any justification for the cuts. “They said they were going to move things to the day shift, but never gave the workers the opportunity to transition,” Huerta said.
He added that the union had been working through contractual issues, some related to seniority, with the employer prior to the cuts. “We were resolving those issues, but it was a very knee-jerk reaction from NBCUniversal. Luckily they came to their senses and realized that it’s better to resolve this [by] putting workers back to work,” he added.
After Huerta’s announcement of the deal, several previously scheduled speakers — including L.A. County Democratic Party chair and UFCW Local 1428 president Mark Ramos and California IATSE Council president Thom Davis — delivered celebratory remarks, albeit from the bed of a truck bearing a banner that said “Shame on You NBCU!” in boldface.
Ramon Segoviano, a shop steward at Universal Studios Lot, told his story of having been laid off. “Shame on you, ABM and NBCUniversal. The studios are a small city and we keep it running,” he said. “We deserve to be treated with respect. Without us, these corporations like ABM and NBCUniversal wouldn’t make a profit.”
According to Huerta, while his members were out of work, the union was hearing of complaints within NBCUniversal that professionals’ workspaces weren’t quite as clean as usual. That will soon be resolved, in his telling.
“I know a lot of folks think that somehow these workers are invisible or some pixie dust comes in and spreads magic around the place and it just gets cleaned up,” he said. “But there’s people out there making sure that restrooms are clean, that offices are clean, that public spaces are clean.”
