In this atmosphere, a number of building service companies rethought past practices. Some offered lower prices to the building owners for their services, thanks to wage and benefit reductions with nonunion labor. Other, unionized contractors pursued an increasingly common practice invented in the construction industry called “double breasting”: subsidiary companies, separate from corporate parents in name only, created simply to get out of collective bargaining agreements. The two largest contractors, ABM and ISS, went nonunion in Los Angeles by the late 1980s, despite operating under collective bargaining agreements in other cities. To keep its remaining contracts in downtown L.A., Local 399, now representing just 30 percent of the workforce, and shrinking fast, offered major wage and benefit concessions to the employers. Clearly a crisis was at hand.