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.

The earliest efforts by janitors to employ the militant tactics that came to be known as the Justice for Janitors campaign occurred in Denver, Colorado, in 1986. SEIU president John Sweeney spent three days at the beginning of the campaign talking with Denver janitors and observing the action, and he liked what he saw. SEIU national organizers and local members raised “enough hell in the downtown area that the industry caved.” When this organizing model arrived in Los Angeles in 1988, it started by going after the nonunion side of a small, double-breasted company, Century Cleaning, which held a number of building cleaning contracts.