ADELANTO – A union that represents low-wage janitors said it would picket the Adelanto Detention Center Expansion Project, threatening to delay the project’s completion, if its workers were not reinstated to their jobs, a union official told the Civic Bee Thursday evening.
Because of a prevailing wages issue, “half a dozen” employees were let go recently from the Adelanto jail construction site, which is overseen by San Bernardino County’s Department of Public Works, according to Dave Stilwell, assistant to the president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1877.
Stilwell said the county’s outside labor compliance company, Labor Compliance Providers (which monitors prevailing wage violations with county projects), determined “fairly late in the game” that the janitorial workers were being paid incorrectly because the janitorial work actually qualified as “construction clean up.”
Providing janitorial services for the Public Works project, the union workers were being paid at rates between $8.50 and $12.50 per hour. However, they were let go once the labor compliance company determined their labor rate actually qualified at $46.50 per hour, the Bee was told.
“Our members were doing typical janitorial work, like cleaning the windows in the inmate reception area, stripping, waxing and mopping the floors … but they decided they were working out of the wage classification for a Public Works project,” Stilwell said. “And because our employer wasn’t paying them correctly, they stopped paying our contractor.”
Stilwell said that Baron Janitorial Cleaning, the union contractor that handled the janitorial jobs on the project site, “floated their wages for a while but had to eventually lay them off because he wasn’t getting reimbursed by the prime contractor, Lydig Construction.”
And few are providing an explanation to just how this labor snafu overlooked prevailing wages to begin with.
Prevailing wage requirements were made available to Baron before they submitted their bid to Lydig; however, those union wages were not stated in Baron’s original quote, according to information provided by Stilwell.
And Lydig claimed they were unaware that Baron’s bid was insufficient for providing prevailing wages and benefits to the janitorial workers, Stilwell said, noting that this is a violation of the California Labor Code.
In the meantime, Stilwell wants Lydig to provide information regarding the contractor that is replacing Baron’s services at the Adelanto jail expansion project to arrange employment for the displaced janitorial workers.
“We’ve told the bonding company, and we told Lydig that … if you guys aren’t going to have Baron there, our members should be offered the jobs coming up,” Stilwell said. “If they’re not offered their jobs coming up, and if they don’t get first claim on this $56,000 in supposed contract violations that the county is pinning on Baron … we will be picketing at that site.”
Though Stilwell has requested to meet with everyone responsible to get straight answers on where his workers stand, officials are pretty much “washing their hands of it,” he told the Bee.
“They won’t respond,” he said. “If there’s a violation, then obviously it’s got to get corrected. But our members are out of work here, and they’re completely innocent in this process.”
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By the time the Civic Bee was tipped off about this story on Thursday afternoon, public officials were unable to be reached for a comment. The Bee will update this story as soon as more information is available from other official sources.
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To help ease crowding at jails throughout the county, the ‘Adelanto Detention Center Expansion Project’ consists of a 1,392-bed expansion at an approximate cost of $121 million to the county, with the state’s share up to $100 million – according to the Aug. 22 update for the state’s AB 900 Jail Construction Financing Program. Construction began in February 2011 and completion is anticipated in January 2014.
The Adelanto Sheriff’s Department County Jail is located at 9438 Commerce Way in Adelanto. For more information, visit cms.sbcounty.gov/sheriff.