Largest Non-Union Janitorial Service Agrees to Labor Pact : Organizing: Tentative deal was reached with a peaceful campaign, unlike last year’s sometimes violent effort in Century City. Up to 1,000 employees in 75 buildings are affected by the settlement.

A union organizing campaign that won contracts and raises for hundreds of janitors in Century City last year after a sometimes violent strike has peacefully won a similar victory over the largest non-union janitorial contractor in Los Angeles.

Local 399 of the Service Employees International Union reached a tentative contract late Monday night with Bradford Building Service.

The proposed contract covers 800 to 1,000 janitors in about 75 buildings, primarily downtown, Hollywood, Glendale, Burbank and the Westside. It will mean raises of as much as $1 an hour and family health insurance--a first for many of Bradford’s janitors--beginning Oct. 1.

Despite months of demonstrations against Bradford by union members, the company had declined to discuss a union contract, which it believed would make it less competitive. Negotiations began only after national union officials threatened Bradford’s corporate parent with a series of janitor strikes at office buildings in several other West Coast cities.

The settlement produced by those negotiations culminated a three-year union campaign to restore its bargaining power in the downtown office cleaning industry.

In the early 1980s, most janitors in Los Angeles worked under a standard union contract that provided health benefits and paid about $7 an hour. But a flood of Latin-American immigrants allowed non-union contractors such as Bradford to underbid union contractors, paying near-minimum wages. By 1987, only 30% of downtown buildings were cleaned by union janitors.

With the Bradford settlement, firms with union contracts clean 90% of downtown buildings, union spokesman Jono Shaffer said.

Local 399’s organizing campaign is part of the union’s national “Justice for Janitors” effort, in which millions of dollars in union money has been poured into Los Angeles and 14 other cities to unionize janitors.

The campaign’s most publicized victory occurred last summer in Century City, where janitors in 13 buildings struck a large international cleaning company, International Service System.

A march into Century City by 400 janitors and their supporters, aimed at prodding the cleaning company to sign a union contract, was forcibly cut short by Los Angeles police, who said they suspected that the marchers planned to be disruptive. The marchers’ refusal to turn back resulted in 40 arrests and 16 injuries. National labor leaders responded to the violence with outrage. Threats by union leaders in New York to take 5,000 of International Service System’s janitors on strike forced a settlement.

The same kind of pressure tactics were applied to Bradford’s parent corporation, San Francisco-based American Building Maintenance Inc.

The dispute was made more complicated by the fact that the parent corporation owns another cleaning company, ABM, which has a number of contracts with the union. The union coordinated demonstrations at ABM buildings in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and Denver, threatening to stage strikes unless the parent corporation pressured non-union Bradford into signing a union contract.

Bradford President Larry Smith on Tuesday confirmed that he negotiated only because of instructions from the parent corporation. As a result of having to pay union wages, Bradford will have to charge office complexes higher cleaning rates. “I think we’ll lose business,” Smith said.