A year long union/management head-butting contest ended Saturday when members of Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, the people who clean office buildings here, unanimously ratified a new contract hammered out by their negotiating team with cleaning contractors.

LIBN has been on the story from the beginning giving updates in setbacks and progress.
According to Lynsey Kryzwick, spokeswoman for the union, the deal provides a 20 percent wage increase for all workers over four years, improves health benefits for part-time cleaners and maintains full employer paid family health insurance for full-time workers.

The union now turns to talks with Mayco Building Services, “which employs about 80 office cleaners on the Island and the few other cleaning contractors that have not yet signed the new master contract,” Kryzwick told LIBN.

In a related story, The Wall Street Journal has a piece of participatory journalism today, with a columnist trailing office cleaners for a sharp insight into why your office and cubicle are clean and tidy, as if by magic, when you clock in each day.

From that story:

Meeting Room A would be a health hazard if it weren’t for the cleaning crew, Palina Palushaj and her colleagues. In this midtown Manhattan conference room on a Friday night, half-eaten bagels and muffins invite pests, an old quart of milk invites trouble and abandoned cream cheese in a tub has cracks like a dry river bed.

The carpet, possibly once blue, camouflages what sounds like sizable pebbles rattling through the heavy-duty vacuum cleaner on every thrust. And the trash bins, filled with some form of garbage juice, risk leaking on that same carpet, which wouldn’t be the first time.

It’s enough to make you want to wear a Hazmat suit, or at least falconer gloves. Instead, Ms. Palushaj sports a light-blue coat, pearl earrings and necklace, and pale red lipstick. If she gets splattered with any questionable substance, “I go to the kitchen and wash my hands right away,” she says in one of her few unsmiling moments.

Along her three-floor route, she’ll empty wastepaper baskets, drag her green terry washcloth over desks and keyboards, and vacuum. She barely sees her husband, Vasel, outside weekends.