Meet the workers: Mumina Ibrahim

For the last nine years janitor Mumina Ibrahim has worked hard cleaning JP Morgan Chase’s sprawling Polaris Corporate Center in Columbus, Ohio.

With more than $1.3 trillion in assets, financial giant Chase is the world’s fourth-largest bank. While Chase has grown to service 8 million banking customers and issued 110 million credit cards worldwide, Mumina has never had a raise.

As a service worker in the nation’s heartland, Mumina is not alone. In the past five years, Ohio has lost more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs and tried to replace them with low-paying service sector jobs. As an employee of Mid-American Cleaning Contractors, the company hired by Chase to clean its building, Mumina has a hard time getting by. “The American Dream for me means working hard and getting respect and decent pay,” she says. “But MACC and Chase are stealing my dreams away from me.”

While poverty pay is a problem, Mumina also lacks access to affordable, quality health care. She is now over 50 and finds that she has to pay increasing medical costs out of her own pocket.

Last year, Mumina and her co-workers decided to work together to form a union to address their common problems. Mumina was surprised by what happened when she and her co-workers began distributing leaflets to the public outside the Chase building. “Security called the police on us, even though we were on public property,” she says. “Now every time we try to tell our stories, they threaten us with the police.”

Mumina and other janitors continue to fight for a voice on the job and the freedom to make their own choice about forming a union—without interference by one of the world’s largest banks.