For immediate release: Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Cincinnati – Four janitors representing the more than 1,200 janitors who clean the majority of Cincinnati’s office space were arrested today at the headquarters of Fifth Third Bank as they asked the city’s largest bank to support workers’ efforts to win good jobs with health care. With ongoing contract negotiations with their employers failing to yield improvements in workers’ jobs to date, today’s arrest marks a critical turning point in the janitors’ campaign.

“I’d never done anything like this before, but as you can see I’m willing to get arrested because something’s got to change,” says Dee Dee Tillman, a janitor who works for Professional Maintenance, mother of three. “Nobody can live on less than $28 a day.”

Despite being home to Fortune 500 companies and other major corporations with combined revenues of $177 billion annually—including Fifth Third Bank, Procter and Gamble, Macy’s, Convergys Corp, and Western & Southern—the region’s high number of low-wage, no benefit jobs is increasingly stifling working families’ ability to lift themselves out of poverty. Cincinnati’s janitors are paid as little as $28 a day with no health or other benefits—and the city ranks among the nation’s most impoverished communities, eighth overall.

Janitors and area faith and community leaders have been appealing to area business leaders for months to work together to ensure the good jobs with health care that will help revitalize the city’s neighborhoods. In the last two weeks alone, four separate delegations of workers and faith and community leaders have attempted to engage Fifth Third Bank in a dialogue about improving jobs in Cincinnati.

“Cincinnati is home to some of the richest companies in the country,” said Linda Watson, a janitor with ABM and one of the workers arrested today. “There’s no reason hard-working people should be struggling just to afford health care or worrying how we’ll pay our rent.”

Janitors have been in contract negotiations with their employers—cleaning companies ABM, Jancoa, Professional Maintenance of Cincinnati, Aetna Building Maintenance, Scioto Corp, NSG, OneSource, and GSF—since early March over increased pay, access to health care, and more work hours. Nearly 60 faith, community, labor, and other Cincinnati leaders have declared their support for janitors’ campaign to win better jobs for their families.