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Hundreds of SEIU cleaners took to the streets on May 20, walking off the job from the offices of Cisco Systems, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and other high-tech and bio-tech corporations throughout the Silicon Valley.



"Enough is enough, we are standing up for good jobs for ourselves and our families," said Adolfo Morales, a cleaer at Cisco Systems. "We keep these corporations clean and open for business but we need decent wages to meet our basic needs and we have to be able to take our children to the doctor, we cannot wait anymore."



Contract talks for more than 6,000 cleaers ended on Thursday May 15, the largest cleaning companies refusing to propose even modest pay and benefit improvements to workers who make only $23,000 a year.



Rent in a 1-bed room apartment in San Jose woud cost 77% of a cleaner's wages. It is estimated that cleaners in the San Francisco Bay Area would need to work 112 hours per week to support their family on current hourly rates.



In April, California state legislators called on the state's top corporations who benefit from the janitor's work to take responsibility for good jobs for the sake of entire communities as they released a report, "The High Cost of Low Wage Service Jobs: How Communities Pay the Price for Poverty Conditions Among Janitors." Report attached.