An ironic end for union labor at 2116 Chestnut

The irony of the situation isn't lost on Phil DiMaio Jr., a union janitor who, until last Friday, picked up trash, vacuumed hallways, and swept sidewalks outside the gleaming 34-story high-rise apartment building at 2116 Chestnut St.

Now, with new owners and new building management, DiMaio, 33, and 12 other janitors, engineers, and security guards are out of work, fired from a building with a long labor history.

Non-union workers now hold their jobs.

"It's a pretty sad state of affairs to know that this building helped guys like us, and then new owners come in from out of state and out of the city and kick guys like us to the curb," DiMaio said.

DiMaio and his co-workers plan to rally Wednesday afternoon at the site. On Monday, they asked the building's manager, Lee Senior, to give them their jobs back - any salary, union or non-union, but have not received a response.

Senior declined to comment, as did other executives from Greystar, the Florida-based property management company hired by the building's new owners, CBRE Global Investors, in California.

"The workers in question were not employed by the property. They are employed by a third-party property service company. It is customary for property service contracts to end when a multifamily property is sold," CBRE spokeswoman Pam Barnett said.

Buildings are bought and sold every day. New owners hire new managers who, in turn, often choose outside cleaning companies and security firms. Workers come and go.

But not every building has the labor history of 2116 Chestnut St.

In 1950, the Sidney Hillman Medical Center of the Male Apparel Industry of Philadelphia, with its rich stone facade, opened at 2116 Chestnut to provide health care to unionized textile workers, employed in a vital sector of the city's economy.

The unions' names, which changed over time, are well-known - the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.

By 2011, most of the city's textile work had disappeared.

That's when the building was sold to John Buck Co., in Chicago, to be razed and rebuilt as a $100 million apartment complex with funding from the state and from an investment fund controlled by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and an association of union electrical contractors.

Before the 321-unit apartment tower reopened in 2013, John Buck Co. approached Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union and told the union that it would hire union cleaning contractors and security, an SEIU spokesman said.

Construction had not been completed when DiMaio started. As crews finished constructing apartments, DiMaio and others cleaned them for rental. Many have been employed in the building since it opened.

"We've been with these people 24/7," DiMaio said, with residents and workers agreeing that a special bond had been formed.

In general, particularly with Center City office buildings, when cleaning, security, and building management change, the union staff is retained, say officials from the union and from the Building Owners Labor Relations group, which negotiates with SEIU.

That did not happen when CBRE installed Greystar as the property manager after closing on 2116 Chestnut St., paying $160 million for the building, according to published reports.

These days, a one-bedroom, one-bath corner apartment with a balcony rents for $2,750 a month.

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@JaneVonBergen

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