Messenger: St. Louis Courthouse Janitor Believes he was Fired for Organizing a Union

By Tony Messenger, August 22, 2022

Marvin King has the sort of positive attitude that comes from years of pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

The 62-year-old grew up in north St. Louis. He’s a “Homer G. Phillips baby,” having been born in the long-since closed hospital that served Black people before widespread integration. King graduated from Sumner High School. He joined the Army and served his country.

King came back to St. Louis after his service. He’s held a lot of jobs over the years, some of them better than others. A couple of years ago, as the pandemic was starting, he had a stroke, which, for a time, rendered the left side of his body mostly limp. He went to a nursing home, but because of the pandemic, he couldn’t get all the services he needed. So he put himself through rehab.

“I’m still here,” he told me when we met, in the basement of the Service Employees International Union building in south St. Louis.

King isn’t a member of the union, but he believes he lost his job because he was talking to some of his fellow employees about joining the SEIU.

“All of a sudden, when I started talking about the union, they cut my hours,” King said.

Until July 11, when he was fired, King had worked for a year and a half as a janitor in the Civil Courts building in downtown St. Louis. He worked for a company called Challenge Unlimited Inc., an Alton-based nonprofit that has the janitorial contract with the 22nd Judicial Circuit Court. Challenge Unlimited provides staffing services and workforce training to disabled people. The company has many contracts with local and federal governmental entities. According to its IRS 990 forms, it brought in more than $28 million of revenue in 2020.

In an emailed statement, Challenge Unlimited said it had “recommended improvements so that worker could be successful in that job, which the worker declined and the worker’s employment ended.”

The first of those recommended improvements, which King provided to me, was a document telling him that a fellow employee felt “harassed” when King tried to talk to him about the union.

For the past few months, some of the employees, including King, have been talking to SEIU Local 1 about unionizing their workforce. For King, one of the motivating factors was something unique he found out about his job. King was hired, in part, because he is disabled. He is classified not as an employee, but as a client.

That’s a distinction some companies that serve disabled workers can make. It allows them to avoid paying unemployment insurance. Missouri has a section of law that allows the insurance exemption, if certain qualifications are met, and special certifications are obtained by the company. The idea is that companies providing workforce and vocational training to disabled employees, sometimes through pass-through tax dollars, should be exempt from paying into the unemployment system.

Marvin King said he believes he lost his job because he was talking to some of his fellow employees about joining a union.

Challenge Unlimited runs a sheltered workshop in Hannibal, where all the employees are disabled, and has such an exemption there. But in St. Louis, among the disabled employees who worked at the courthouse, there were no such services provided. “Nothing at all,” King says.

The union agrees with him. They say that Challenge Unlimited doesn’t have the proper certification to meet the exemption in Missouri law, at least as it relates to the workers at the courthouse. Paraquad, a St. Louis-based nonprofit that serves disabled people, agrees. It outlined its concerns this week in a letter to Judge Michael Stelzer, the presiding judge in the 22nd Circuit.

“Although the practice of withholding (unemployment) benefits is legal in certain circumstances, it does not appear these circumstances were met during Mr. King’s employment,” the letter says.

Paraquad asked Stelzer to investigate King’s firing.

In a statement, the court said there was nothing it could do. “While the Court has been made aware of the concerns raised by SEIU and Paraquad, it does not have the authority to investigate those complaints related to employee discipline administered by Challenge Unlimited,” the statement says.

“There is no protection for workers with a disability,” says Carl Walter, the field coordinator for SEIU Local 1.

The union has filed a complaint with the city, under a provision of the living wage ordinance, which makes it illegal for an employer to conduct anti-union activity on city property. King says there was at least one meeting after he started talking to union reps where Challenge Unlimited management gathered the janitors in the courthouse and discouraged any of them from organizing. That investigation is ongoing.

King feels like a man without any recourse. He doesn’t qualify for unemployment and, as a disabled “client,” he doesn’t fit under the various umbrellas that might allow a labor-law complaint. He is hoping the city investigation goes somewhere. Meanwhile, he’s looking for a new job, and counting his blessings. He still has a place to live, and next month, the rent in his subsidized housing will likely drop because he no longer has outside income.

“I had to get myself back up on my feet before,” King says. “It will work out.”

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/tony-messenger/messenger-st-louis-courthouse-janitor-believes-he-was-fired-for-organizing-a-union/article_e25a9b37-3a8b-5885-baf3-4ccb48c259bb.html