The contract cleaning industry has long functioned on a model of hyper-exploitation. Building owners and public agencies outsource cleaning to contractors who then compete to submit the lowest bid. Labour, by far the largest cost, gets squeezed.
For years, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 2’s Justice for Janitors campaign has tried to disrupt this model by organizing cleaners across companies and bargaining common standards covering entire cities.
In Toronto, the union represents roughly 3,000 cleaning workers, more than 80 per cent of whom have their wages and working conditions determined through multi-employer, city-wide bargaining.
Now, the union alleges that one of Canada’s largest facilities-management companies is trying to circumvent that system.
SEIU Local 2 has filed an unfair labour practice complaint with the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) alleging that Dexterra Group concealed cleaning contracts and workers from the union, allowing the company to avoid participating in the most recent round of city-wide bargaining in Toronto. The union further alleges that Dexterra subcontracted bargaining-unit work to non-union companies, potentially allowing it to undercut competitors that abide by the city-wide agreement.
As the secretary treasurer of SEIU Local 2, Tom Galivan, told Class Struggle, the union has also filed a formal grievance, which will be heard in arbitration this week.
SEIU is not just depending on the legal process, however, as the union has taken the fight public. On August 13, workers and supporters rallied outside the offices of Crosslinx Transit Solutions, the consortium responsible for the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, where Dexterra holds a cleaning contract. SEIU argues that Crosslinx has a responsibility to ensure contractors working on public infrastructure respect workers’ rights.
At stake in this dispute is whether cleaning companies can evade collectively bargained industry standards and gain a competitive advantage by pushing work outside union agreements.
As Galivan explained to Class Struggle, in the cleaning sector “there are built-in downward pressures on costs, which are really by intention designed to drive down wages. So our organizing strategy is to unite workers broadly across a region in a sector to counteract that downward pressure and raise standards.”
A single employer’s recalcitrance can therefore undermine hard-won industry labour standards.
“We have worked to organize all the workers and create central bargaining tables where the contractors of the industry have to bargain as a single entity, and the workers across the city are united and can raise their standards. So when a company like Dexterra comes along and basically ignores that process, hides its work, and subcontracts it out as a means of evading the standards set through this process, it really undermines the work that thousands of workers have done,” Galivan further explained.
Moreover, Toronto isn’t the only place where SEIU contends that Dexterra is seeking to undercut union standards.
In February, Dexterra took over cleaning on two Vancouver SkyTrain lines operated by the BC Rapid Transit Company (BCRTC), a TransLink subsidiary. According to SEIU, conditions deteriorated rapidly. Workers told PressProgress that they lacked cleaning supplies and protective equipment, while staffing cuts left remaining cleaners responsible for more stations. The union says more than 15 per cent of the SkyTrain janitorial workforce was initially laid off.
Workers have also alleged bullying and harassment, excessive workloads, and pressure to perform potentially dangerous work near active train tracks. At a June TransLink board meeting, SEIU members said cleaners were routinely being assigned four to six stations per shift, sometimes with additional duties piled on top. The union has filed grievances concerning layoffs, unsafe work, working alone, harassment, inadequate supplies and subcontracting, as well as an unfair labour practice complaint in British Columbia.
The disputes on opposite sides of the country help explain why SEIU views the Toronto case as particularly significant.
According to the Ontario complaint, Dexterra has a long history of participating in Toronto’s city-wide cleaning agreement. Its corporate predecessors participated in earlier bargaining rounds, and Dexterra itself engaged in previous negotiations. The resulting agreements established identical economic terms among participating cleaning contractors.
When SEIU served notice to bargain a renewal agreement in January 2025, however, Dexterra told the union that it no longer had employees covered by the city-wide agreement. In February, a company representative confirmed that Dexterra had been removed from the participating-employer list because it supposedly no longer employed anyone covered by it.
Taking Dexterra at its word, SEIU proceeded through the 2025 city-wide bargaining round without the company. The remaining contractors eventually signed a new agreement running from April 2025 to March 2028, containing improved wages and benefits as well as stronger protections governing bargaining-unit work and subcontracting.
Then SEIU discovered something that, according to its complaint, fundamentally changed the picture.
This January, the union learned that Dexterra held the contract to clean Eglinton Crosstown LRT stations. After investigating, SEIU concluded that Dexterra employees had been working on the Crosstown account since approximately 2022. Workers told the union that Dexterra had continuously hired as construction progressed and had subcontracted substantial portions of the cleaning to agency workers supplied by Primepro Services.
The union says it subsequently discovered additional Dexterra work in Toronto, including cleaning at seven office buildings used by Crosslinx and the TTC and a contract to clean streetcars during the day. According to the OLRB complaint, another cleaning company that unsuccessfully bid against Dexterra for the TTC work raised concerns that it could not compete because Dexterra was not bound by the new city-wide agreement.
This is precisely what’s at issue here.
SEIU’s city-wide bargaining strategy is intended to reduce unfair competition that relies on exploiting low-waged labour. Instead of contractors winning business by paying cleaners less, companies operate under common labour standards.
Such a framework is partly dependent on trust: employers participate because they know their competitors will face the same labour costs. In the latest bargaining round, employers even agreed to stronger restrictions on subcontracting because preventing companies from shifting work to cheaper labour was in their collective interest. As Galivan summarized it: “Employers that follow the law and want to provide a good service, they ultimately benefit when we have common standards because they’re no longer competing against companies whose only thing they bring to the game is low wages.”
SEIU alleges Dexterra’s actions attack this arrangement. Its OLRB complaint argues that the company’s failure to disclose bargaining-unit employees violated its duty to bargain in good faith under Section 17 of Ontario’s Labour Relations Act and interfered with the union’s representation of workers contrary to Section 70.
The union is therefore asking for consequential remedies. Among other things, it wants the Board to order Dexterra to disclose its Toronto cleaning contracts and subcontracting arrangements going back to 2022, sign the 2025-2028 Toronto City-Wide Collective Agreement, facilitate paid meetings between the union and impacted workers, and compensate the union for monetary losses resulting from the alleged concealment.
None of those allegations have yet been established by the OLRB, though the grievance the union is pursuing simultaneously may help to settle the issue. Either way, the stakes will extend well beyond the eventual rulings.
Contract cleaners are often among the lowest-paid workers keeping major public and private institutions running. Their work is essential but deliberately kept at arm’s length through layers of subcontracting. That structure allows the organizations ultimately benefiting from the work to insist that employment conditions are somebody else’s problem.
Sectoral bargaining offers one way of countering that fragmentation. By organizing across employers and establishing common standards, workers can make it harder for contractors to compete by cutting wages, benefits, staffing, and working conditions. Through its Justice for Janitors organizing campaigns, SEIU has effectively been doing a form of sectoral bargaining without the legislative framework to facilitate it.
The model only works, however, if commonly bargained standards are enforced. When contractors can escape a sectoral or city-wide agreement by concealing work, subcontracting jobs, or bargaining separately after its competitors have already signed on to higher standards, the incentive for everyone else to remain at the common table weakens. The race to the bottom starts all over again.
For SEIU and the workers at Dexterra, the question is whether or not a large contractor receiving money to maintain public infrastructure will be permitted to drive down labour standards. Protecting sectoral standards means ensuring decent work rather than forcing cleaners to work for less.
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