On June 15, 1990, several hundred janitors and supporters walked north on Olympic Boulevard in Century City, turning toward the office towers on Century Park East. They carried no weapons and had a legal permit for the march. Los Angeles police officers moved to hold the line at the intersection, shoved the marchers back toward the street, and then, as the crowd tried to cross, went at them with batons. The confrontation lasted about half an hour. A television crew was there, and the tape ran on the local news that night and on national broadcasts within days.

The janitors worked for International Service System, known as ISS, a contractor that cleaned most of the office towers in Century City and much of downtown Los Angeles. They were members of SEIU Local 399, and they had walked off the job on May 29 in a strike aimed at forcing ISS to recognize the union and sign a contract. Contemporaneous Los Angeles Times reporting put the number injured at about two dozen, mostly cuts and bruises from the batons and the crush of the crowd. Other tellings of the day, written years later, cite a higher figure of 38 injured. The Times also reported that officers made no immediate arrests at the scene, a detail that cuts against the version of the story where police hauled marchers off in handcuffs on the spot.

What the settlement actually bought

The video did what a permit and a strike line alone had not: it turned a labor dispute nobody outside Los Angeles had heard of into a story with an unmistakable villain. The Los Angeles Police Department, then led by Chief Daryl Gates, faced an inquiry from the city into the officers’ conduct. ISS faced something more immediate. Gus Bevona, president of SEIU Local 32B-32J in New York, told ISS’s leadership the company would face the same fight in Manhattan if it did not settle in Los Angeles. Within weeks, ISS signed a contract with Local 399 covering its Southern California janitors. Accounts of the terms describe a wage increase of a little over two dollars an hour and full family health coverage, figures that differ slightly by source but land in the same range. The company that had refused to recognize the union in May was paying for its workers’ doctors by midsummer.

That is the version of Justice for Janitors that gets repeated: a beating, a video, a contract. It is true, and it undersells the part of the campaign that mattered after 1990.

The contractor was never the target

ISS was the entity the janitors technically worked for, the one whose name was on their paychecks, and the one the strike was legally lodged against. It was also, according to the organizers who built the strategy, close to beside the point. Stephen Lerner and Jono Shaffer, two of the campaign’s original organizers, wrote in 2015 that the cleaning contractors janitors nominally worked for “had no power and thin profit margins” of their own. A cleaning company bids for a contract against a dozen competitors on razor-thin margins; it has almost nothing to give a union that its own contract with the building doesn’t already dictate. The people who actually set the cleaning budget, and who stood to lose reputation and rentable square footage from a boycott or a scandal, were the building owners and the real estate and financial firms that hired ISS in the first place.

So the campaign built pressure that ran past the contractor: publicity aimed at the buildings’ tenants and owners, coordinated actions across cities where the same national cleaning companies operated, and later a mechanism called market-share bargaining, in which a union contract would trigger automatic raises once the union had organized a set share of a market’s buildings, giving already-organized owners a reason to want their competitors organized too. The contractor still signed the contract, because it employed the workers. The pressure that made the contractor sign it came from above.

That structure, a worker whose paycheck comes from one company while the decisions that actually govern their job come from another, runs well past commercial cleaning in 1990. It is the operating model of a gig platform that classifies drivers as independent contractors while setting their rates and routes through an app. It is the model of a fast food franchise where corporate sets the labor budget and the operations manual while a franchisee signs the checks. It is the model of a warehouse where a staffing agency issues the paycheck and the retailer that owns the building sets the productivity quota. Justice for Janitors did not invent subcontracted labor. It worked out, decades before the term had currency in labor law, that the fight belongs at the top of that structure and not at the bottom.

The legal name for the question of who counts as an employer when a worker’s paycheck and their working conditions come from two different companies is the joint-employer standard, and it sits at the center of the National Labor Relations Board’s authority. If a company is a joint employer, it can be forced to bargain, held liable for unfair labor practices, and named in a union election alongside the direct employer. If it is not, the contractor or franchisee absorbs that exposure alone, and the company above it stays a customer in the eyes of labor law.

The standard has moved with the Board’s own composition for more than a decade. A 2015 Board decision, Browning-Ferris Industries, broadened the test to reach companies with indirect or even reserved, unexercised control over working conditions. A 2020 rule under a different Board narrowed it back to direct and immediate control. A 2023 rule, adopted under yet another Board majority, tried to broaden it again, explicitly including indirect and reserved control as grounds for joint-employer status. That 2023 rule never took effect: a federal court in the Eastern District of Texas vacated it on March 8, 2024, in a suit brought by business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Board did not appeal in time to save it.

As of August 29, 2026, the standard actually in force is the 2020 rule, formally reinstated by the Board on February 27, 2026, which requires a company to possess and exercise “substantial direct and immediate control” over essential terms of employment such as wages, discipline, and supervision before it counts as a joint employer. That is a meaningfully narrower test than the vacated 2023 rule, and narrower than Browning-Ferris before it. Whether a future Board tries to broaden the standard again is not knowable from where things stand today; the pattern over the past eleven years is that whichever standard is current rarely survives a change in the Board’s political majority. A reader relying on this for a legal position in their own workplace should confirm the rule has not moved again since this was checked.

The lesson that outlasted the video

Justice for Janitors succeeded in Century City; that much is settled. The correction is about where that success actually lived. The batons made the news. The contract with ISS ended a specific strike. The part of the campaign that other unions and worker organizations still borrow, in fights against delivery platforms and franchise chains and staffing agencies, is the refusal to let a thin, powerless subcontractor stand in for the company that actually calls the terms. Labor law has spent the years since arguing about how to write that refusal into a legal test, and as of today it has not landed on one that holds.

DRESS prints on garments cut and sewn by organized labor start to finish, on a supply chain where the cutting room, the sewing floor, and the print shop are not shell companies standing between us and the people who make the clothes.