David Banks has lived in Columbus all 60 years of his life. He has worked as a janitor at AEP Ohio&r

David Banks has lived in Columbus all 60 years of his life. He has worked as a janitor at AEP Ohio’s headquarters downtown for the past 24 years under various cleaning contractors. Now, he cleans five floors a day, emptying large trash bags and vacuuming the floor for eight hours at a time.

Despite his experience, though, David is still paid just $19,500 a year. He isn’t sure if he’ll ever be able to afford to retire. His employer, ABM, employs hundreds of janitors around Columbus, and many have the same problem: after years of hard work, poverty wages are still the norm—even for full-time workers.

Despite working full time doing difficult, necessary work, David isn’t exactly living a middle-class life. He lives with his niece in the Near East Side, and since he doesn’t have a car, the bus ride to work downtown takes an hour each way. He can’t afford to go anywhere on vacation, and can’t always afford to go out to dinner with his family. Recently, he was even denied bereavement time when his sister died, simply because she wasn’t his biological sister –even though they were adopted together at a young age.

With the janitors’ contract now being renegotiated, David wants to see justice done. Columbus is clearly prospering at the top: Fortune 1000 companies headquartered in Columbus took home $7.6 billion in profits in 2011. While Columbus’ unemployment rate is still below the national average at just 6.2%, the poverty rate in our city is nearly double what it was 10 years ago. Low-wage, no-benefit service jobs are beginning to replace the good jobs of the past, and Columbus janitors are coming together to change that trend.

However, in the most recent contract negotiations, cleaning contractors are resisting janitors’ modest requests for raises, and threatening to slash their hours in order to avoid their responsibility to provide health care under the new federal law. After 24 years of dedicated service, David is facing the possibility of having his hours cut back to part time and falling deeper into poverty. “I’ve been working here too long for that,” he says.

But David understands that companies like ABM aren’t in the business of being fair. If he and his coworkers are going to protect and improve their jobs, they’re going to do it by standing strong together.

You can show your support for the janitors by sending a letter in support of living wages to the Editor of The Columbus Dispatch! Click here - it only takes 5 minutes to speak up for working families.