Musk ‘Waltzed In’ And Fired Everybody - Now What?

Workers rally outside Twitter’s W. 17th Street offices in support of union cleaners put out of work in San Francisco and New York City. Photos By Joe Maniscalco

By Joe Maniscalco

The Twitter office cleaners billionaire owner Elon Musk marked for termination in both New York and California last month, are part of a group of essential workers who, just a minute ago, were rightly being lauded as pandemic heroes responsible for helping to keep the economy going while many were too afraid to go outside the house.

Local laws say business owners — Musk included — can’t eliminate these kinds of janitorial jobs and toss workers aside just because they decide to save more money and switch out the sub-contractor who technically employs the staff.

They are also part of SEIU — Service Employees International — one of the most dynamic labor unions in the nation. It wasn’t that long ago, when SEIU put thousands of workers into the streets, shut down traffic as part of the Justice For Janitors campaign, and revolutionized the industry.

All those office cleaners, as of this writing, are still out of work, however. In a couple more days their employer-based health insurance will vanish.

“When I think about Twitter, I think about billionaires — and one in particular,” 32BJ SEIU Secretary Treasurer John Santos told members protesting the firings outside Twitter’s Manhattan offices on Jan. 25. “They want to cut costs on the backs of the most vulnerable workers — people who have little savings, people who support their families and live [hand]-to-month.”

Santos told them, “That’s not gonna fly here in New York City.”

Is he right?

America’s billionaire class has been flying high and thumbing their noses at working people for decades. Gen Z, millennials, whatever term you want to use, anyone with the hard luck of being born in the 21st century have never known any other reality.

32BJ Secretary Treasurer John Santos denounces billionaire Elon Musk and the firing of union office cleaners in San Francisco and New York City.

Musk has reportedly purged half of Twitter’s staff since buying up the company last fall. A couple of those workers have filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging the firings disproportionately targeted women. Most of the union cleaners who spoke out on W. 17th St. on Wednesday were women, too.

“Our lives have been upended,” fired office cleaner and mother of four Merita Gashi told her supporters.

They were all standing in the rain behind steel barriers far away from the 245-249 W. 17th Street entrance to the Twitter offices across the street.

“We were here during the pandemic — and now we have no job,” Gashi continued. “This is a crisis for me and my family.”

The janitorial job was the single mom’s main source of income. Already, Gashi said, her medical bills, following recent surgery, have started to pile up.

Unaccustomed to speaking to large crowds like this, Gashi did well until she started talking about her 91-year-old father living back in Kosovo and how she had to send him money because “there is no one else to help him except me.”

Her voice cracked. She kept going, her daughter Pajtesa at her side.

“We have to keep fighting for a better economy that supports people like me,” Gashi added. “We will keep fighting for our union jobs because I know what it’s like to work as a non-union cleaner — and we cannot go back to that.”

Other longtime officer cleaners who were callously eliminated last month shared similar hardships, including Laureta Gjoni, a kidney donor who’s spent nearly a decade cleaning the W. 17th St. offices.

“This job, it was my life for me and my kids,” Gjoni said. “Hopefully, we’re gonna get the job back soon. “I’ve been working at this building for eight years and he [Elon Musk] kicked us out for no reason.”

32BJ office cleaner Merita Gashi talks about losing her job cleaning Twitter’s offices in New York City.

Musk, like all the other billionaire “job creators” out there who own the lion share of this country’s wealth and control all its levers of power, has a reason for firing people, of course. It comes right out of the oligarch’s playbook of power and control.

At least one member of the Musk’s inner circle is reportedly going around telling people robots are gonna replace the janitors.

SEIU Local 87 members Adriana Villarreal and Junana Laura talked about being terminated from their Twitter cleaning jobs in San Francisco.

“When I heard that [I was fired] my world turned upside down,” Laura said through an interpreter. “We thought we had lived through the worst of the pandemic. We thought we had something safe and stable — and in an instant that all changed. When a worker is fired it doesn’t just affect the worker it affects an entire community.”

All of the testimonials were impactful. None of them, however, mean a thing to Musk and the other monied people Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “economic royalists.” It’s just not part of the bottom line — and the bottom line is the only thing that matters.

That’s why working people — not billionaires — need to be in power. Nothing will change until then. It’s one of the things that becomes quite apparent covering the labor beat for over a decade. It doesn’t matter how bad or bleak things get — nothing is going to change until working people have power over their lives.

Most reading this modest post probably don’t think, “Oh, man — if I had $44 billion I’d add another giant corporation to my collection and immediately fire half the staff and bring in robots!”

Members of 32BJ stand in the rain outside Twitter’s Manhattan offices on January 25.

Your thinking probably turns first to taking care of all the people you love — all the kids each get a house; best buddies, too, because they work so hard and have stuck by you through so much. That kind of stuff.

With a fortune still left over, there’s probably a couple of new children’s hospitals in there, too. And not because you could use that kind of philanthropy to exert more power and control over everything, but because you could, you know, help take care of sick kids no matter what shade of skin they have, where they came from, or their ability to pay the medical bills.

Santos told the protesters penned in behind the steel barriers that when he heard Twitter cut its cleaning staff resulting in twelve union cleaners in New York City getting laid off and dozens more in San Francisco — “it made me mad.”

"Let’s make sure billionaires who waltz into town and think they can do as they please, jeopardizing people’s livelihoods, know they are messing with 32 BJ,” Santos said.

What does that look like exactly?

In Paris and cities throughout France, more than one million people are shutting stuff down and hitting the streets to stop President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 65.

We’ve got U.S. politicians in this country trying to raise the retirement age to 70.

Whether it’s raising the retirement age to 70 or illegally firing essential union workers — we’ve got plenty of reason to take to the streets, too.

Will we ever do it? Will the fired Twitter cleaners ever get their jobs back? And who’s next to get fired?