Last year, the Chicago Weekly published a feature entitled Swept Under the Rug about University of Chicago housekeeping staff layoffs. Here’s an update on that issue.
Matt Wan
It remains to be seen whether the massive protests on Wall Street and other financial centers around the country will lead to any real change; but students at the University of Chicago can take to heart the fact that their own protests appear to have ended in victory.
Last spring, university administrators announced (during Housekeeper Appreciation Week, no less) that they were planning to outsource dormitory housekeeping jobs to a private subcontractor. Would the current housekeepers get to keep their jobs, or could they all be fired? That administration kept mum about that issue, leaving workers to fear the worst.
Students Organizing United with Labor (SOUL), a labor-rights group on campus, organized weeks of protests, demanding that the university guarantee that each worker would get to keep his or her job and benefits. They held sit-ins, teach-ins, study-ins and rallies for several weeks, but as the students left at the end of Spring Quarter, there were still no guarantees from the administration. It was possible that the protests would do nothing: even weeks of rallying can be forgotten in the long months of summer.
However, it appears that, whether they were the cause of it or not, protestors got what they wanted. On September 28, Karen Coleman, the Associate Dean of Students, stated in a letter to university students that all staff members were offered a choice between a job or retirement with a severance package. The housekeepers have a new union and a new boss, but at least they still have their jobs. Coleman wrote:
“More than 75 percent of the staff members affected by this transition were selected for new positions within the University or were hired into new jobs with ABM [the new sub-contractor]. Most of the remaining staff elected to leave the University and accepted an enhanced severance package. All housekeeping staff that applied for new positions are now working, either with the University or with ABM (with the exception of one staff member currently unable to work). We are pleased that this outcome means that residents and staff will continue to see many of the same faces in their buildings that they have come to know over the years.”
According to University Spokesman Steve Kloehn, 55 housekeepers were affected by the transition: 24 were hired by ABM; 16 found other University positions; and the remaining 15 workers chose to leave. Both the retiring workers and those now working for ABM received severance packages. Just as SOUL was about to celebrate, however, they discovered that its victory was more than a little bittersweet.
“Our job load has doubled,” explained Mazurie Wright, a housekeeper at the South campus dormitory, in a SOUL meeting last Thursday. According to her, out of the 16 workers in South before the transition, 8 remained in the dormitory as housekeepers. Wright went from cleaning one house in the dormitory to cleaning the entire first floor, which includes six lounges, four kitchens and ten bathrooms.
She also took a pay cut of two dollars per hour, but is now working an hour extra per day (this returns housekeepers to the amount of hours they were working a few years ago). According to Kloehn, because of the longer work day and a better benefits package, “total compensation is now higher” for the housekeepers. When a student at the SOUL meeting asked Wright if she made more or less the same amount of money per day as before, she answered yes – but that it doesn’t really matter when “you’re too tired at the end of the day to spend it.”
Not all of the housekeepers have taken a pay cut: some moved to different positions on campus, and a lucky few are now “Building Maintenance Workers,” or BMWs. Their job role is to respond to certain maintenance issues, such as heating/cooling or moving furniture, and they enjoyed a pay raise.
The point of the consolidation of Housekeeping and Facilities service was to “take advantage of the expertise and experience in Facilities Services,” according to Coleman; however, Wright says, “The quality of the work is going to go down because we just don’t have enough time.” Moreover, she says, it’s been difficult to adjust to the new, stricter rules and protocols that go with the new contractor.
However, Wright is still happy to have a job at the university – an institution she’s worked for since she was 18 years old. She stressed, “We have to say thank you [to students]. The first meeting, they said we’d be laid off.”
For now, Wright and the other housekeepers will just have to adjust to the new contractor and the new workload. Not much can be done until next year, when the housekeeping contract will be up for renewal. In the meantime, my guess is that SOUL will be occupying its time on Wall Street.
