Over 4 Dozen Outsourcing Opponents Chant and March in Rally
More than 4 dozen custodians, groundskeepers, their families and supporters, as well as union members and other staff and faculty of the University of Arkansas gathered Saturday afternoon, March 16, 2024, to rally against the proposed outsourcing of their jobs.
UA-Fayetteville Education Association / Local 965 organized the demonstration. We gratefully acknowledge St. Martin’s Episcopal Center at the University of Arkansas and its chaplain, Casey Anderson-Molina, for hosting the rally. The assembled had a permit to march through campus.
Below, click on an image in each row for a full-size slideshow of those three.
Marchers prepare their pickets at the sign-painting tables. (April Reisma photo)A custodial supervisor tells marchers about her concerns about proposed outsourcing. (April Reisma photo)About two-thirds of the marchers (over 32) listen to speeches. (April Reisma photo)UA Law Professor Amelia McGowan is ready to march. (April Reisma photo)5News’ Lauren Spencer interviews Brad Edwards, a housekeeping coordinator, and History Professor Mike Pierce. (April Reisma photo)Protesters pass through UA’s Pi Beta Phi Centennial Gate to enter the Fayetteville campus. (April Reisma photo)
Video of march from Arkansas Education Association
Video of march from onlooker
Rousing speech by Professor Mike Pierce. Video by onlooker
Onlooker captures end of march as final speeches about to start
A dozen protesters conclude the march outside the Administration Building. (Christy Pollock photo)President April Reisma of the Arkansas Education Association watches the last speeches of the rally and march. (Christy Pollock photo)NWA Central Labor Council President Walter Hinojosa delivers the penultimate speech at the UA Administration Building. (Christy Pollock photo)
March 16 Rally & March Supports Custodians & Groundskeepers
Press Release and Public Announcement
The independent organization for University of Arkansas employees is fighting with and for the custodial and grounds staffs of the Fayetteville campus.
UA-Fayetteville Education Association / Local 965, backed by its resolution supporting the custodial and grounds teams, plans a rally and march for Saturday afternoon, March 16, 2024. The rally, comprising brief speeches, will be at 2 p.m. at St. Martin’s Episcopal Center at the University of Arkansas, 814 W. Maple St. The media and public are invited.
Then a march comprising Local 965 members, custodians and groundskeepers — and their colleagues, friends, families and supporters — starts there by 2:45 p.m. The group will cross Maple and march though campus to the Administration Building, 1125 W. Maple St.
Administrators have been developing a plan to transfer groundskeepers and custodians to a private company. While current employees are expected to retain salary levels, they stand to lose some key benefits, such as terrific tuition discounts if they or family members have not yet enrolled. New custodians and groundskeepers can expect lower salaries, and current employees moved out of the public sector can be fired at will. (The bookstore and food services are already outsourced.)
“These workers, like all of us at the U of A, came here to work FOR the University of Arkansas and not just work AT the University of Arkansas,” said Local 965 President Hershel Hartford, summarizing comments made by workers at the union’s February meeting.
Contact Form for more information and to ask questions.
A quorum of the UA-Fayetteville Education Association / Local 965 at its February 2024 meeting approved drafting of a resolution to oppose the university turning over the custodial and groundskeeping staffs to a private company.
Whereas, the UA-Fayetteville Education Association/Local 965 has a six-decade history of fighting for employee rights and improved working conditions on the Fayetteville campus;
Whereas, members of the custodial and grounds staffs provide essential services, ensuring that dorms, classrooms, labs, libraries, offices and public spaces are clean and sanitary;
Whereas, the University’s recent moves to privatize custodial and groundskeeping services threaten the livelihoods of over 400 University employees, including many with decades of service;
Whereas, the heroic actions of the custodial staff allowed the University to resume holding in-person classes safely by the Fall of 2020 when many research universities continued with remote instruction;
Whereas, privatization efforts at institutions of higher education have historically failed to delivered the promised results, with the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Managementshowing recently that in the long term “there is no cost saving [for the university] because of the profit factor that is inherent in private enterprise”;
Whereas, SSC Services for Education, the facilities management company that the University is considering, is part of the multinational conglomerate Compass Group with a history of malfeasance, its subsidiaries putting unpaid workers from a drug diversion program in dining facilities at Louisiana State University and shortchanging impoverished schoolchildren in the United Kingdom during the COVID epidemic;
Whereas, there is no guarantee that fired long-time workers will not be replaced by lower-paid ones (Chartwells, also owned by Compass, starts workers in University of Arkansas dining halls at $13.00 an hour vs. $14.42 for University of Arkansas custodians);
Whereas, the private company will have the flexibility, ability and incentive to fire long-time custodial employees without cause;
Whereas, during the 2019 renovation of Kimpel Hall the employees of a private contractor stole or damaged between $20,000 and $30,000 worth of University equipment;
Whereas, the Fayetteville School District terminated its contract with SSC Services for Education after a year due to complaints and concerns of faculty and staff;
Whereas, the Chancellor has promised to make the University of Arkansas the “Employer of Choice” for Northwest Arkansas;
Whereas, University administration insists, “Being an employer of choice means ensuring each individual feels valued, facilitating flexibility that serves both personal and university needs, and connecting faculty and staff members to the U of A’s land-grant mission”;
We resolve:
★ The University of Arkansas should not let a private company with a dodgy record determine who gets access to dorms, class, labs, libraries, and offices as well as landmark lawns;
★ Chancellor Robinson should reject the effort to privatize custodial and groundskeeping services and redeem his promise to make the University of Arkansas the “Employer of Choice” for everyone who performs essential labor on campus.
NOTE: The UA Staff Senate approved its resolution opposing the outsourcing of these employees (PDF) March 13, 2024, and it was signed and delivered to the chancellor’s office March 14, 2024.
In March 2020, just before the Covid pandemic, then-Chancellor Joseph Steinmetz announced the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville’s intention to pay living wages to each of its employees. “Longstanding issues,” he said, had prevented it from doing this before, but he was committed to resolving them so that the wages for more than 540 grounds, housekeeping, maintenance and clerical workers could be raised to $30,000 per year.
Steinmetz later explained that the university pegged the living wage at the amount that each working adult in a four-person household (two working adults and two children) needed to earn for the family to live independently (i.e., without Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, ARKids insurance coverage, or any other government assistance or resorting to the university’s food bank) in Washington County.
The chancellor kept his promise, and the university began paying living wages to those who made sure that dormitories and classrooms were clean and sanitary, that faculty could teach and conduct research, that buildings and grounds remained in good repair, and that students could graduate in a timely manner. Chancellor Steinmetz knew that these workers were critical to the daily functioning of the university and that paying a living wage — one that was competitive with employers throughout Northwest Arkansas — would allow the university to attract and retain the highest-caliber workforce. More importantly, he thought that the university had a moral imperative to treat its workers right.
Unlike what some doomsayers predicted, raising the pay did not hurt the university. In fact, it is flourishing, setting enrollment records, retaining more of its students, and generating more revenue than ever before.
Even though the university is as flush as it has ever been, the decision to pay living wages to essential custodial workers is now under threat. The university has contracted with a private company, SSC Services for Education, to study the possibility of privatizing custodial services. The university claims that no decision has been made, but the very selection of this firm is troubling. The company also provides custodial services to dozens of universities, including University of Arkansas at Fort Smith (UAFS). Asking a company that profits from providing custodial services to universities (and might be in line to receive the university contract) to provide an unbiased study about the risks and rewards of privatization suggests that the fix is in. It is like asking a car dealer if you should buy a new car — you know what the answer will be.
Privatization promises to make the lives of some of the Fayetteville campus’s most essential workers more precarious. Although the university will undoubtedly provide assurances that existing employees who are retained by the contractor will keep their current wages, benefits — both health insurance and pension contributions — will be immediately reduced. The desire for ever-increasing profits will keep wages low moving forward. Perhaps, most importantly, protections against arbitrary firings will be eliminated, and workers with the most experience and the highest wages will be the first to go. One must look no further than the UAFS to see that SSC is not an “employer of choice.” The starting wage for custodians on that campus is 30% less than on the Fayetteville campus.
Privatization also threatens the rest of the UA-Fayetteville community, especially students in dorms and those who work on campus. The current administration should take the Fayetteville Public Schools’ experience with SSC as a warning. The district contracted the company to provide custodial services at the high school in 2018 but dismissed the firm the next year. A district spokesperson treaded lightly when discussing the decision, suggesting to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (“Fayetteville School Board Drops Custodial Contract,” July 20, 2019) that there was friction between SSC’s employees and the schools’ teachers and other staff. A teacher I talked with was more explicit — the faculty simply did not trust the SSC workers. Because custodial staff have keys to dorm rooms and private offices, the university has a duty to continue to ensure that only trustworthy and forthright people are hired. Leaving those decisions to a private company with a spotty record would be reckless.
Privatizing custodial work is also bad for taxpayers. It will shift costs from the university to other public agencies. With reduced benefits and downward pressure on wages, the custodial staff will again be forced to rely on SNAP benefits, ARKids and other government assistance programs. Arkansas taxpayers will thus pick up the tab for privatization, and any savings realized by the university will be used to pay the salaries of the ever-growing legion of administrators — vice chancellors, associate vice chancellors, assistant vice chancellors etc. — many of whom have little to do with the core mission of the university. The prospect that the University of Arkansas will be squeezing both those at the bottom of the pay scale and the state’s taxpayers to fund the salaries of those at the top stands in opposition to its charge to help all the people of Arkansas.
The current chancellor has pledged to make the University of Arkansas the “employer of choice” for Northwest Arkansas. But that apparently does not include the custodial workers who were on the front line during the Covid epidemic. When other universities continued to teach remotely in the fall of 2020, the custodial staff ensured that the University of Arkansas’s Fayetteville campus could open safely, classes could be held, and research continued. The chancellor needs to redeem that promise to all the university’s essential workers — not just those who work at the top.
Michael C. Pierce is an associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas.
An Editor’s Note by Ben Pollock, Local 965 Vice President
The proposal has not been widely announced, but the University of Arkansas is considering having the company SSC Services for Education take over custodial and groundskeeping for the Fayetteville campus, specifically Facilities, Arkansas Union, Housing and Athletics.
These Fayetteville campus service workers are expected to be offered jobs with SSC with similar salaries and “comparable or better” benefits, Scott Turley, associate vice chancellor for facilities, told the UA Staff Senate at its Feb. 14, 2024, meeting.
One benefit, however, won’t be given to new employees whom SSC hires. Currently, any full-time UA employee as well as their spouse and children may get a substantial tuition waiver (90% discount for the employee, 50% discount for their spouse or dependent children for this campus). Those currently enrolled at UA would continue to receive this benefit, Turley said, adding that SSC has been asked to grant this benefit to employee children who are graduating high school this spring and plan to attend UA in the fall.
Salaries for new hires would be up to SSC but would be “competitive,” Turley said.
The university’s structure of vacation and sick leave might become a PTO (paid time off) structure under SSC. “Paid time off,” according to common definition, is when the employer combines sick days, vacation days and other leave that the worker would draw from.
Meetings have been held with two-thirds to three-fourths of the service employees who would be impacted, Turley said, adding their comments and questions are being brought into the talks with SSC. Some custodians began telling members of the University of Arkansas Education Association / Local 965 of their concerns several weeks ago.
Turley and Cale Fessler, associate vice chancellor for budget, financial planning and business affairs, made the presentation to the Staff Senate and took questions. Fessler said that current employees would face “no reductions in pay.”
“I don’t think we’ve seen enough to to respond and say that yes, we know for sure their pay wouldn’t be competitive relative to ours. With respect to benefits, I think there’s a lot still to be worked through there,” Fessler said. “We would negotiate strongly for that comparable benefit package.”
UA officials first worked with the consulting firm AArete then moved to negotiations with SSC. AArete “has been looking at a whole range of business processes where the university spends money,” Turley said.
The administration does not plan to let competitive bids, Turley said. Other private service providers are not being considered, he said, because SSC is “an approved contractor by the state of Arkansas,” arranged by E&I Cooperative Services and thus “meets all the procurement requirements” of the state.
The main reasons to privatize are fiduciary as in saving money for the university and second to provide a better level of service, Turley told the Staff Senate, adding, “We are constrained by the state on how many kinds of positions we can have, and an outside enterprise isn’t,” with a previous workaround having been to hire temporary labor for some outdoors work.
Turley noted that in the last two years about 40 percent of campus groundskeeping has been handled by two private contractors with the remaining 60 percent by UA staff. An arrangement with SSC on groundskeeping and custodial may be a similar hybrid arrangement, he said.
The final decision on a privatizing arrangement rests with Chancellor Charles F. Robinson.
UA-Fayetteville Education Association / Local 965 board member Mike Pierce, an associate professor of history, has submitted a guest column on the matter to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, while another local news outlet has interviewed him on the matter for a future story. The matter will be addressed at the Feb. 22 monthly meeting of the local’s general membership and board.
Ben Pollock and Local 965 President Hershel Hartford serve on the Staff Senate. Meetings of the Staff Senate and Faculty Senate are open.
UA-Fayetteville Education Association 