Anonymous Contributing Writer
To the editors of the Voice,
I’m writing to you today to speak on behalf of the custodians. We need to be heard. We have been tricked and lied to for the past two years. Every change they have made has been to set us up for outsourcing. We had enough workers before the pandemic. Due to the furlough of our workers and then bringing them back to second shift, which disrupted their lives, we lost half of our crew. Instead of putting the outsource company ABM on second to clean residential halls they put the cleaning company on the first shift in academics and forced our people to do a shift they didn’t apply for. Now all of a sudden it is ok for an outsourced company to work in residential halls. The reason they didn’t put them there in the first place was because of you students, who didn’t want an outsource company in the residential halls.
And now it’s ok? We couldn’t have a third shift nor a 5am to 1pm shift due to safety reasons. Now they are making our people come in on call by themselves to clean up messes. We either volunteer or we are mandated. This doesn’t make sense, it’s not fair, and was their job to begin with – Scott and Mike, that is. They didn’t want to get up in the middle of the night so they are forcing us all to do so by ourselves, and most of our crew is made up of women. I couldn’t defend myself if something bad was to happen. During the recent winter storm we had where they closed campus, they deemed us essential yet they chose that only grounds crew and campus safety would be put up in Best Western. Our people had to drive in to work; some live at least 40 minutes, if not close to an hour away. A comment by one of the people in management was that the custodians who live in town could have walked but that they chose not. The reality is that the sidewalks were in fact not treated, and that’s not the point of the issue. Our safety used to be of importance. There were times old management would call and say do not come in, do not risk your life. We dreaded summer cleaning and now we dread it even more. With the skeleton crew they forced us to have we will not have a successful summer with camps and conferences. We don’t enjoy summer cleaning but because of the benefits we had, we tolerated it and we still loved our jobs. No one is going to want to go into those residential halls with enormous cockroaches and put up with that with no benefits. We are all tired, exhausted, and overworked. We are tired of the lies and mistreatment, and most of all we are tired of being silenced. Thank you for allowing us to have a voice! I would like to stay anonymous please but thank you again.
