ABM Industries Incorporated, a facility services contractor, acquired OneSource in November. According to officials at OneSource and ABM, the change in ownership will have no effect on the custodial services provided to Tufts.
"It's not going to have any impact [in] the foreseeable future," said Dale Tunstall, the project manager for OneSource's office at Tufts.
OneSource Services Inc., based in Atlanta, Ga., has 31,000 employees nationwide and nearly 200 on Tufts' Medford/Somerville, Boston and Grafton campuses. In addition to providing janitorial services to the university, it offers snow removal and certain on-call maintenance services such as flood cleanup.
Tunstall said that ABM's status as a leading facility services company will help OneSource in the future. According to ABM's Web site, the company has over 75,000 employees and its fiscal 2006 revenues exceeded $2.7 billion.
"ABM is a much larger company than OneSource," he said. "[The acquisition is] just going to enable OneSource to have that much more support."
But according to Tunstall, the additional help will not be as significant in the Boston area.
"In this part of the country, OneSource is much larger than ABM," he said. "Right here, we've always had all the resources we've needed."
ABM, based in San Francisco, announced the acquisition of OneSource for $365 million in cash in early October. It completed the merger on Nov. 14, and OneSource ceased trading on the London Stock Exchange the same day.
As a result of the change in ownership, "the combined company will operate under the ABM name," ABM said in a press release.
OneSource employees at Tufts will not see any marked change in their work, and there will be no layoffs or changes in leadership.
"Clients should really see no differences whatsoever," ABM spokesman Douglas Kiker told the Daily. "It will be the same people working for now."
According to Tunstall, Tufts' OneSource workers are members of a union, and thus should have no reason to worry about their contracts being affected as a result of the merger. He said that ABM has met with Tufts officials in order to assure them that there would be no difference in the services provided.
Many OneSource employees on the Medford/Somerville campus have not even been made aware of the change. Those who have, however, said they are confident that the merger will not have a large impact on their work.
"So far, everything's the same," said Tony Cordeiro, an uphill shift supervisor for OneSource.
