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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Students protest treatment of janitors

Members of Tufts Labor Coalition last Wednesday held a rally and march in support of the school's janitors, presenting demands to the administration after discovering that custodial service provider DTZ/Unicco appeared to be in breach of its contract.

Rae Axner, TLC vice president and one of the event's organizers, explained that the janitors' employer has been manipulating the workforce and its schedule.

"The janitors are clearly in a precarious situation because they are not employed by Tufts University; they are employed by their contractor DTZ/Unicco," Axner, a senior, said. "There [have] been a lot of problems with the contractor in the past couple of years. There are three major issues that are going on right now, two of which are contractual violations, one of which isn't specifically a violation of the contract — it's just mistreatment."

Axner said that DTZ/Unicco's main issues are having too few full-time employees at Tufts, the janitors not receiving weekly paychecks during time off and having increasingly large workloads.

"The janitors are not being employed full-time at the rate that their contract states that they should be," she explained. "The contract says that 75 percent of the janitorial staff should be full-time employees and that DTZ should be aspiring to employ 90 percent of the janitorial staff full-time. Currently, about 58 percent are full-time and that number is corroborated between the janitors, the union, DTZ and Linda Snyder, the vice president of operations at Tufts."

Snyder explained that the contract DTZ negotiated with the union, Service Employees International Union , was agreed upon last year.

"With respect to the obligation to reach a goal of 75 / 25 in full-time / part-time employees, DTZ has told us that it believes it is not in violation of the contract," she told the Daily in an email. "The SEIU contract requires that the goal be reached through attrition, which is a provision that the SEIU negotiated to avoid layoffs. DTZ says that attrition, in which an employee voluntarily leaves employment, in the university custodial workforce is very low and therefore has not been sufficient to reach the goal."

Axner, however, suggested that the issue is complex and expanded upon the hiring practices of DTZ.

"When janitors leave full-time positions, they are not replacing those full-time positions, but rather letting people continue to work part-time and really just dividing that workload among part-time employees, reducing the staff, not actually hiring to replace full-time employees and not promoting within the staff from part-time to full-time," she said.

She suggested that DTZ has engaged in schedule manipulation in order to avoid paying for the benefits that come with being a full-time employee, including healthcare and paid time off.

"It is our understanding that DTZ has actually been manipulating the schedules of the janitors specifically so they don't have to grant full-time status to employees that are essentially working full-time," Axner said. "For example, they will have full-time hours for two weeks, and then their hours will be reduced for one week so that they aren't working full-time for the amount of time that they would legally have to be [in order to be] considered full-time employees."

Giovanna Castro, the incoming TLC vice president and current chair of the group's janitors and dining hall workers committee, led the rally, which consisted of students, professors and janitors. She said the rally was purposely planned during the lunch breaks of many custodial workers.

"We had a bunch of posters and ... a fair amount of janitors came and they also had their posters," Castro, a junior, said. "Three of the janitors came up and spoke, and I translated for some of them. One of the things that just really touched me was that one of them said, 'Remember, kids, you are the engine of this university.'"

Rally participants marched down Professors Row, up Packard Avenue and over to Ballou Hall where they presented a list of demands to Snyder and other administration officials. One of the other demands included fixing the pay schedules for workers on vacations, who, according to Castro, are supposed to receive checks every week.

"That's something they want and that DTZ isn't doing," she said. "That's an issue that DTZ has been [confronting] nationwide, so if we win at Tufts, it could be a huge win for DTZ employees nationwide."

While not an actual violation of the contract, the increasing workloads of DTZ employees are unjust, according to Axner.

"Their work strain has gone way up, and the quality of their work has gone way down," Axner said. "They take great pride in the quality of the work they do. ... We have janitors who are assigned to three, four, five buildings every day and DTZ also does not keep staff on retainer to cover when other janitors are sick."

Axner said that this means DTZ is likely cutting corners and providing less to Tufts than it is contractually obligated to do.

Snyder explained that the contract cost to the university was agreed upon in last year's negotiations, and she could not speculate on how costs could potentially change in a new contract. The agreement runs through July 31, 2016, according to a copy of the contract Axner provided to the Daily.

"[The contract] is signed and final," she said. "We are very conscious of the fact that the costs of operating the university, including the costs of custodial services, contribute to the cost of higher education and therefore tuition."12