Trouble Brewing over Threat of Privatization at UTK

From: Frances L Ansley <ansley2@utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
To: ansley@utk.edu
Subject: Trouble Brewing over Threat of Privatization at UTK


Dear Labor & Human Rights Lists,  

I am forwarding an article that appeared in Wednesday's Daily Beacon about
the very vivid fears of UTK housekeeping staff that the university is
preparing to privative work in the residence halls this summer. Members of
the custodial staff in the residence halls  will be working hard to get
both clarification and substantive assurances about this matter from the
UTK administration, and it is quite likely that they will be asking others
for support in this effort, so I thought that people on these lists who
may not have seen the Beacon article would want to be alerted.  

A couple of background paragraphs may also be in order, so they
follow.  The Beacon Article is pasted into the bottom of the message.

Brief background on privatization at UTK:

As most of you probably know, this campus has already seen two earlier
waves of privatization.  In the first instance, the custodial staff in
most classroom and office buildings was privatized a decade or so ago,
with the work turned over to Service Solutions.  It is my strong
person impression that dissatisfaction with current maintenance practices
in our workspaces is both wide and deep among faculty and staff.  Many of
us who worked on this campus when regular UT employees did this work
remember how different it was when we had relationships with a
corps of stable employees who were covered by UT benefits plans,
considered themselves part of the UT community, and readily did tasks 
that appeared to be important and necessary without regard to whether the
tasks were specified by name in a service contract. 

In the second instance, food services jobs were contracted out to Aramark.

In both prior instances of privatization, there were plenty of private
conversations and some expressions of individual concern, but no
public debate, deliberation, or outcry took place, although the 
decisions being made were undoubtedly important ones for the campus
community as a whole, impacting quality of life, the academic mission, and
the general social climate.

Relationship to living wage issue

It is worth noting that both of these private contractors -- Aramark and
Service Solutions --  have thus far declined to reveal the wages and
benefits they pay to their employees, despite repeated requests from
members of the campus living wage campaign and from official 
representatives of the Faculty Senate.  Campus administrators have
similarly declined to provide -- or even to seek -- that information.

The Faculty Senate recently addressed the issue of privatization in the 
context of a larger resoluction about wages on campus. At least to my
knowledge, however, it has not yet received a public response from the
administration.   

In March the Senate resolved that the University should endorse the
concept of a living wage as a long-term goal, and should
devote concrete resources toward meeting that goal over each of the next
several years.  As a key complement to the living wage resolution, the
Senate also resolved that if low-wage jobs on campus were contracted out
in the future, the contracts should require that the work be compensated
at a living wage level, or at least no for no less than wages paid to
comparable employees working directly for the university.  Otherwise, of
course, selected bottom-tier wages could be "disappeared" first, and
lowered later, falling off the community's radar screen entirely, although
workers would still be present and would still be doing our work.

There has as yet been no public response from the administration to the
Faculty Senate recommendations described above.  If there are
indeed steps being taken to contract with  Service Solutions for work in
the residence halls, the substance of the Faculty Senate resolution is
obviously implicated in that decision.


All right, enough for my brief background paragraphs!  Thank you for
reading this far.  I hope you agree this is an important issue for our
campus. If the sharp concerns of custodial workers turn out to have been
ill-founded, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.  On the other hand, if
it turns out that the administration is indeed contemplating such a move,
perhaps this time the decision to privatize can be treated as the
important matter of public concern that it clearly is , . .

Fran A.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 11:36:51 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jobs with Justice Knoxville <jwjknox@korrnet.org>
To: Main:  ;
Subject: UT Workers Fear Privatization

This article appeared in yesterday's (April 18, 2001) University of Tennessee
Knoxville Daily Beacon.  Please read and forward...


WORKERS FEAR UT WILL PRIVATIZE THEIR JOBS, GROUP MEETS TO DISCUSS PROBLEM
--Nate Arthur, Staff Writer  (The Daily Beacon, Apr 18, 2001)

The United Campus Workers, UT’s independent union, has scheduled an emergency
meeting to discuss fears that the administration seeks to privatize jobs.

“The fear is that they’re bringing in Service Solutions to phase us out,” said
Sandy Hicks, UCW co-founder and a senior housekeeper at UT.

UCW members and sympathizers have been told by administrators that any SS
workers employed this summer were purely temporary.

“They did the same thing 12 years ago as now and that’s what I’m concerned
about,” Hicks said.  “People got back from vacation and didn’t have jobs, were
fired after years of working here, with the choice of working for SS at a
lower pay with no benefits.  All the evidence points to privatization, and so
does history.”

Administrators say SS is only being considered as a “third option” to deal
with the summer season.

Directors of Housing Jim Grubb and Mike West have both said such the measure
is in response to December’s talks with UCW members who wanted to address the
issue of “forced overtime” last summer, when the department was understaffed
and some workers needed to work 10-12 hour shifts to manage the busloads of
conference visitors.

Grubb and West both said that through human resources an attempt would be made
to use overtime and temporary workers within the UT family before they sought
labor from the current contractors.

But some in UCW say they haven’t seen much evidence of these preliminary
in-house efforts and are puzzled about the need for more labor because,
according to West, the conference load is lighter than last year’s.

In a January meeting with Grubb, Alliance For Hope member Chad Negendank and
assistant history professor George White asked if there were any plans
underway to privatize dorm workers.

Grubb replied that he “was not aware of any such plans, but that didn’t mean
that decisions weren’t being made above him at a higher administrative level.”
 Hicks said the fact that housing bosses have said recently that SS workers
need to be trained by UT supervisors for summer dorm work is unsettling.

“That’s what we need to do here, is send a message saying we are not going to
allow UT to contract out our jobs,” Hicks said.  “We know this work better
than anybody.  Quality for the students will suffer if this happen, and we
need to show administrators this is how we feel, that we won’t stand for
privatization.”

**********************************************************************
Alliance for Hope, a University of Tennessee Student Economic Justice Group
A Member of the Council for a Living Wage and Worker Justice at UT
(865) 546-6721
Email:  hopeutk@utk.edu
Alliance webpage:  http://web.utk.edu/~hopeutk
United Campus Worker webpage:  http://www.korrnet.org/ucw