Benefits, efficiency of outsourcing come at price of workers' welfare
April 27As student protests in support of custodial workers' rights continue, assessments of outsourcing at Tufts show costs to employees that some say are not worth the benefits. Outsourcing Tufts' custodial services have resulted in high quality services for the University, according to administrators. This greater efficiency, however, comes at a price for workers, who receive lower wages and benefits than their peers directly employed by companies. Tufts' Vice President of Operations John Roberto said that the quality of custodial service with OneSource is much better than when Tufts employed its own janitorial staff. "OneSource employees are probably better trained, maybe even better supervised [than the workers before]," he said. Companies generally outsource because they think they're going to save money, according to Boston College (BC) professor of operations management Larry Rickman. "They seek to either to improve upon the quality of services, to reduce costs, or some combination of the two." UNICCO, an area company who offers custodial outsourcing services tells its customers that "tomorrow's winners will be those companies with the vision and discipline to focus their expertise Outsourcing gives companies more flexibility, allowing companies to quickly change details and conditions of the work, Rickman said. To make the same changes with in-house unionized workers, companies must undergo a lengthy contract adjustment process. According to Roberto, Tufts is able to stipulate specific standards for custodial operations. Currently, custodians clean residence halls in the morning and academic and administrative buildings in the afternoon and evening. Personnel are scheduled around University holidays and breaks. Similarly, outsourcing allows universities to change contractors if unsatisfied with the contract or with the work being done. Tufts did this in 1997, when it offered its services up for competitive bid and changed its custodial outsourcing contractor from UNICCO to OneSource, then called ISS. The results of Tufts' original decision in 1994 to outsource its general janitorial staff to UNICCO caused an uproar among workers, students, and faculty. The results of outsourcing, Rickman said, "can be very embarrassing, particularly in a university environment: it causes student relations issues, alumni relations issues." After the University began outsourcing its janitorial work, the workers who returned under the UNICCO contract maintained their current wage rate, but lost their university health benefits as well as reduced Tufts tuition for their children. Retirement and pension plans were also lost. "Some janitors were around a year from retirement age, and they lost all retirement benefits," Tufts physics professor Gary Goldstein, who protested against treatment of custodians, said. Similarly, when Tufts offered its contract up for competitive bid, changing its contractor from UNICCO to OneSource in 1997, Goldstein said, all employees were fired, and then "given the opportunity to reapply for their jobs at 25 to 30 percent lower wages." In their current contract, Tufts' OneSource employees are paid $11.45 an hour. Generally, outsourced employees make less than their in-house peers. MIT, BC, and Boston University employ their workers in-house and pay them $15.58, $16.66, and $16.69 an hour, respectively. Meanwhile, contract workers at Brandeis, Suffolk, and Northeastern make $10.95, $13.41, and $10.95, respectively. Because a university must approve the contract negotiated between a janitorial union and an outsourcing provider, some argue that it has implicit leverage in terms of the contract's framework. Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) members have put pressure on Tufts to stipulate certain wages and benefits to be included within the terms of its outsourcing contract. SLAM claims that some other schools that have outsourced their workers have demanded certain standards to provide a better quality of life for their workers. According to Arthur Jones, Director of the MIT news office, the parallels between universities are not that simple. "There are too many variables for a comparison," he said. "What works for one institution may not work for another," because of the different natures of the respective universities and the varying ways in which services are financed and organized. Sandra Waddock, BC professor of corporate citizenship and public strategy, said there are ethical implications of responsibility for employees not directly employed by a company, citing pressures on companies like Nike and Reebok to monitor sweatshop-like conditions in labor environments overseas. "There are many questions about where the responsibility really ends," she said. "No one has really come up with an answer. But you can't just absolve yourself of responsibility just because the company is not yours." Tufts economics professor Jeffrey Zabel raised the fundamental question of whether Tufts is a business, or whether its university status entitled it to be concerned with "more than just the bottom line." "Of course [universities] are supposed to be more socially responsible, and not actually profit-making businesses, but nonprofit organizations. [But] they have to make some profits otherwise they will not be viable in the long run," Tufts economics professor Siddiq Abdullah said. "Every university has multiple purposes, which include caring for their employees and their 'customers,'" Rickman said, explaining that the "customers" are the students. "They not only care about the quality of the education provided, but also the cost of providing it. A university must keep an eye on both dimensions."
