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Rick Brewer: April is college decision month, and there’s a lot of invisible work being done behind the scenes in order to recruit students and impress parents while touring campuses.
WCMU’s Cristin Coppess takes us to Central Michigan University, where custodians are struggling to keep up with the demands for a clean campus amid a staffing shortage and shrinking budget.
Crispin Coppess: It’s just past 5am on a Monday morning. The Wheeler Hall dorm is eerily quiet— there’s not a student in sight.
Cutting through the soft whir of the HVAC, there’s a light shuffling. A deep sigh. A jingle of keys.
It’s Nicole Hill, a custodian who has been at CMU for almost a decade. She’s just started her day on the ground floor, cleaning the laundry rooms and kitchenettes first, so they’re ready when students start milling about in a few short hours.
Hill then gets a phone call; her to-do list just got longer. She quickly loads her cart, hops on the elevator, and makes her way to a different building.
Nicole Hill: My partner's off, so now I'm going to go down to Kessler, do her bathrooms, do her entryway, get her elevators, and then I will run up, do her kitchenettes real quick.
CC: In the last decade, CMU has decreased its custodial staff by about 25% due to budget cuts, leaving about 60 custodians to handle cleaning over 40 buildings with over 5 million square feet.
Now, the union negotiating the custodian’s upcoming contract is calling for higher pay. But with a steep drop in international enrollment at CMU leaving a multi-million-dollar gap in its budget, union officials are concerned the impending budget cuts will interfere with their goal.
To make up for the loss of staff, facilities management officials implemented a new approach, where custodians partner together to clean specific areas. Hill says this approach is not working, and there’s little administrative support for the struggling custodians.
NH: When it comes to like, hey, I really can't do X amount of work because it's not physically possible. It's more along the lines of, well, you're just going to have to figure it out.
CC: At least once every two weeks, CMU custodians are mandated overtime. That often makes an 8-hour day stretch to a 14-hour day.
Hill says the added stress affects the custodians both at work and at home.
NH: That also decreases the amount of time that I have to take care of my mother.
CC: Custodians at CMU aren’t the only ones having to cover more ground.
Jeff Warner is the manager of custodial services at Ferris State University. He says his team has been cut to the bone after rounds of financial losses. 61 custodians are responsible for cleaning about 3.5 million square feet on campus.
Jeff Warner: If we get into a situation where we are adding buildings or square footage to our campus, we also have to add staff because I can't continue to take on more square footage with the same amount of employees.
Warner says only having the bare-minimum number of staff means any cleaning or maintenance outside of what is immediately needed gets put off until students are on break.
JW: They take a lot of pride in their work. But it has become more difficult for them because they know that there are things that they would certainly like to get done on a daily basis that they just don't have time to do.
Hill, the CMU custodian, says the university’s low pay rates are contributing to the staffing shortage. CMU pays custodians around 15 dollars an hour. Comparatively, Ferris offers their custodian a starting wage of around 17 dollars an hour. Grand Valley State University offers around 18 dollars an hour.
David Willis is president of the union representing CMU custodians. He says the union is aiming to negotiate competitive wage increases in June, which will hopefully help fill the handful of open custodial positions.
Willis says the union is concerned the university will only focus on trying to save money instead of focusing on the needs of its staff.
David Willis: They tried outsourcing some of the cleaning in the past. And the custodians, after they outsourced it, they had to go back in and re-clean it.
Willis says custodians are on the front lines of student recruitment because potential students, and their parents, want to see a clean campus.
In the meantime, Hill and her colleagues will continue do their best with what they have.
NH: As far as anybody acknowledging, you know, hey, thank you for doing this job or anything like that, it's very rare in few between. It kind of makes me feel a little invisible.
CC: Ari Harris, a CMU spokesperson, told WCMU the university is hoping to negotiate a contract that works for both parties.
The proposed budget cuts for the next academic year will be presented to the CMU Board of Trustees in June.
In Mount Pleasant, I’m Cristin Coppess, WCMU News.
RB: We note WCMU's broadcast license is held by Central Michigan University. WCMU's newsroom is editorially independent from CMU, and the university is not involved in writing, editing or reviewing our reports.
