Primary voting has begun in Chicago. I will be voting, along with many others I hope, for “CEASEFIRE”.
The Aramark Saga continues
"Aramark’s job is to clean the schools so our principals and teachers can focus on their fundamental responsibility, education. They will either live up to that contract and clean up the schools, or they can clean up their desks and get out." — Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Sept. 2014
I was happy to hear Mayor Brandon Johnson’s announcement that he’s finally giving the boot to Aramark, the food and janitorial service provider for Chicago Public Schools. It is being celebrated by the union that represents school custodians, who have long opposed the privatization of cleaning services. Why it’d taken 10 years is beyond me.
There have been various attempts to correct the school cleaning system in the years since CPS announced its intent to dump Aramark in 2020, only to re-up them a year later with a promise of greater accountability.
Aramark has left the schools in a filthy condition, causing complaints from parents, students, and school principals. They have also fired hundreds of workers since those services were provided internally within CPS, and have left the schools understaffed and under-equipped.
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Over the past decade, CPS has paid Aramark nearly a billion dollars for its services and the company is owed millions more.
The battle to dump Aramark and Sodexo Magic from the schools and prisons became personal with me back in 2014 when “Mayor 1%”, Rahm Emanuel, following in the footsteps of predecessor Mayor Daley, moved to privatize everything in Chicago that was not nailed down, including the schools. Why personal? I’ll get to that in a moment.
When CPS first contracted with Aramark a decade ago, budget officials at the time promised that outsourcing the management of school cleaning would save money and ease the burden on school principals. But the deal backfired in the first school year when staff returned from summer break to dirty classrooms and, in some buildings, fewer custodians. Then, prison-bound CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett admitted the shift to privatized management of custodians was not going smoothly and the board reversed nearly 500 planned layoffs. By the spring of 2015, the contract with Aramark had gone millions of dollars over budget.
Catalyst reporter Sara Karp wrote at the time:
The $340 million privatization of the district’s custodial services has led to filthier buildings and fewer custodians while forcing principals to take time away from instruction to make sure that their schools were clean. That is the finding from a survey done by AAPPLE, the new activist arm of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association.
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Where Mayor Daley had previously sold off the parking meters, the Skyway, and city garbage collection, his successor Rahm Emanuel went on to close more than 50 neighborhood schools, replacing many of them with privately managed charter schools and then later with the city’s first private school voucher program.
Rahm’s handpicked school board contracted with Aramark, despite the company’s shady history of corruption, mismanagement, and worker abuse. Aramark is the largest provider of food services to US prisons. On Good Jobs First’s “Violation Tracker” for Aramark, there is a list longer than your arm of workplace safety and health violations. Starting with labor rights and the NLRB, Aramark has violated US labor relations laws more than 40 times, resulting in nearly a million dollars in fines.
Now for the personal part…
At the time I was doing a lot of writing about the privatization of public schools and schooling in the Ownership Society and was very critical of the Aramark deal. The thing that pissed me off the most was the sellout on the deal by the workers’ own union, SEIU Local 73. The union leadership not only supported the Aramark privatization scheme but topped it off with a $25,000 contribution to Rahm Emanuel’s campaign war chest.
I wrote one piece criticizing the union leaders who responded by threatening to sue me for calling one of them “dirtier than a CPS bathroom.” I retracted my comment, admitting that nothing at the time was dirtier than a CPS bathroom. Being a lifelong union member and organizer, the last thing I wanted was a costly legal battle with SEIU. Following the advice of my attorneys at Pro, Bono & Plead, and having made my point, I retracted my statement. I had no hard evidence that the leadership was indeed dirtier than a CPS bathroom — a pretty high bar for dirtiness, I admit.
Nearly two years later, Local 73, torn apart by the sellout divisive leadership, was put into receivership by union trustees. Union President Christine Boardman the was fired and the union was reconstituted under new leadership and headed in a better direction.
According to the union's statement on the takeover:
This time, it stems from “incessant fighting” between union president Christine Boardman and secretary-treasurer Matt Brandon that apparently “reached a boiling point and seriously disrupted the operations and functioning of the Local, putting members’ interests at risk.”
Boardman and Brandon “each challenge the basic legitimacy of the other’s authority to hold office or lead the Local,” resulting in a “debilitating dysfunction of the Local’s governance process as well as causing instability and confusion within the Local and its membership,”
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I admit, I felt a bit of redemption at the time. But it was too little, too late. The deal was done. Once you take the public out of public schools, it’s difficult, nearly impossible, to put it back.
Now Mayor Johnson and the Board are left with the task of either bringing custodial services back into CPS or replacing Aramark with a group of small, private clean-up companies. There will be expensive legal battles and the threat that even more CPS service workers’ jobs and union rights will be impacted.
Mike is so right. How hard is it to figure out that privatizing a public function must generate profits or there is no point to it. And there are only two easy ways to generate profits: reduce the services or reduce labor costs (cutting pay or jobs). There is a pervasive myth in America that public agencies are always inefficient or ineffective. Comparing public utilities for electricity or gas with privatized utilities should quickly put the lie to that.