This is what the combination of relentless budget cuts and privatization of custodial work and maintenance looks like in Chicago schools:
... a handful of parents of pre-kindergarten students packed yellow rubber gloves and spray bottles of vinegar and baking soda solution and headed to Suder Montessori Elementary Magnet School, 2022 W. Washington Blvd., on the Near West Side, where they spent the morning cleaning their children's washrooms.
The parents felt they didn't have a choice: Upon entering the bathrooms, they found pools of day-old urine on the floor, feces smeared on the walls and clogged, stinking toilet bowls. In the past few weeks, the school had an E. coli outbreak, and more than half of the kindergarten students missed school because of various illnesses, including a stomach bug, diarrhea or vomiting, said Michelle Burgess, head of the school’s parent-teacher association.
"These are preschoolers. They go to the bathroom and miss. The boys play in the urinals. And sometimes can't get to the toilet fast enough. It's understandable," said Angela Morales, the parent of two children who attend the school. "But they need to clean. We can't have our kids be in this filth."
Chicago has a three-year, $260 million custodial contract with Aramark, which, in September, laid off 480 of the janitors who had been working in the city’s schools. The number of custodial workers per school has been cut, and the parents cleaning at Suder found that the bottles of cleaning materials in the janitor’s closet were empty.
A fair day’s wage
● 2015 year in review: Grassroots resistance points the way forward.
● Boo:
Volkswagen AG is refusing to bargain with skilled-trades workers at the company’s Tennessee plant who voted for union representation earlier this month, the United Auto Workers said.
● Nice!
A port trucking firm in Carson has been ordered to turn over nearly $7 million in back pay to 38 drivers, the latest in a series of recent wins for port drivers and the Teamsters union that has been trying to organize them.
The state Labor Commissioner's Office ruled this month that the drivers at Pacific 9 Transportation were improperly treated as independent contractors rather than as employees. It ordered the company to compensate drivers for illegal paycheck deductions, back wages and legal costs, payouts that amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for some.
● Workers at several of Amazon’s German warehouses were on strike in the days leading up to Christmas.
● It won’t bring back the 1,100 dead, but 41 people will face murder charges for the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh.
● Cablevision has fired a longtime worker and—surprise!—union activist, despite her excellent performance record. It’s illegal to fire a worker for exercising his or her union rights, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good investment for companies wanting to intimidate other workers away from union support.
● Students say Loyola University Chicago admins punishing participants in on-campus worker protest.
Education
● An education professor explains why he tells his students don't join Teach for America.