with an average of 10 years tenure. Compared to private sector of 4 years, who are also transient workers.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?Itemid=74&id=31&jumival=6443&option=com_content&task=view"So these are the custodians. You know, anybody who has school-aged children, you know, runs into custodians in their public schools all the time. You know, these are the people who make sure that the hallways are clean, that the cafeterias are, you know, cleaned properly, that maintain the basic quality of the buildings. So you just think of them as the caretakers of the physical learning environment for these kids in school. It also includes, you know, groundskeepers, people who are doing some auto-mechanical work. But again, you know, basically these are the people who are taking care of the physical environment at these learning institutions. So the basic change of that is: The average wage currently, for the custodians, is $20.90. Under the privatized contract, this average wage would fall to $12.50. So it's a cut in wages by about 40 percent. In terms of benefits, one of the really significant changes is that right now the custodians work full-time. The entire workforce is working full-time. Under the privatized contract, about two-thirds of the positions would be part-time. It could be more than that--I had to estimate this a little bit. But at minimum, two-thirds of the positions would be part-time. And all those part-time workers would have no health benefits and no retirement benefits. The current full-time workforce has both of those benefits, health and retirement. So these are not only drastic changes in terms of compensation, but also in terms of the work hours, so the potential earnings, so the amount of--even, you know, at a very much lower pay rate, they're working about half the hours."
"Currently the average salary of the custodians is about $45,000. They make about another $5,000 in overtime. But when you look at what would happen under the private contracts, they're talking about an annual earnings of about $13,000 for a $12.50 an hour job 20 hours a week. I mean, the size of that loss of income is huge."
"You're talking about a household making about $31,000. And that qualifies them for major public subsidy programs like, as you mentioned, food stamps, which is now called SNAP, Medicaid, housing assistance, the earned income tax credit program, childcare subsidies.
So in effect these subsidy programs will be subsidizing the low earnings that these jobs will be offering under the private contract."
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