As community members of Simon Fraser University, we stand in solidarity with SFU’s contract workers who perform work that is essential to the safe functioning of our university. While SFU has committed to maintaining its “academic mission, institutional priorities, and the student experience,” budget cuts are being borne by the lowest paid, most precarious members of our community who have been excluded from this commitment.
BEST (Best Service Pros) has recently laid off 23 contract cleaning service workers (approximately 15% of their SFU workforce). They represent 23 families of racialized workers, women, and immigrants to Canada who, after having just achieved a living wage and access to services on campus only very recently, are now paying the price for SFU’s administrative decisions.
While SFU has taken the position that this is a matter between BEST and the cleaning staff, it is clear that the cuts are a direct result of SFU’s decision to contract out this essential work. Cleaning services workers, their union (CUPE 3338), and hundreds of SFU community members have repeatedly called on SFU to bring cleaning service workers in house and employ them directly, as is the practice at UVic and UBC. SFU has refused, instead requiring BEST to meet the standards for a living wage but not acting to fund that demand. The result is that BEST has resorted to cost-cutting, including laying off workers responsible for keeping the campus clean, presenting these layoffs as a response to post-pandemic changes in office space use.
This is disingenuous, cynical, and beneath a university that has repeatedly professed its commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion. There are not suddenly fewer bathrooms to clean, or fewer floors to mop. Instead, BEST is intensifying the workload for workers who survived the layoffs and further cutting costs by limiting supplies of items like gloves and trash bags. Workers continue to complain of heavy-handed management practices, health and safety concerns, and inadequate equipment at work. A 2022 report by Contract Worker Justice @ SFU reveals BEST to be an exploitative contractor that mistreats the most vulnerable workers in our community, and its presence on campus flies in the face of the university’s public mission.
As members of the SFU community who rely on the work of cleaning service worker every day, we call on SFU to address this situation immediately. Targeting these workers as an easy cost cutting measure is entirely contrary to SFU’s stated commitments to equity. Budgetary adjustments may well be needed, but it is not acceptable to make these savings on the backs of the workers who keep our campuses clean and sanitized for the safety and comfort of the community.
The crises of COVID should have taught this administration to prioritize basic sanitation to maintain public health standards amidst ongoing spread of infectious diseases. Moreover, persistent issues and inequities related to COVID and long-COVID, among many other public health concerns that have arisen, should have taught everyone that the health and safety of each of us relies on securing conditions for the health and safety of ALL of us.
We call for:
o the reinstatement of laid off contract workers;
o reasonable workloads for workers that do not include taking over additional work to compensate for layoffs;
o a full investigation into BEST management’s bullying and intimidation of workers;
o access to the necessary supplies for workers to perform their jobs effectively and safely;
o bringing food service and cleaning staff into direct employment at the earliest time possible based on current contracts.
