Jason Lemery
When 10 custodial workers don’t show up for work on a busy Wednesday, most overseers would be very upset, but for Paul Nieman, it’s just another challenge to surmount.
For Nieman, Director of College Facilities at Pierce College, and nearly every day is just as hectic for him.
“It’s increasingly harder and harder to maintain this campus,” said Nieman..
Pierce College’s recent expansions haven’t done anything to ease the custodial burden. The campus recently expanded from 702,000 sq. feet to 772,000 sq. feet, upping the load that each member of the custodial staff must take on.
Dominic Gasperi, general foreman at Plant Services, agreed with Nieman’s assessment.
“Right now it’s nuts, two new buildings coming online, and the Center for Sciences has no janitorial closets,” said Gasperi.
When Nieman arrived Wednesday morning and found such a large number of custodians had called out, his first response was to let the various departments know.
“I made the decision that the focus would be on restrooms and trash,” he said. “Some are off because of industrial accidents, some have scheduled vacation days, and others are really sick.”
The custodial staff at Pierce College currently consists of 29 people, according to Nieman: 19 on the “Early A” shift, 4:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., and five on the “Late A” shift 10:00 a.m to 8:30 p.m. Nieman added that there is no traditional “graveyard shift,” as regulations prevent custodians from working before 4:30 p.m.
“With a full roster of custodians working single assignments, each custodian would theoretically be expected to clean about 25,000 sq. feet,” said Nieman.
But with the budget cutbacks and a hiring process, custodians are working double and even triple assignments, bringing their daily cleaning totals to around 55,000 sq. feet, according to Nieman.
“Most of their day, they’re trying to work around all this population, which is counter intuitive,” Nieman said. “If this were Las Vegas or Disneyland, we’d have enough staff to have a restroom attendant in every restroom. [Right now] we can come through, clean [a room], and move on to the next one. Maybe five minutes later it gets trashed.”