"… And I'll turn on the heat when I'm done cleaning my yacht." - unethical New York City school custodians

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1994 by John Fager

My 10-year obsession with changing the New York City school custodial system began one day in 1984 when I was dropping off my son at P.S. 87 on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The school's principal told me the city health department had just cited the school cafeteria. The cafeteria was so filthy that had it been a restaurant, instead of the place where 1,000 children ate every day, it would have been closed.

I said that we should talk to the custodian and ask that he clean it more often. She told me that she had already done that, and the custodian had retorted that his contract required only one cafeteria-scrubbing a week. And as for the health code violation, he didn't give a damn.

The custodian wore a coat and tie to school, never did any hands-on work, and supervised two cleaners. For this he was paid $40,000 to $50,000. He had put his wife on the payroll as a do-nothing secretary earning more than $20,000 (more than a new teacher made at the time). And he charged the school PTA $9,000 in fees (even though he worked no extra hours nor provided any extra services) for the PTA's use of the school for an after-school program.

I told the principal we should complain to the custodian's supervisor. She told me that they were members of the custodial union. I asked to whom we could address our complaints. She said, "No one."

The next school year, 1984-85, I was working as an investigative producer, with correspondent Arnie Diaz, at WCBS-TV News. I spent three months researching and producing a two-part series about the system and discovered that what was happening at my kid's school was the rule in New York, not the exception. By contract, custodians have their personnel sweep the classrooms every other day, scrub the cafeteria floor once per week, and clean windows three times a year.

You've probably heard something about the allpowerful New York school custodians; the first reformers' report came as long ago as 1942. (It concluded, as if written in 1994: "The custodial system itself does not seem to insure a proper degree of competent service on the part of the custodian.") And if you read The New York Times or watch "60 Minutes," you will occasionally catch an item on how the abusive system--a public system that operates totally for the benefit of the employees--just keeps on going. You would think that so much publicity, over so many years, would have generated enough public outrage to persuade lawmakers to change the system. But curiously, reform hasn't come, and that itself is proof positive that once a self-serving bureaucracy is in place and allowed to fester, sometimes it can take nothing short of dynamite to reform the system. In New York, the time for dynamite has come.

How did we get into this mess, anyway? The origins of the abusive contract that favor custodians lie in the 19th century, when custodians lived in the schools because coal-burning furnaces required constant tending. Since the schools were also their homes, the custodians were given enormous authority and autonomy. But when the custodians stopped living in the schools, instead of taking that authority away, the union successfully clung to its privileges and the now-familiar abuses began. (After all, once the custodians weren't living on the premises, their direct interest in keeping the place clean faded accordingly.) At mid-century, as the comfortable contract evolved, unions were in their heyday and were able to keep winning concessions from the Board of Education. Politicians, after all, tend to fear organized interests such as unions, which vote as a bloc, far more than the general public. And one potential check on this developing disaster--the press--was not then covering unions in a way that would have attracted adequate public attention, so contracts negotiated in the dark took root. And once they took root, inertia--combined with the difficulty of focusing public attention on a specific problem long enough to pass substantial reforms--set in.

They Rarely Do Windows

The custodians have the best of both worlds: By contract, they're treated like independent contractors even though they are highly protected civil service workers. The city Board of Education gives each custodian a lump sum of money based on the size of the school and he (it is almost always a white man) is then free to hire a staff that works for him.

This is how, in 1985, 200 custodians employed their wives as handymen but then used them as private secretaries. Why are they hired as handymen and not as secretaries? Because handyman pay is better, and there is no secretarial title. This misuse of the handyman position--a job that should be filled by someone who can fix a furnance or repair a broken window--is one reason schools are in such poor shape.

During my research for the WCBS series, I found that custodians could also buy jeeps and use Board of Education funds for 5/12 of the purchase price. They could drive the jeeps as their own and would own the vehicles after five years. Why jeeps and why 5/12ths? Well, the unstated premise of the contract is that we have a five month snow season in New York City and the jeeps are used to clear snow during this period. Using that logic, the Board spends $1 million on the vehicles annually.