The College Bureaucracy Strikes Once Again …
And this time, it has managed to anger one of Dartmouth’s most important groups of employees, without which the College’s ancillary activities would grind to a halt: the custodians.
Many custodians were blindsided by this notice, posted inside of McKenzie. According to a reliable College employee, the parking lot shift is “meaningless red tape intended to provide something for pencil pushers to do.” According to our monitoring of the aforementioned parking lot is barely occupied — the highest number of cars we spotted during a weekday, at most hours, was 3 in a parking lot designed for more than 20 cars. There is only one word to describe the parking lot during daily operational hours: empty! Custodians are not even allowed to stop their cars.
Adding to the injury are the two part-time parking enforcers hired by Dartmouth to monitor this. In their first few days, the two had managed to ticket at least one Dartmouth-owned-and-operated car with an FO&M employee who merely stopped the car for a few minutes to pick up something from a desk inside McKenzie. What part of the College sticker did the two parking attendants not see? Their lack of vision notwithstanding, the College has expanded its bureaucratic leviathan: it forces custodians to make the walk on their own time, wasting at least half an hour a day for custodians who attend to buildings at the heart of campus, right next to Baker-Berry, which is an unreasonable exertion on their time, and it is unpaid.
Custodians I spoke with also conveyed a sense of frustration with the SEIU Union, of which they are all part of — and pay approximately $600 each per annum to have the pleasure of disservice from. Frustration mounts internally at the failures of the SEIU union, which, according to a custodian who did not wish to be named, “only rubber-stamps college policy.” The frustration only extends to Mr. Chris Peck, who presently heads the union; his predecessor was beloved and active for the benefit of the rank-and-file members.
And so the bureaucratic nightmare starts once again. The College’s bloated bureaucracy and wasteful expenditures has significantly affected its financial aid programme, as I reported late last year, which resulted in students having to leave Dartmouth despite its pledge to ensure Dartmouth is affordable for every student who is admitted. Next in line are the hard working support staff, who, unlike overpaid DDS workers, earn competitive wages, and recognise their essential role in the College’s functioning.
Imagine what happens if the Custodial staff strike over this: toilets will overflow, showers will grow colonies of mould, and hallways will stink of vomit and will overflow with uncollected garbage [which, may I add, piles up ridiculously quickly]— and this is only by the middle of the first week. It seems as though the College is doing what it does best: finding a way for the tinkering and significantly underworked bureaucratic leviathan it employs to do something?
Perhaps this is also a great time to remind our readers that bureaucratic bloat has resulted in the employment of almost 3 non-teaching faculty members for every 4 undergraduate students at the College. The day when this ratio becomes 1:1 is not too far away … and then there’ll be no one left to keep the dorms habitable, for they would have all left in protest! The College’s leviathan is truly relentless.
Addendum: A union member in good standing informed me that dues are, in fact, $600 p.a. and not $1,300 as previously reported.
Addendum 2: A member of the custodial staff calculated the additional time it would take every year, that the college would expect for unpaid work. It comes up to 130 hours —3.25 work weeks!
Addendum 3: An alumnus writes in:
The parking behind New Hamp is also problematic.
Hanover Inn used to park behind 4 Currier. Why change it? Who’s parking at 4 Currier now?
I walked past both lots on Tuesday. there were 3 cars in the Inn’s lot, and Currier was less than half full.
I also noticed a car parked on the sidewalk in front of the Inn that day.
One question I have is in the second paragraph in the letter to FO&M employees. What discussions with the town? How does changing parking spaces benefit anyone but the Inn’s valet parking attendants with a shorter walk?
Which employees are [now] allowed to park there? Probably not custodians.
