Solidarity with school facilities workers!
There was a big strike vote in Philly last week. The union representing school bus drivers, custodial staff, and building engineers--SEIU 32BJ District 1201--voted to walk out if contract negotiations go south. There are 2,000 members of that unit and 32BJ is a powerful presence in the city. They're demanding wage increases and continuing education for members, focusing specifically on school shooting training. The school district's head of the Office of Talent Support Services (OTSS), Larisa Shambaugh--a graduate of Eli Broad programs--has led the public response as new superintendent Tony Watlington faces a first big challenge of his tenure.
I've written about the organizational structure of the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) before, focusing on facilities, capital programs, and compliance. Many of the workers in the unit going on strike work under these parts of the district's sprawling management apparatus. There's been solid coverage of the strike's basic demands, but I wanted to look a little deeper because, embarrassingly, I've realized that in my search for knowledge about how school finance works (particularly facilities) I haven't spent a lot of time looking at the workers who work on the facilities. What're their material conditions? So here are scattered notes and background that I've found. I'm going to focus on facilities and maintenance workers here, since transportation is an entirely different lane. (For some great political economy on school buses, check out this episode of Odd Lots.)
The workers themselves
Let's focus on the workers first. Looking at the most recent SDP budget we can see some interesting stuff. The first thing that I find striking is the breadth of positions, just when it comes to facilities, maintenance, and custodial workers. There's about 20 kinds of custodians and building engineers, including four types of building engineers, general cleaners, night cleaners, training managers, and even had a single elevator operator who was fired in 2020 (I wonder who that was). In this group of workers the district has been making some good moves from what I can tell. There was a huge increase in hiring Group II in 2021-2, jumping from 67 to 134. That's doubled! A good thing. There was also a huge increase of general cleaners from 2020 to 2021, from 602 to 732. They hired about 200 people in this area, most likely using ARP funds.
But maybe more impressive are the roughly 30 kinds of facilities and maintenance support workers at the district. There are air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics, plant mechanics, bricklayers, electrical mechanics, facilities truck chauffeurs, field & grounds foremen, field & grounds mechanics, fire alarm maintenance technicians, machinists, millwork specialists, painter/glazer/plasterers, pest control foremen, plumbers (two kinds), roofers (two kinds), steamfitters, sprinklers, and trades apprentices.
And there are some increases in these workers as well, which is particularly good when it comes to the facilities crisis in the district. If you don't have workers to do the facilities work then it's hard to maintain healthy buildings. One thing that jumps out to me is that they tripled the number of air conditioning and refrigerator mechanics (from 4 to 13) between 2020 and 2021 and kept those numbers in the recent budget. They quadrupled bricklayers from 2 to 8. Though they halved the numbers of field and ground mechanics of one type.
Ummm, what's that?
I'm going through the salaries and benefits expenditures for these workers in the budget and it's hard to breath life into these numbers since I don't know national or regional averages, nor do I have historical data on these sums. It's interesting to note that the salaries and benefits are large expenditures, which confirms an adage in progressive school finance research: education is a human resource thing. It's paying people to do the work needed to educate including the people that take care of the buildings where teaching and learning happening.
One thing I'm seeing in the expenditures is a strange number: there's $125 million "scholarships and stipends" expenditure for "supplemental facilities investments." As the district haggles with 32BJ over these workers' salaries, what's going on with this number? That's a lot of money in a strange category. For context, check out how the total expenditure for facilities custodians and building engineers is only $113.4 million. You could double the number of those workers' payments with this strange supplemental figure. 
Background and negotiators on the district side
In terms of background, as I read about in a bond statement, the reason there are negotiations now over this contract is because there was an extension to the most recent contract whose last year was 2020. That extension agreement had a 2% raise and a lump sum of $1,000 paid to every worker in the unit starting in 2021. Fresh in everyone's mind of course are the millions in cuts the district had to make in 2012 with 32BJ in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and its sclerotic municipal recovery. As they negotiate, we should keep in mind that the district can only operate within the financial bounds of its revenue streams, which are in an acute situation given that American Rescue Plan money will run out in two years.
There's an interesting question here about what the district 'can' handle financially when it comes to workers' demands. On the one hand, we support workers and their demands full stop. On the other, we can appreciate the ways that school financing in the United States hamstrings a district's ability to meet those demands. Yet there are gray areas in the machinations of district budgeting decisions. The people that allocate money to school district workers' wages aren't merely technicians whose decisions are based on natural laws that must be thus and so. They're ideological too. And given Broad's influence within the district's leadership, we have to assume that there's a neoliberal common sense in the offices making these decisions. In the negotiations with 32BJ, I imagine there's are hallways full of district officials working in the Office of Management and Budget, Office of Finance, and the Office of Operations.
Based on my previous charting of these offices, we know there's a difference between the bigwigs--public facing officials whose job is to absorb and redirect pressure--and middle management working underneath them crunching numbers, generating analysis, and making recommendations to decision-makers. That layer of managers should interest us because the front-facing people like Watlington, Reggie McNeil at Operations, and Uri Monson in finance aren't necessarily in the data trenches, though the ideological buck will stop with them to some extent when they sit across the table from 32BJ negotiators. (Also of note: Ahmed Sultan is out as director of capital programs and Nicole Ward is Acting Director since January.) Who are the people most likely generating the reports that guide these decisions? My best guess is that people working with Tejal Bandejee (director of finance for facilities and maintenance), Paul Bonewiscz (director of maintenance), and Jeff Scott (director of facilities) will be important figures here, along with Erin O. Davis (Deputy CFO)and Marcy Blender (Comptroller) in the finance office. My instinct is that Pandejee and Davis would be good to target for campaigns on this score.
So main takeaways for this analysis: there are so many workers that make the school buildings work in the district! In the pandemic milieu, the district has been hiring workers to do important facilities work. On the other hand, I don't understand what the $125 million for scholarships and stipends in supplemental facilities investments is. Maybe the union should ask about this and see if any of that might go to their workers if the district doesn't want to provide raises. I'd also recommend that campaigns supporting the union target the middle managers, Pandejee and Davis in particular.
Postscript: Their contract was negotiated and settled Friday afternoon last week, as I was drafting this post, which is great news. Before I got that news, I posted a thread on twitter about some of the insights from the post, to which Uri Monson responded by calling my question about $125 million a 'conspiracy theory' and noted that that money is the remaining federal relief funds from ARPA.