Dozens of Fort Wayne Community Schools custodians showed up to the district's board meeting, Monday, in opposition of recent proposals to outsource services including custodial work.
..... "We are your first defense against illness and intruders. We are a big part of the support system in place at FWCS," said Michelle Tribolet. Tribolet is the president of local 561 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. It represents custodians at FWCS. Tribolet says the staff is "very anxious and very worried."
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State firefighters and San Mateo County sheriff's deputies would respond to emergencies in San Carlos under a budget scenario proposed by the city manager. Outsourcing police and fire protection services would save the city an estimated $3 million to $5.5 million, said City Manager Mark Weiss, who on late Friday released his "two paths" plan to close a $3.5 million deficit in the 2010-11 fiscal year budget.
Workers at Chris Jensen nursing home in Duluth don't need economists or politicians to tell them what privatization means. Peterson is one of more than 200 caregivers coping with the upheaval St. Louis County created when it sold the nursing home. Under county management, workers had a strong union contract as part of Local 66. On Nov. 1, it all vanished.
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DC 37 leaders blasted a 1,000 percent cost overrun on a computer contract -- still unfinished after 12 years -- that the city gave to former Giuliani officials with ties to the Bloomberg administration.
They testified Dec. 18 before the City Council Contracts Committee, which is investigating how the $63 million Citytime deal ballooned to $700 million as the city budget went into the red and the mayor laid off employees.
]]>The delivery of health care services in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections evolved from a decentralized system in the 1970s, during which time institutions contracted with separate local vendors, to a system of separate regional vendors in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 2002, the DOC issues a statewide request for proposal. The belief was that "economics of scale" would result in greater savings for DOC.
.....The lessons learned from the previous unsuccessful contract was that vendors would underbid a request for proposal to secure a contract and then try to recoup additional funding later, or they would inflate their initial bid to protect themselves from unpredictable, catastrophic outpatient expenses.
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Abstract: Outsourcing of labor services grew substantially during the 1980s and 1990s and was associated with lower wages, fewer benefits, and lower rates of unionization. The authors focus on two occupations for which they can identify outsourcing in those two decades using industry and occupation codes: janitors and guards. Across a wide array of specifications, they find that the outsourcing wage penalty ranged from 4% to 7% for janitors and from 8% to 24% for guards. Their findings on health benefits mirror those on wages. Evidence suggests that the outsourcing penalty was not due to compensating differentials for higher benefits or lower hours, skill differences, or the types of industries that outsourced. Rather, outsourcing seems to have reduced labor market rents for workers, especially for those in the upper half of the occupational wage distribution. Industries with higher historical wage premia were more likely to outsource service work.
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Local governments that contract out services are faced with a complex problem of developing an appropriate mix of incentives to elicit performance from a diverse set of service providers, including networks of other local governments, mission-driven nonprofit organizations, and profit-maximizing firms. This paper employs agency and stewardship theory to motivate an analysis of rewards and sanctions used in service delivery relationships. Our findings, consistent with principal-agent theory, indicate that a significant proportion of local governments in our sample employ high-powered incentives with for-profit firms.
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.... The survey strongly supports the increased involvement of the private sector, which is likely to help in delivering additional infrastructure more effectively. Increased private sector involvement is not a total solution and the public sector should also bear responsibility for how it leverages the private sector to best add value.
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After six and a half years working for Sodexo Food and Facilities Management Services at Lafayette College, Genevieve Repsher grew tired of earning $8.25 an hour as a cashier in the Farinon Hall cafeteria.
When she showed interest in organizing fellow workers with Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, she found herself followed, watched, interrogated and disciplined by Sodexo management.
The founder of a city-funded AIDS program that recently closed amid reports of alleged fraud and neglect also operated eight facilities for the mentally ill that were racked for years by similar problems, city officials said.
..... Unlike the HIV/AIDS Administration, which awarded more than $1 million in grants to Hill's program, the Department of Mental Health provided no money. Instead, with a license from the agency, Hill drew fees for room and board from her clients' Social Security payments and other public benefits.
]]>One of three committees working on ways to save Nevada County's financially-strapped libraries will recommend the county bail itself out and not rely on an outside firm.
The library systems Citizens Oversight Committee voted unanimously Wednesday to recommend a plan from the Truckee Friends of the Library that keeps all the libraries open.
..... Committee members also rejected a proposal from private firm Library Systems & Services, saying it did not have enough details about how services would be kept as close to whole as possible.
]]>One Kentucky State Representative has introduced a bill to improve the quality and quantity of the food at all of the state's prison, but critics say it's costly and unnecessary. This was the scene last August when inmates rioted at Northpoint Prison near Danville. State Rep. Brent Yonts believes one of the main causes for this uprising was food.
Right now, a private company, Aramark, provides the inmates meals, so he is proposing a bill that would put the state back in control.
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........ Now, the economic downturn has prompted college officials to seek the once unimaginable, the option to outsource some duties of facility workers to save on overtime costs. Doing so, officials say, would help the school preserve jobs.
But many faculty, students, and workers are questioning the move to contract out overtime work, saying it could open the door to replacing the employees with lower-wage, nonunion workers. Such a shift would run counter to Catholic traditions of social justice, they say.
A company that serves meals to 2½ million schoolchildren daily in more than 500 districts nationwide, with multimillion-dollar contracts in both Washington and Chicago, has a history of marginal quality and food-safety scares amid concerns over the nutritional content of its school menus, according to school and company records.
Chartwells-Thompson School Dining Services, a subsidiary of the Charlotte, N.C.-based Compass Group, owner of Burger King, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, is one of North America's largest school cafeteria operators -- its contracts with the Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2009 totaling more than $289 million and a D.C. operation that could net the firm as much as $140 million from 2008 to 2013.
In a major victory in AFSCME's fight against privatization, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) will shut down its Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton on Feb. 1. It housed fewer than 250 inmates last year, in part because Minnesota is placing more offenders in state-run facilities. Prisoners from the privately-owned 1,600-bed jail will be transferred to a public detention complex in Faribault.
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