Jani King and the Workers Who Keep Our Campus Clean
Reported By: Sophia Lumsdaine
Illustrated By: Addie Patterson
Jani King employees haul out students’ food waste, vacuum hallways, remove hair and grime from showers, scrub toilets, mop bathroom floors, and unclog sinks. Inconspicuously and quietly, they keep George Fox University (GFU) functioning and tidy for its students and staff.
Several years ago, GFU stopped employing students to do janitorial jobs on campus and instead began contracting with the international cleaning franchise Jani King. The corporation has operations in ten different countries and generated $935 million in revenue in 2022.
Dwayne Astleford, superintendent of Custodial Services, works most directly in managing the relationship between Plant Services and Jani King. When he was asked about the nature of the contract with Jani King, Astleford replied: “We have a policy regarding whether I can respond to your questions or not. Due to that policy I am not at liberty to answer your questions.” According to Astleford’s supervisor, Assistant Vice President of Facilities, Jeremiah Horton, “these orders come directly from the finance office.” At the time of publication, the Finance Office has not commented on this policy.
Two Jani King employees at GFU, who will remain anonymous, estimated that about six individuals work for Jani King on campus. They are two of about three or four individuals who clean all university dorms, working from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Other workers who clean classroom buildings or common areas such as the gym tend to work at night. Staff behind the front desk in the Hadlock Student Center said that the janitor who cleans Hadlock arrives at around 9 or 10 p.m.
One of the two individuals interviewed has worked for other janitorial companies in the past and believes that Jani King is worse in its treatment of workers than their previous employers.
“The work is really hard and they don't pay us enough,” their co-worker said in Spanish. The two workers specified that they are paid $15 an hour by Jani King and expressed that it was difficult to live off of this compensation.
Both agreed that student carelessness in their treatment of facilities, particularly bathrooms, does not help them do their jobs. When students wash their dishes in the bathroom sinks, food particles quickly clog the drain. “Sometimes we can unclog the sinks and sometimes we can’t,” one of the employees said. They added that “sometimes they [Jani King] don’t have the chemicals we need to clean to do a good job, and we have to buy them with our own money.”
Additionally, when students put their personal trash in the bathroom bins, the trash bags get unnecessarily heavy. Paper towels add up in weight, but when other items (often leftover food and drinks) are disposed of in bathroom trash cans, the bags get even heavier. One of the individuals said that they have to drag the bags in order to move them.
The two employees remind students to wash their dishes in the dorm kitchen instead of the bathroom and dispose of their personal trash in campus dumpsters or in the trash cans in their rooms.
One of the employees stated that they already have back problems to begin with from taking out the trash by the dish collection area in the Bon. Though they were not sure exactly how much the cafeteria trash bags weighed, they said that they were very heavy because of all the food scraps and liquids from students’ plates.
The employees said that they are not unionized and that when they have approached their supervisor about paid holidays, better working conditions, or higher wages, their grievances have been brushed off.
GFU and its students are not directly responsible for or connected to Jani King’s practices. However, they are benefactors of janitorial service on campus, and should accordingly be conscious of the Jani King employees who clean up their messes.