Kaiser Htoopo says he’s worked at Carolina since 2005. Each day, he cleans specific buildings and coordinates with his supervisor. For eight hours, he and other housekeepers do a variety of tasks – ranging from emptying trash and cleaning bathrooms to intense disinfection following the spread of COVID-19.
He says while some housekeepers used to have assistance from other cleaners for each building, some now have to fully clean up to three university buildings each day.
Since this fall, there’s been a push from some UNC housekeepers for the university to make a change in their pay. Between rising costs with inflation and some dips in staffing numbers, the facilities’ staff say they need help. With the help of a UNC workers union, the group is looking to share their message and try to garner enough support to approach the university system’s Board of Governors.
The current rate for many UNC housekeepers is around $15 an hour, according to organizers. The sector of university staff is largely made up of members of minority communities and works all hours of the day to clean spaces across the Chapel Hill campus.
Htoo Paw says she’s enjoyed her housekeeping job at the university, but that she has not had a meaningful pay raise in years. She brought her pay stubs to show how far below a living wage – which is calculated to be $15.85 in Orange County – the housekeeping crews earn. When having conversations with cleaning and housekeeping staff at other local institutions, she says people share their own recent pay raises and criticize UNC for its lack of response.
“Everything’s price [has gone up] and our raise [has] never gone up,” said Paw. “It’s very, very low, the [pay] rate for a housekeeper.”
With those challenges in mind, the housekeepers began writing and sending individual letters as a group to UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz in September. After seeing the effort, the local union UE 150 took up their cause and helped mobilize with more events and coordination.
The list of demands from the housekeepers is short: they wish for a pay raise to $20 per hour and to no longer have to pay for parking during their shifts.
Aung Than, another Chapel Hill housekeeper, was quick to point out that housekeepers are subject to pay for hundreds of dollars each year for a parking pass – while parking overnight for guests or others on UNC campus is free.
“At nighttime, [for] all the people who work from 11 to 7 in the morning, nobody [else] is working,” Than said with translation through Paw. “The parking is free. Why is the reason we [day shift housekeepers] have to pay? Do you think this is right?”
To spread their message, the housekeepers have held several demonstrations over the fall. The group held a protest at the Old Well and South Building on October 28, marching with handmade signs and delivering a petition to university leadership.
A group of the UNC staff also held a demonstration outside of a recent university Board of Trustees meeting.
Trey Anthony, a UE 150 organizer and a graduate teaching fellow at UNC, said a representative of the housekeepers was later invited in to speak with trustees about their experience. Since then, the housekeepers have met directly with university leadership about their cause – which the staff hopes will happen on a more regular basis.
“[The trustees] did go on the record saying that they did support the housekeepers’ demands,” said Anthony, “and that they’re doing as much as they can to advocate for the pay raises and changes in parking [at] the level of the state legislature. It’s the Board of Governors that’s appointed by the legislature and they’re the ones who set pay maximums for housekeepers.”
Anthony said the union and housekeepers have their sights set on meeting with those statewide Board of Governors next. The goal is to ask for those pay maximums to be changed and for the right to collectively bargain with the university.
“UNC complains about not having enough housekeeping staff,” he said, “but they’re not taking the actions to treat their workers well, to pay them what they deserve in a competitive way. And it’s the current housekeepers who have to shoulder the burden of that, doing multiple buildings between two or three people.
“It just gets to this bigger problem of does UNC really value its workers,” continued Anthony. “And we’re trying to join together to show how much their worth.”
But Paw said she feels encouraged about the worker union’s involvement with the housekeepers’ efforts and knowing that others support their cause.
“I’m thankful for [the] union’s respect for housekeeper people,” she said. “This is very important for housekeeper people because just like I have a membership with the union and I’m feeling like that [I have a] big brother, big sister.”
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article said overnight housekeepers were not required to pay for parking and day-time housekeepers were. That is incorrect: housekeepers are required to pay for parking during their shifts no matter the time of day.
Photo via UE 150.
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