"… dozens of custodial staff positions at the University of Missouri-Columbia will be eliminated over the next three months, meaning others will have to pick up the slack.
In all, about 16,000 Mizzou hospital and campus employees — including professors — will be responsible for the upkeep of their offices beginning this summer." …
Dirty dorms?
Yeah, saw that story. And laughed. The people that came up with that genius idea, don’t do manual labor…they have no idea how much effort it takes or how much time it takes to clean up a whole building of people. My husband owns a small cleaning company, and I can’t tell you how many times we walked into a business that had done the same thing.
For example; Small business X is trying to save money, so they fire their janitor staff and make the employees clean in their dresses and business suits. Now, said employees are not getting paid extra to do so, and they are use to having someone else do it for them. But the employees want to keep their jobs so they clean…just not well. The baseboard, behind the door,the bottom of the toilets gets neglected. Windows, dusting the vents, those too, get forgotten about. Plus cleaning is a physically demanding, it wears you out if you are not in some sort of shape after awhile. In about two months time, the whole place looks like crap. And what are you going to do??? Fire your employees that make you a profit because they won’t clean a bathroom the right way? Nah, you are going to have to hire a professional cleaner, to first detail all the dirt and grime and dust out of the place, so it can be quickly cleaned on a daily/weekly basis.
Look, some places have to look good to retain business, the grass needs to be mowed, flowers planted, lobby cleaned, etc. because if not, customers will not come in. I have seen restaurants go out, because they fired the landscapers and let the outside go to crap, and then sat and wondered why business went down. You might think that a University can get away with it, but it can’t. A university looks pretty, and a university is CLEAN. It will not look good to any touring new students when they show up, and the place is a dirt hole. (And don’t give me, ‘but the staff and professors will keep it clean’,because they won’t, it’ll be a pig sty in 8 weeks or less) I think it will cost them more money than they save and they will end up having to hire all the janitors back.
Yeah, those overpaid janitors are the real problem… 
@greymouse There’s also the issue of those other employees having other things to do. For example, I work in the beverage department of a retail chain. If we fired our janitors and my boss asked me to go clean bathrooms, I know how to do it right and am in a physically demanding job anyway, but it takes away from what I normally need to do. If I’m cleaning the bathrooms, I’m not filling empty wine displays from the stockroom, facing shelves so they look attractive and well managed to customers, seeing what beers we need to reorder from our distributors, processing deliveries, lugging wine cases out to customers’ cars, engaging with customers, or doing any of the myraid other things I’m being paid for. An office job or teaching job is no different in that respect. And university teaching jobs have enough time demands and low enough pay as it stands.