(update Friday April 4th 2025: correction of calculation)
ACOD asks the candidate duos of rector/vice rector to take a position on the possible insourcing of cleaning. We passed on the position below to the currently known duos (Petra and Herwig and Rik and Ilse), and will also publish their response.
The Executive Council of Ghent University on Friday, April 4, will include an agenda item about cleaning at Ghent University. It proposes to extend the current contract with ISS by 6 months and to submit a new tender to have the cleaning continued through outsourcing.
The documents state that taking the cleaning back in-house would be a lot more expensive (about 3.5 million euros).
We delved into the figures ourselves and made calculations based on an insourcing scenario that management made itself in 2020. We assumed different scenarios. We always made a calculation for insourcing as statutory employees, as contractual employees with and without a replacement pool for illness:
- Counts by the trade unions at ISS assume that there are 110 to 120 FTEs in cleaning at Ghent University. Taking into account an additional 10% of additional staff to replace colleagues in the event of illness, all scenarios (contractual and statutory) are cheaper than outsourcing.
- We received the figure from Ghent University management that there are currently 140 FTEs in cleaning at Ghent University. We created two scenarios based on that figure (one with an additional 10% replacements, one without). These scenarios are also cheaper when working with statutory employees, and are comparable to the current cost price for contractual employment.
- Finally, we created a scenario in which we calculated how many FTEs we could employ under the UGent conditions as statutory staff. This shows that we can increase the number of cleaning colleagues by as much as 24.3 FTE [update Friday April 4th 2025: correction of calculation: 24,3 FTE instead of 40,4 FTE] compared to the current number, without additional costs when compared to the current contract with ISS.
ACOD therefore continues to advocate insourcing cleaning. Not only because it can save us money, but also because the wages and working conditions at Ghent University are fundamentally better for the cleaning staff. After 10 years, wages are almost €200 per month higher than in the private sector, and at the end of the career this is almost €1,400/month. The leave scheme, pensions and other secondary conditions are also considerably better than in the cleaning sector.
Moreover, insourcing could provide a solution to the problem of replacements in case of illness that still exists at ISS, and it would put an end to the anti-social practice of placing people on temporary unemployment during periods of leave.
We therefore ask:
- Reconsidering, researching and preparing the insourcing of cleaning at Ghent University
- For the time being, no new tender procedure should be started, or at least the current tender should be awarded in such a way that it can be unilaterally stopped every year by Ghent University.
- First make a thorough evaluation of the different insourcing scenarios, taking into account the real figures regarding the number of FTEs in cleaning
- To provide in any tender that the use of temporary unemployment during periods of leave will be prohibited
- Create a monthly overview per site of absences and replacements, and share this with the trade union delegations at Ghent University and ISS, so that they can monitor a correct replacement procedure.
For the sake of transparency, we share our calculations. You can find these through this link.