Government cleaners paid $1.76M in severance
HARD-HAT ZONE Silverado Demolition works on tearing down the Shekinah Eagles Centre Church, formerly Sacred Heart Church, in Regina.
The province has paid $1.76 million worth of severances to 158 people in the wake of the privatization of cleaning services in governmentowned buildings.
Last March, the Saskatchewan Party government announced it would be privatizing custodial work in 95 of its facilities in order to save $3.5 million. Those savings will fully come onto the books for the province this year.
“Cleaning services I think, based on interviews with clients and tenants across the province, are at least as good if not better than they were. People are quite happy with the new model and we’re saving the money just as we predicted we would,” said Richard Murray, deputy minister of Central Services for the province.
Warren McCall, Public Service Commission critic for the NDP, said the province is “penny-wise and pound-foolish” before questioning the long-term benefits of firing 158 people.
“If they wanted to fire some of the least-paid, hardest-working people in the public service so that they could hire people for even less money to do some of the cleaning jobs in government ... it speaks volumes to the values of this government,” McCall said.
On average the 158 employees were paid out $11,111.58.
Six former cleaners in the Legislative Building were paid out a total of $66,148.90, or an average of $11,024.82.
At the start of 2017, the province announced it was in the early stages of a process “to examine if there is a value in transitioning cleaning services for government buildings across the province to the private sector” even though the provincial budget at that time included dollars to be paid out in severance.
Public tenders to privatize cleaning services went out at the same time, and two months later the province announced more than 1,000 bids had been put forward. Twelve firms were selected to clean the buildings, six of which were employee-owned companies. All of them are, according to the province, Saskatchewan-based companies.
“This is an excellent opportunity for the Saskatchewan business community. The successful firms moving on range from wellestablished companies to smaller, employee-operated businesses,” read a statement from then-Central Services Minister Christine Tell at the time.
“Additionally, all firms have offered to hire current cleaning employees.”
The province initially estimated severance payouts to be $3 million.