Skilled Trades ESP—
Building a Quality Workforce

Privatization
and Skilled Trades ESP

Privatization is a cut in service to a school district, and creates a disconnected, non-resident group of workers who are usually poorly paid and not committed to the school district or the community. When school boards turn to privateers they sabotage employees and the community and weaken the ESP Quality Work-force. Clearly, when work in a school district is sold to the “lowest bidder” everyone loses. The old adage, “You get what you pay for,” is true!

Skilled Trades ESP are among the K-12 job groups most likely to face privatization and the possible loss of their jobs. In an NEA member survey, 48% reported that Skilled Trades ESP work is being contracted out in their school district. Almost 80% of those surveyed are concerned or very concerned about having their jobs privatized. Unlike the privateers, as many as 61% of Skilled Trades ESP live in the districts where they work, vote and pay school taxes. As many as 35% have their own children in the school district where they work. (For more information, see the NEA National K-12 Educational Support Personnel Membership Study: 1997.) Skilled Trades ESP are valuable and connected members of the school district communities in which they work and participate. Replacing them with poorly paid strangers is a shortsighted, dangerous, and false economy!

There’s another weakness in the argument for cutting service to the community when a school board sells out to a privateer. Very often a private contractor is hired to do a job at a cut rate. The job is done too cheaply and too quickly and the privateer is gone. Clean-up, repair, modification, and often completion is then necessary, and the job often falls on the Skilled Trades ESP. Two inefficient and wasteful things happen: the job must be essentially done and paid for twice, and Skilled Trades ESP are kept from doing all the other jobs that are postponed in order to fix a job done poorly by privateers. Privatization of skilled trades jobs usually costs more in the long run due to clean-up/correction chores that must be done by Skilled Trades ESP.

In order to successfully fight threats and attacks of privatization by boards of education, Skilled Trades ESP must actively participate in educating their administrations and their communities. They must first define and describe accurately who they really are and then communicate what they really do, as clearly and comprehensively as possible. One of the best methods to focus and accomplish this recognition is through Results-Oriented Job Descriptions. Skilled Trades ESP need meaningful, comprehensive, and accurate job descriptions that reflect all that they do.

When the value of employees is made clear, privateers have a much more difficult time getting a foothold with the school board. The fight to keep privateers out and quality in becomes a fight between the school board and the community (not between the employees and the school board) where it belongs. Privatization is about politics, not money. Privatization is about cuts in service to the community and to the students.

The important message that Skilled Trades ESP must convey in the face of privatization threats is that the majority of them live in their school district, work in their school district, and vote in their school district. Skilled Trades ESP are part of the resident roots of the neighborhood school!

To Section 7. Health & Safety — Protecting the Individual Employee