SHADOW STRUGGLES
Custodial staff at UND face an uncertain future every night at work By Kelly Hagen NDU Communications
It’s 11 p.m. on a weekday, and while many North Dakotans are just going to bed to prepare for another day of hard work, Amanda Filipy is just starting hers. She is the building services supervisor at University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, and regularly works overnight. While the campus is quiet, Filipy and her crew of custodians are keeping facilities spotless. “Normally when I start the night,” Filipy said, “I check in with my crew to make sure everyone’s here, checking out and see if we have any work orders that they need to deal with throughout the night. And then, depending on if we have people out, I’ll be covering areas with my lead or else I’ll go around and do a comeback, do paperwork, timecards. And then go around checking to see what my employees need. If they need help with projects or whatnot.” She supervises crews in nine buildings at UND. “I’m in charge of Harrington, Upson II, Upson I, CEC, Leonard, Starcher, Hyslop, the Core Library and the Steam Plant,” she said. “I’m in charge of the crews that clean all of those, plus I’m in charge of the carpet crew that cleans all the carpets all over campus, and the carpet crew is three guys.” Filipy is fiercely loyal to her crew and worries about their future at UND. There are rumors circling on campus that administration is considering a plan to privatize custodial functions in all the academic buildings, to save on costs. The state Legislature has already made severe budget cuts to higher education in the 2017 session, and the Governor’s budget plan for the next biennium calls for a cut of more than $50 million in state appropriation funds. If the Legislature approves of that plan, higher education appropriations will have been cut by a full one-third in just four years. And that will mean hard-working public employees, like Filipy and her co-workers,
University of North Dakota building services supervisor Amanda Filipy.
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