“The whole way things were handled was so wrong. We felt less than human and definitely did not feel valued at all. We had worked so hard to hold things together over the years of being short staffed and that didn’t seem to matter one bit,” shared former EMU facilities office manager Lori Gant, speaking on the recent outsourcing of facilities management to Aramark.
As noted in Social Media Manager Eli Ours’ previous Weather Vane feature, titled “Students Face Challenges After Facilities Transition to Aramark,” the change from the previous facilities staff to the current Aramark company has not been without its difficulties.
Chief Operations Officer (COO) Shawn Ramer addressed these challenges experienced throughout campus: “Regretfully, some students arrived back on campus to find the air conditioning not working properly and trash not being taken out in their dorms. The facilities team addressed these issues as quickly as possible. I’d like to express my apologies to students for having to endure these issues and to thank them for their understanding.”
While the initial article’s focus centered the voices of students experiencing the downstream effects of this process, we have found it necessary to expand the scope of our coverage to include emerging details regarding the treatment of previous employees throughout the facilities shift this past summer.
In an email exchange provided by Campus Life Representative Mike Ramer between himself and Shawn Ramer (who bear no familial ties to each other), Mike Ramer raised concerns regarding the handling of the transition: “In my opinion, if you had approached the transitions with more respect and decency towards the facilities staff, more of them would have stuck around, as you initially predicted.”
According to Gant, as of the July 1 transition, only 9 out of the 24 EMU/Facilities Management (FM) employees chose to continue working under Aramark. Soon after, this number dropped down to 4.
Shawn Ramer responded to Mike Ramer’s critique, noting that staff were offered the same job at the same salary and were given 45 days notice “to make an informed decision.” Conversations with current and former employees indicate that they did not all feel prepared to make an informed decision, but in fact felt rushed and uninformed.
The following is a brief timeline of the facilities-Aramark transition, spanning March 25 to July 2. These dates and events were acquired through conversations with Gant and Mike Ramer. These dates were corroborated when necessary via all-staff emails accessed via multiple sources. The Weather Vane also attempted to follow-up two separate times after the initial correspondence over a week-long period with Shawn Ramer through Director of Marketing & Communications Jen Kulju to gain further insight on the process and rationale behind EMU’s decision, and to hear his comments regarding Aramark’s history, but received no reply.
March 25: Then EMU FM Director Edwin Lehman sends out an email to EMU employees and students addressing a reduction in response time due to a “significant staff shortage.” Mike Ramer recalls the FM team’s difficulty filling vacancies at this time, noting “EMU would never post…job descriptions. So [FM] were feeling increasingly short staffed and not listened to, and there were also a number of repairs that they were asking to get approved, to purchase the parts for, that were not approved.” He describes the EMU FM team feeling “increasingly…at odds with the administration.”
May 2: Spring 2024 semester ends.
May 14: FM staff receive an invitation from Shawn Ramer after 10 p.m.for a meeting the next morning at 11. “There was no explanation about what the meeting was about. We didn’t have a clue what was coming,” shared Gant.
May 15: Lehman is informed of the Aramark transition 30 minutes before the rest of the FM team.
May 15: During their meeting, Shawn Ramer reads a statement informing them that their jobs with EMU will be terminated, and that Aramark is taking over their department via contract. They are then informed that they will be provided an opportunity to remain employed at EMU through Aramark as their employer. “When he finished reading us the information, he said that he would not be taking questions at that time,” said Gant.
The former EMU employees were then told that they were to schedule a meeting within the coming two weeks with the Aramark HR and Leadership team to discuss what a potential position would be for them. “… Given the fact that there was no questions [taken] on this first day…where they found out about the termination, of course they had many questions,” Mike Ramer stated.
In spite of this, employees “felt encouraged that they were offering a one-hour one-on-one meeting with each of us in two weeks and we could sign up for those meetings that day. They indicated on the day of the meeting that they guaranteed we would be making the same amount of money with Aramark but some of us would be getting raises.” said Gant.
This is the last day that the former EMU FM team had direct correspondence with EMU administrators, with Gant remarking: “We did not hear from anyone from Administration nor were told thank you for the many years of service we had given to EMU. Some of my team had been there 25, 28, and 30 years.”
May 16: The Aramark transition is officially announced to EMU faculty via an all-staff email from Shawn Ramer. In this email, Shawn Ramer shares that current FM staff will become contracted employees under Aramark, effective July 1.
May 20 through May 31: A number of the former EMU FM staff have their meetings with Aramark regarding the transferral of their job position, titles, pay rate, and benefits. Gant recalls her meeting experience: “When I entered the room with a coworker, we were told to sit down at a table and sign up with Aramark. I indicated that they had told us we could ask questions and they would explain our positions and benefits. The two HR employees who were present said they could not give us that information at that time.”
Gant claims she continued to push for answers, explaining, “I was not about to sign on with a company where I did not have my job information explained nor questions answered.”
She believes her questioning raised concerns, as she was asked to leave the room and meet individually with Aramark District Manager Tim Knight, following a private conversation between himself and then EMU Human Resources Director Marilyn Harris. Gant took the opportunity to ask Knight for information regarding her job title, job description, rate of pay, and benefits. She says, “I had been at EMU almost 18 years so I assumed I would be one of the people they spoke about who would be getting a raise. When I asked that question, his response was that none of us were getting raises. When I told him the information differed from what he had told us two weeks prior, he didn’t have a response.”
Following her conversation with Knight, Gant says she “felt less and less comfortable working for a company who made me feel so uneasy.” After informing an Aramark HR staff member she would need time to think about her decision to work under the company, Gant was met with the following: “Her response was that if I didn’t sign up that day or the next…I would have to start as an outside employee and at the bottom. So, I was pressured to make the decision within two days. The more I thought about it, it became very clear I could not sign up with Aramark.”
June 1 through June 30: A number of EMU FM staff take the last of their accrued paid time off (PTO). Regarding this, Gant offers: “Every year, most of us left PTO and vacation hours on the table because we were so short staffed and didn’t feel like we could take the amount of time off that was given to us. Throughout this Aramark situation, a lot of us decided to use as much of it as we could.”
July 2: Shawn Ramer sends out an all-staff email marking the official start of EMU’s partnership with Aramark. This email did not resonate well with Mike Ramer, specifically a comment Shawn made regarding the EMU FM staff in the context of the new Aramark crew catching up on campus maintenance.
“This is no small task as they have been left with extra challenges as the prior organization mostly abandoned the campus in June.” Gant commented on the content of this email as well, noting “how hurtful [it is]” to be called the ‘prior organization,’ “as if we weren’t part of EMU.”
A long time member of the EMU community, Gant concluded her comments with the following. “Unfortunately, as an alum from EMU, I have come to the place of knowing that I would not recommend anyone going to EMU if the administration is going to act in ways that I consider as devaluing, less than Christian and overwhelmingly hurtful.”
