In 1989-90, the University of Minnesota employed fewer custodians per square foot than comparable universities. However, Physical Plant's custodial costs per square foot were about 40 percent higher than the median costs of other Midwest research universities. It is not clear whether this is solely due to higher salaries, but we did find that Physical Plant's starting salaries are higher than those paid by most comparable schools, and its average salaries are higher than those paid by most Twin Cities employers. The University negotiated a contract with the trades workers in June 1990 that reduced overtime and premium pay, but did not change its practice of paying prevailing construction wages to maintenance workers. We also examined customer satisfaction with Physical Plant's maintenance and custodial work.
Most customers think that custodial service levels are inadequate.
One of the main causes of shop inefficiency cited in our 1988 report was the lack of work planning and scheduling. To date, only minor improvements have been made, although management intends to fully implement daily work scheduling, backlog monitoring, and systematic preventive maintenance in 1991. We found that 32 percent of a recent sample of shop tickets from the Minneapolis campus had time estimates, compared to 10 percent in 1988. Despite this improvement, the Minneapolis shops still lag far behind the St. Paul shops, which develop estimates for 70 percent of shop tickets. Physical Plant has improved its system of transporting workers to job sites, mainly through the purchase of additional vehicles and by encouraging workers to walk, when possible.