‘I think they’re making us lookouts’: M&O Demand Changes to Wildfire Protocols

Illustration by: Jenna Tibby

The Maintenance and Operations (M&O) departments of Santa Monica College (SMC) were summoned to work while wildfires raged in L.A. last week. Several department employees spoke to The Corsair about their concerns.

On Tuesday, Jan. 7, SMC issued a virtual announcement that canceled the following day’s classes out of safety concerns with the then-nascent Palisades fire. On Jan. 8, a second broadcast announced all in-person classes and services were made remote for the remainder of the week. Both notices stipulated that “essential personnel and Maintenance & Operations staff should still report to work.”

As early as Tuesday night, several employees of M&O expressed feeling perplexed over the work summons, even questioning their own complicity. Custodian Star Barboza recalled the existentialist drive towards a potential site of danger. 

“I saw the sides of the freeway, people slowing down. I said, why am I the only one going towards this shit?” Barboza said. “Everybody’s running away from the fire, and stupid me going towards it.”

“We weren’t offered much. We were told that if we didn’t wanna come in we were gonna use our own vacation time, unless we were ‘directly affected by the fires.’ They said, ‘if you take the time, it’s on your time.’ … ‘We care about you guys! But get your ass here.’

“We just have to be here for some strange reason,” she said.

To shed light on the rationale behind M&O working through the wildfires, SMC President Dr. Kathryn Jeffery wrote in a statement to the Corsair that “essential personnel were asked to report to campus to fulfill several important responsibilities. Their presence was vital to conducting thorough inspections of campus facilities and grounds, ensuring that any potential damage or risks caused by the fires and high winds were identified and addressed.”

Barboza’s colleagues told her their routes to work were impacted by “bad smoke… My coworker who came from Riverside said, oh yeah, I had to drive through that, it was bad.”

Once arrived, what stood out to Barboza was the thick presence of groundspeople clearing the campus of flammables. Barboza was concerned over their eight-hour workday without proper safety equipment or protocols, so she called her union, California School Employees Association (CSEA) Chapter 36.

“She never called me back, the president of the union. Obviously she did something, she heard my message, because the groundsworkers were only here for an hour (on Friday),” said Barboza. 

Her tasks, she said, were assigned ambiguously. “My bosses have not said, go do this, go do that. They’ve just said go to your areas,” she said. Barboza also reported no air ventilation mechanisms were provided. In response, she assembled four air purifiers and barricaded herself in a nearby classroom to safely abide by her boss’s command.

Despite her self-driven precautions, “our lungs do hurt quite a bit. Smells like I’m sitting in a barbecue,” she said.

With nothing to clean or work on, she expresses significant confusion and outrage over the work summons.

“We’re not essential to a fire. You’re gonna call me an essential worker during COVID, that made sense. But in a fire, I can’t do shit for you. All I can do is bring marshmallows. I’m no good to you in a fire. …I don’t know if they were aching for a lawsuit or what.

Why are we coming in when the air quality is worse here than in my house? Why are we here? …I think logic ran out the door,” Barboza said.

Another custodian, requesting total confidentiality “because you can get me fired,” was tasked with cleaning the area marked Drescher One, outdoors. 

“I had to walk around outside. (Ash) falling on your head and landing on you. At the same time, you got really bad air. I couldn’t breathe,” he said.

“Nobody should be forced to go through that air,” he said. Even when working indoors, he said, “it still gets in the classrooms, in the offices. The first thing should be the health of the people. … They’re discriminating against us, period.”

To him, the reasoning behind the work summons is easily linkable to elitism.

“We have nothing to clean, why are you making us go to work? It’s just a bunch of rich people who have power in the college and figure they can tell little people like custodians… what to do. You know, elitism. That’s what this is all about,” he said.

“We are custodians. We’re the lowest in the group, okay? The last group of employees in the college are custodians. We clean your toilets, okay? But for some reason, they think of us like the toilets, no, they think of us as shit,” he said.

“If it’s bad air, it’s bad air. Doesn’t matter if you’re the custodian or the president of the college. The air’s gonna kill you anyway. … What applies to us applies to them. We are not less of human beings because we clean after their shit. For some reason they think of us like toilets. They don’t recognize us as human beings at the same level as they are. Class warfare,” he said.

This custodian feels profoundly for the students - “you guys are like my grandkids” - and the work, exacerbating frustrations with the unkempt workspace.

“They claim, we’re all family, they care about us, no they don’t. The only time we get any time of accommodation is when we shoot each other. The one time a custodian decides to shoot one of his supervisors, that’s the only time they accommodate us,” he said.

“Even without this fire thing, our department is run really bad,” he said. “Our supervisors look at us like, you stupid toilet cleaners who have no brains. … So it’s not good enough that they’re bringing someone in to investigate the group. It’s important they have someone to implement these changes.”

He’s referring to OIR Group, the outside agency recently hired by the college to investigate departments including  Maintenance, Operations, and HR with regards to their involvement in the Oct. 14 shooting.

An employee in Maintenace, who asked for his name withheld, has noticed similar mishandlings he wants to take up with OIR. His key takeaway is a sense of abandonment. 

“Our administration building is an indescribable disaster. This is a long, long running problem,” he said. He’s sent several emails to HR and his managers asking for air quality and smoke reports, evacuation protocols, and explanations behind their work summons, to radio silence.

“We’ve also received no official communication as to, here’s the reasoning why we’re here, written policy. And we feel kind of abandoned by both the administration and our union, as nobody cares to respond,” he said. “Not getting clear accurate answers as to why only us are asked to be here. I’m trying to be calmly going about it, but this is pretty frustrating.”

He and his colleagues are left unprepared in the face of a turbulent emergency. “If the fire did happen to make its way into downtown Santa Monica, what is the procedure to get evacuated from that? We have the potential of gridlock as we saw in the Palisades,” he said. 

He recalled fire events in previous years that sent his department home and were smaller in scale than Palisades and Eaton. And in this instance, the burning of structures and vehicles means the smoky air is harboring unregulated toxins, a significant concern of his.

Another is the uptick in stressors. “I have at least three friends who lost their houses. …it’s kind of at the back of your mind when you’re at work, up on a dangerous ladder or doing a dangerous type job when you don’t have 100% of your mind set on it. Catastrophe would obviously cause some mental health or worry issues in all of us,” he said. It’s dangerous, he said, “for them to not take that into account.

“I’d really really love to see this college become where it’s supposed to be, where it serves the students in a high-end way. And I don’t think it’s at this place,” he said.

On Friday, he said, the scene at the worksite upon his arrival was alarming. “Quite a bit of confusion about OSHA” - Occupational Safety and Health Administration - “regulation and air monitoring and what type of smoke it was,” he said.

That day, he and his colleagues were finally distributed masks, with some controversy. In environments affected by wildfire smoke, OSHA mandates masks of a minimum N95 caliber. Some of his colleagues were only dealt KN-95 respirators, which are not manufactured to OSHA standards.

“They’re kinda tight and small and when paper masks get wet, when you have a drink of water, or sweating, you end up breathing it in, some of the fibers in the mask,” he said. “Wearing a mask all day is not the best thing for anyone.”

He also said, on Friday, “apparently (there was) someone from admin with some kind of hastily written papers, asking people to sign them.”

These papers, reported another custodian, stated that the onsite workers “were ‘protected’ from smoke and gas and any of the things.” He also said, “no one signed it.”

Like the others, this custodian was left unsatisfied by their union representation, and the lack of adequate compensation in alignment with the newfound safety risks of the job. He requested anonymity fearing “how they retaliate on you when you speak up for common sense scenarios like this.”

“The (union) said they do get funding for us to (get) state-of-emergency hazard pay and whatnot and for some reason they don’t get it. They said they need to change the contract so that the language can be definite,” he said. “So basically it sounds like we’re not gonna get anything but we gotta go to work.”

“My thing is like, it’s not really fair. … I don’t understand how we’re not included in public safety,” he said.

Though the groundspeople earned some reformative policy over the week, this custodian and three of their coworkers were on their feet outdoors for hours in preparation for the Fire Support Resource Drive on Jan. 13 - 14. “We go from, okay y’all, stay inside, but… Friday, we were literally outside all day preparing for this event,” he said.

President Jeffery wrote that “certain scheduled activities, which could not transition to remote formats, required on-ground support to proceed safely and effectively. … Throughout this period, we have prioritized the safety of all essential colleagues who report when needed, ensuring they have the necessary tools, clear guidelines, and resources to carry out their responsibilities effectively and safely.”

However, this custodian has an updated procedure in mind.

“Maybe it should be, hey, we need a certain amount of people on call for emergency events so we can take care of emergencies that occur, but we’re gonna compensate you for the year.

You would think after all that stuff that happened in October… there’s really no compassion in that department. I don’t know what’s going on. …I understand that it’s an emergency, but everyone has family, loved ones they gotta protect,” he said. 

A final custodian also requested anonymity out of fear of employer retaliation - “these are things they don’t wanna hear.”

“God bless our union, but I didn’t hear them ask anything about masks or protocol. I didn’t hear them sending emails about our wellbeing,” he said.

“I’m diabetic. Some of us have health issues that they don’t take into consideration,” he said. “I myself missed two days of work, and it came out of my bank. I’d rather be healthy than start breathing all the smoke.” 

They detailed the process of mask distribution on Friday, in which M&O were told masks were available - behind a layer of bureaucracy.

“They told us to register to get a mask, …and then to top it off, we go pick it up at a house on Pearl. Wasn’t even given by our supervision or nothing,” he said. “Since day one they should’ve said, come here, get a mask, you don’t need to register.”

He has a theory: “I think they’re making us lookouts in case something starts burning.”

In her statement, Jeffery wrote that “these personnel played a crucial role in monitoring the fires’ ongoing activity and evaluating how the evolving conditions might affect the safety of the campus and the surrounding community.”

A risk of that magnitude is not in their job description, the custodian said. “You can’t try putting it out, you have to run like hell out of here, you know? …The first thing I’m gonna do is run home to my family. That’s all I wanna do.”

In the future, he said, “they gotta be proactive right away, not wait till a week later. Kinda like the emergency with my supervisor Felicia. They tried to deal with things after the fact. We can’t predict the future but at least be prepared for some of it, you know.”

“We should have one of those emergency handbooks handed out to everybody. …We’ve got the resources. So why wait until two days later?”

He also focused blame on elitism: “Why are we different from students and faculties that teach? …We’re all in this together, but for some reason we’re like the stepchildren of the college.”

“I love my job. It’s a great place, they treat us well. But when it comes to emergencies, they’re not up to par, y’know?” he said.

Seven CSEA Chapter 36 officers were contacted by email for comment, four of them additionally by phone. The Corsair did not receive any responses before the time of publication.

“We deeply appreciate the dedication of our essential personnel, whose efforts have been instrumental in maintaining the safety, integrity, and operational readiness of the college,” wrote Jeffery.