This week, a company is coming to campus that should not be welcome here. Cintas Corp., which is recruiting at the Career Fair, has repeatedly broken the law while mistreating its own employees and the environment.
Cintas is the biggest uniform and laundry business in the country. It’s a very profitable company, with record profits last year of more than $200 million. And the people at the top are making off like bandits — the CEO gave himself a $51,000 raise last year (more than most workers make in a year), and the chairman of the board is listed by Forbes as one of the richest people in American, with a net worth of more than $1.6 billion.
But while Cintas may be a leader in profits and executive pay, it is at the bottom in terms of how it treats its employees and local communities. Cintas’ workers are struggling to get a fair raise while being forced to cope with rising health care charges and without any secure retirement plan.
More shocking, Cintas employees have been subject to numerous cases of harassment and discrimination. The company was forced to pay more than $200,000 in damages after illegally discriminating against a female employee and then firing her for complaining. Another African American employee was told by a manager that “Cintas didn’t promote minorities” and that “upper management did not want black employees working in supervisory capacities.” All told, there have been more than 40 lawsuits against Cintas for discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age and disability.
In addition, the company regularly cheats its employees out of the wages they’ve earned. In California, Cintas employees recently won a class action suit worth millions of dollars when the company was found guilty of cheating its workers out of overtime pay. This is in addition to at least eight other Cintas lawsuits, citations or fines for failure to pay minimum wage or overtime.
Cintas is also a notoriously anti-union employer — the company has been cited 25 different times for violating federal labor laws.
Finally, Cintas is a polluter. In Connecticut, Cintas was sued for repeated violation of state and federal clean water laws. In California, the company was served an “Imminent and Substantial Endangerment and Remediation Order” by the Department of Toxic Substances Control.
This is a company that should not be welcome on our campus. At the very least, the company should be required to disclose all its wrongdoing to University students before asking us to go work for it. Right now, Cintas employees across the country are trying to unionize and make sure they get treated fairly; and community activists are trying to force the company to clean up its environmental act.
If students knew the facts, I don’t think anyone would take a job with this company until it changes its ways. The Career Center should make all these facts known to students and not be part of hoodwinking us into working for an employer like this.
Robert Hayden is a senior in political science.