By Anon
As the COVID-19 pandemic exploded in March 2020, Penn’s response sadly (but unsurprisingly) reinforced the habits this disorientation guide continues to call out. Across the board, Penn’s response lacked transparency and accountability, was dismissive of workers, students, and community members, and placed its own profit and reputation over the health and safety of all. Here we explain just some of the ways in which Penn did so.
The pandemic quickly showed Penn’s true colors regarding their relationship with workers. Roughly half of the dining halls on campus are operated by subcontracted workers under the California-based corporation Bon Appetit. This demarcation between internal and external labor allows Penn to avoid accountability for these workers, blaming low wages or mistreatment on their faraway employer. As the pandemic rapidly worsened in mid-March, Bon Appetit quietly revealed that they were laying off nearly all of their approximately 140 employees at Penn Dining in a mere two weeks, with the rest to follow shortly after. Due to their subcontracted status, these workers were not guaranteed the full pay and benefits that Penn-employed dining hall staff received for the rest of the semester. Furthermore, the workers would be pushed into debt over health coverage fees (a portion of worker paychecks typically went towards health coverage; now, their coverage during their months laid off would be taken from future paychecks on top of current health coverage) .One worker calculated that she would not receive a single paycheck for the next semester due to healthcare debt owed to Bon Appetit.
Sending workers into debt because of layoffs due to a global pandemic is a ruthless, unconscionable act. This appallingly callous decision was met with outrage by the Penn community and silence by the university. Students, workers, public representatives, and local organizations took action to push Penn to step up and use their enormous endowment to support workers, launching a petition, the social media Venmo campaign #PennPayUp, multiple emergency fundraisers and more. Evenpeer universities began to announce financial support for their own subcontracted workers. Finally, two weeks later, and the day before the workers were to be laid off, Penn announced that they would pay the worker salaries until the end of the semester. However, this move to cover workers’ salaries made workers ineligible to collect COVID-19 unemployment benefits. It is clear that Penn has the ability to provide workers with greater financial support so that they are not at a disadvantage from not being able to collect unemployment benefits, but it chooses not to exercise it.
Alongside pressuring Penn to pay their employees, student organizers set up a fundraiser for laid-off workers with help from Jobs with Justice. Using a mutual aid set-up, the fundraiser pooled resources from the Penn community for the benefit of the Penn Bon Appetit workers, while still acknowledging the central responsibility of the Penn administration to support their workers. The goal of the fundraiser was to raise as much money as possible from the Penn community, as Penn administration showed itself to be incompetent and condemnable in their reluctance to assure the health and welfare of their employees. Since there was no guarantee that students would garner enough pressure for Penn to financially support the laid off workers, the mutual aid fund was a way to quickly contribute support to all Bon Appetit Penn workers regardless of Penn’s indifference to their workers in times of crisis.
The university’s lack of transparency paired with quick decisions absent of student voices threw student lives into equal uncertainty. Students were given a mere 6 days notice before being evicted from their dorm rooms (the original announcement on March 11th required all students be out of their dorms by March 15th, a deadline later extended to March 17th). This was even more outrageous since it occurred during Spring Break while many students were out of town These students were prohibited from returning to campus or accessing any of their belongings. While many students were able to simply return to their parents’ homes, this was by no means a universal experience. What about students that did not have stable or safe homes to return to, or international students who had to navigate travel restrictions? Penn offered limited emergency housing to those who needed it, but this proved grossly insufficient and many students were denied this resource. Penn then furthered housing chaos through their approach to students living off-campus. Students with off-campus housing typically rent their houses or apartments from local landlords, a process completely divorced from the control of Penn. However,this did not stop Penn from bypassing communication with students and instead reaching out directly to parents with a blatant lie, saying that they had talked to local landlords and would force students to exit their leases and return home. This was clearly outside Penn’s control and was intended solely to deceive parents and manipulate students out of their legal residences. When pressed to claim accountability for their actions, Penn sent an email to students admitting to their initial lie. Penn’s instinct was to panic, kicking students out of dorms and deceiving students out of apartments in an effort to removePenn students with total disregard for student wellbeing.
For FGLI, international, and other students blindsided by Penn’s decision to kick students out of dorm housing, student organizers set up a different mutual aid fund to help these students for both short-term and long-term needs. The organizers matched people willing to donate to those who needed fundings for housing, transportation, necessities, etc. These organizers raised over $4000 to directly ease the burden of struggling students.
You may have read in Penn’s constant stream of self-congratulatory press releases how active they were in “combating COVID” or how professors and medical professionals were “on the front lines” at Penn Med. However, when professor Felipe Javier Gorostiza Arroyo, a tenured urban studies professor teaching “Introduction to Urban Planning” for the Spring 2020 term, died of COVID-19 on April 15, Penn released no special statement to the community. He was not featured in Penn Today, nor were students and the community at large able to recognize his work or the sacrifice he ultimately made for an institution that gave him no restitution. His class continued, with the TAs suddenly tasked double the workload they had expected for no increase in pay. The DP did not publish a story on him. Although there is an obituary on the Penn Almanac site, it was published 13 days after the fact and did not appear on the first page of search results until months after the incident. Perhaps Penn was not trying to cover up the death of a beloved member of their community, but it does beg the question of whom they deem as beloved and cherished. When the former CAPS Executive Director Gregory Eells died by suicide in early September, there were Penn-issued statements, DP articles, and students throughout the campus knew of the horrible irony of his death. But when a minority professor of a subject that by nature directly challenges Penn’s ongoing gentrification dies, silence befalls Locust. Penn Today gave daily updates about positive progress of COVID-19 but failed to describe when their own institution reflected disturbing national trends of racial inequity and COVID-19 morbidity. The obituary was posted on April 28, nearly a quarantine period after his death. Final essays for that class were still turned in, albeit for a professor who would not grade them.
Penn’s inadequate response to the pandemic is an ongoing issue. Its misleading announcements (or lack thereof) regarding fall semester plans punctuated the months of April to August, and left students, staff, faculty, and especially West Philly community members confused and worried about their safety. Until August 11th, the University had been planning on allowing students to return to campus without discussing the real implications of such a situation for the neighboring community with its very members. Shortly before the University went back on its decision, Police Free Penn organized a Speak Out giving voice to the concerns that Philadelphia residents had regarding Penn’s reopening. One of the speakers eloquently called Penn out for unironically expecting people whose lives it deliberately put at risk to “trust” the University. “Trust us” is insufficient when it comes from an institution that has been harming and neglecting its workers, neighbors and general community for so many years.
Although the Administration ended up making the only sensible decision, the manner in which it did so once again lacked accountability and transparency. Despite their efforts to clarify and change the terms of their contracts, residence hall workers (RAGAs) have had to deal with the uncertainty that Penn’s shifting housing plan meant for both their working and their living conditions. As Penn planned on re-opening, dining hall workers communicated the exploitative bind that they found themselves in: they felt obliged to return to work because Bon Appetit threatened to terminate their unemployment benefits otherwise, but were deeply concerned about what their exposure to thousands of returning students would mean for their health and that of their families. When Penn announced it would mail self-administered COVID-19 testing kits to domestic students, it left international students in the dark as to how their return to campus would be organized. Especially in light of ICE’s changing policies about international students, Penn’s ambiguity with its COVID-19 policies has put these students in precarious situations. And since Penn failed to provide any support to off-campus students looking to get out of their lease agreements, the University is effectively bringing back thousands of students from across the country to West Philly who are trapped in leases, thus endangering the community – and they have taken no form of accountability, aside from the unenforced, lukewarm Student Campus Compact.
As we move forward, we must continue to be wary of Penn’s actions and statements. The pandemic has exposed the evil workings of the capitalist system that Penn so enthusiastically participates in. Penn has demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to put people over profits, safety over their bottom line, unless pressed. We must continue to push them to make the right decisions, force them to support their communities, and rely on each other when they refuse.
Penn Disorientation Guide 