COLUMN: Treating workers with respect

From Dina Bass, "No Loss for Words," Fall '99 From Dina Bass, "No Loss for Words," Fall '99It must suck to be a University employee. While the benefits plan is pretty solid, you have all the job security of a recent Merrill Lynch hire. You can do your job well day-in and day-out for years and still be forced to apply for your own job when your department gets outsourced in Penn's deal du jour. It's just another business day at the University of Pennsylvania. Each outsourcing deal is supposed to make departments and offices run smoother and cheaper. And some have. But the most unconscionable side effect is the treatment of the outsourced employees. If Penn currently employs unqualified employees in its offices, dining halls and buildings, then the school should let those people go. But it should be done in an honest, up-front manner after employees have been evaluated and given feedback on their performance. Penn should not keep these people on, failing to tell them how they could improve or what problems mar their performance and then simply fail to offer them a new job when another company takes over. That is no way to treat employees and it is no way to treat people, both from a moral and a business perspective. It isn't even the way to treat bad employees. And the workers in the Faculty Club are anything but bad. I have eaten dinner at the Faculty Club's kosher dining hall for the last 3 1/2 years. I have also worked in the club's kitchen, making sure that the employees keep the kitchen kosher. The employees in the Club are uniformly friendly and efficient. Their jobs are not easy, requiring them to follow arcane details of someone else's religion since all Faculty Club employees either work in the kosher kitchen or have to make sure not to mix their own kitchen's equipment and food with the kosher things. They work hard and they go out of their way to share a smile or a joke with the students. They are some of the nicest, friendliest people I have met at Penn. More than that, they are real people with husbands, wives and children who depend on their income and their health care benefits. Over the last two years -- since the announcement of the Trammell Crow Co. outsourcing -- a sense of fear has become pervasive among the Club's staff. In conversations with various employees about their jobs, the word "outsourcing" has never failed to come up. Many workers expressed fear that they could be out of a job any day. This fear has led many to be silent about the outsourcing of other departments and about the fact that, as part time workers, some of the club's employees don't receive any benefits at all. As a former Daily Pennsylvanian reporter, I would often speak to them for stories about outsourcing or part-time workers. Many would express fear, asking me if I was sure that no one would be able to identify them or telling me that they couldn't comment, even anonymously, for fear that they would lose their jobs. They repeated claims made by workers in other outsourced departments -- that they were never told how they could improve their performance. At the same time, these employees were not told until recently that they would have to reapply for their jobs, although the DoubleTree deal was inked in October 1997 . They were left with rumors rather than answers. Penn Executive Vice President John Fry has said that his primary responsibility is to the students and thus to keeping costs down. Personally, I favor outsourcing where appropriate and agree that departments that can be run better and cheaper by someone else should be outsourced. Penn clearly should not be managing a chain of hotels or a dining and retail empire. But Penn must remember that for many years it did run these things and that required employees. There is a right way to treat these employees -- with respect. The right way to treat employees requires that Penn be up front with them about their job future. It requires that they receive feedback about their job performance and are given a chance to improve before they are let go one day. Most of all, it should require that Penn be committed to hiring as many current employees as possible for the new jobs and to finding other jobs at Penn or career counseling for the workers who are not hired. Penn does try to transfer some "restructured" employees to other departments and it does offer career counseling and job skills training for employees during their time at Penn. These are steps in the right direction. But they mean absolutely nothing to employees who can't get a straight answer about their jobs up until the day when they're told that they might not have one.