UMass Memorial recently told current Health Alliance food service workers and housekeepers that they would soon become employees of Sodexo. Those employees will all have jobs, with health insurance, and their pay rate will stay the same, UMass Memorial announced.
These staff are not represented by any union, but all of us in the UMass Memorial community should be concerned by this move. We assume that moving staff off the UMass Memorial payroll is a cost-saving measure. How do you save money, doing the same work plus making a profit for the company, without cutting spending on wages and benefits?
Contracting-out is not new at UMass Memorial. When the Med Center contracted out Dialysis, affected SHARE members were promised job security and minimal changes. However, within months they were told they would have to move to hold onto their jobs. Information Services (IS) and Central Processing were contracted out and then brought back in house for quality reasons. The SHARE Biomedical Engineers fought contracting out by showing that they could save money while keeping their jobs in-house, though the hospital contracted them out in the end too.
The middle of a pandemic is the wrong time to upend good, stable jobs for our lowest paid staff. As the Institute for Healthcare Improvement points out, it is possible to support “better care, better neighborhoods, better health – all while holding onto valued employees, many of whom may be part of our most vulnerable populations.”
Perhaps most importantly, housekeepers are crucial to patient care, particularly in the age of COVID, especially when they also have patient transport duties. Being a UMass Memorial employee means that you have loyalty only to the patients and the hospital, not to an outside company.