Pitt will compensate student dining workers laid off due to the COVID-19 pandemic, University officials said Friday. The move was first reported by Pitt’s University Times.
The University will financially support the 173 student workers laid off by Pitt dining contractor Sodexo with a stipend. It will equal their pay rate multiplied by the average number of hours they worked from the beginning of the semester through spring break, then multiplied again by six weeks, the number of weeks left in the semester after Pitt sent students home.
It is a reversal from the position Gallagher took at Thursday afternoon’s Senate Council meeting, where he said it would be an “enormous” financial commitment for Pitt to “underwrite” the losses of subcontractors like Sodexo. Pitt had already committed to paying most student workers, but not those employed by subcontractors like Sodexo.
“Our ability to support those employees is quite different from our ability to support our own employees,” Gallagher said. “It’s been much more limited.”
The approximately 400-500 dining workers laid off by Sodexo, as well as by other contract workers around campus like security officers, will not receive any financial support from the move. Many workers have said they currently face financial difficulties, and are trying to subsist on unemployment checks.
Traci Benjamin, a spokesperson for the SEIU Local 32BJ union that represents Pitt’s dining workers and security officers, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After a 29-year partnership with the University, Sodexo’s current 10-year contract to provide dining services will end June 30. Pitt announced last month that it selected Compass Group, a British multinational food service company, as its new single-source dining contractor beginning July 1.
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