Chancellor Subbaswamy: Give Us a Better Plan, or We Will Cancel Yours
Chancellor Subbaswamy:
Your reopening plan is in danger of being canceled. We, the Resident Assistants and Peer Mentors upon whom your plan’s success rests, have just overwhelmingly voted, by a margin of 95%, to authorize our Bargaining Team to formally refuse to work in the dangerous conditions your reopening plan creates. Residential Life must bargain with us to create a safe reopening plan, or our Bargaining Team will have no choice but to call for RAs and PMs to refuse to work in the unsafe conditions of the current reopening plan.
Your reopening plan has one fatal flaw: It completely ignores the safety of students, workers, and community members, in the interest of ensuring the University can collect dining and housing fees. We proclaim: Our lives are more important than your fees. We refuse to put our lives at risk for the University’s own revenue.
For weeks, we have bargained with Residential Life to achieve a safe reopening. Residential Life still refuses to allow students the option of working remotely, and refuses to provide hazard pay despite asking RAs and PMs to risk exposure to COVID every day. We haven’t even been promised adequate PPE or safe ventilation standards.
And yet you insist on a suicidal reopening plan that will put 50–60% of the population back on campus. Approximately eight thousand students will be living in close quarters, during a pandemic, while COVID cases are on track to reach 100,000 new cases per day. Even in Massachusetts, the Rt — the rate of infection spread — for COVID has just risen to 1.03, meaning community spread — the kind that led to the outbreaks in California and Florida — has returned. This reopening will increase community spread. Students and community members will get sick and die. And, as COVID disproportionately afflicts Black and brown communities, this dangerous reopening plan confirms that UMass’ commitment to racial justice is hollow.
Your reopening plan calls for RAs and PMs to enforce social distancing protocols, yet fails to outline how we are to do that. What if residents refuse to comply? What do we do then? Calling UMPD won’t help — policing is rooted in white supremacist violence, and you can’t shoot COVID. Your protocol has no answer to this, because your priority is not genuine safety.
This plan is a gimmick meant to ensure UMass receives housing and meal plan payments. Any pretense that this plan adequately accommodates student safety is magical thinking. RAs and PMs are not pandemic police — we can do little to stop COVID. Those who return to campus to work should be given hazard pay (either increased wages or free housing on top of their wages), while those who want to work remotely should be able to do so.
With COVID surging, some universities are already reversing their foolish reopening plans. A student at Penn State has already died. If UMass continues this course, a COVID outbreak is bound to occur, and RAs and PMs will be caught in the middle of it.
We will not allow this to happen. Without us, the Residential Communities cannot open. Chancellor, give us a better reopening plan — or we will cancel yours.
It’s not too late — work with us. Provide students and staff with free PPE; allow RAs, PMs, LCGs, ARDs, and RDs the option to work remotely; give all on-site workers hazard pay. Consider further reducing the campus population so that we might avoid a deadly COVID outbreak. Bargain with us to create a reopening plan that prioritizes student and community health instead of University profits.
UMass students, parents, and alums: We urge you to sign this petition demanding a safe reopening. We will agree to reopen a safe campus — and that is not what the current plan creates.
In Solidarity,
Nat Luftman, Alice Troop, and James Cordero, on behalf of the Resident Assistant/Peer Mentor Union