The college presidents and administrators leading the 26 schools in the University System of Georgia faced a difficult mandate.
The state’s top elected officials ordered them and other Georgia agencies to cut their budgets by 10% last summer as revenues plummeted during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.
The colleges and universities — told by system officials to make cuts strategically — limited travel, delayed filling some vacant positions, and in some cases, laid off workers.
The problem, one group says, is the schools typically let go more employees who did clerical or service work and were older, female or non-white.
The United Campus Workers of Georgia, Communications Workers of America based its findings on data collected from the system over a 12-month stretch that began in November 2019, a few months before the pandemic began. It shows full-time employment in the system declined by about 1,500 workers. Black employees were about 33% of the total job losses although they made up 23% of the total workforce in 2019. They shared their findings last week with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Union leaders say their findings, compiled in a 14-page report, shows the University System schools should “chop at the top” when making job cuts. They demand in the report that the schools prioritize rehiring people of color and women whose jobs have been cut over the past year and said they’ll continue to advocate on these matters. Other demands include urging administrators to focus any future cuts on managers and return staffing levels to at least the pre-pandemic baseline.
“These job cuts are not new to USG; they reveal an ongoing pattern,” one part of the executive summary said. “The significant job loss shown here evidences the whittling down of Georgia’s public education workforce, whereby 1) people are laid off or vacancies are never refilled in the name of “efficiency” while unreasonable workloads are placed on fewer workers; 2) jobs are outsourced to private corporations; and 3) a politics of austerity continues to shrink campus services while producing ever-more job precarity for exploited workers.”
University System officials, though, said in a statement that the report was flawed in several ways.
They said it does not reflect employees who took voluntary separation agreements. For example, the University of Georgia and Georgia State University said 286 and 201 faculty and staff, respectively, who were eligible for retirement participated in the agreements.
System officials note the race or ethnicity wasn’t known for many former employees, which they said was downplayed in the report. They also said several alternatives the union mentioned to offset the budget cuts, such as dipping into institutional funds or taking out low-interest loans, are “uninformed.”
“This report is wrong and misleading, based on flawed logic and a misinterpretation of facts,” system officials wrote.
System officials did not provide their own data in their response detailing how many job cuts were pandemic-related. Their response did note that the five schools with the highest percentage of workforce declines — more than 10% at four of the schools — also had enrollment declines.
Union leaders have criticized several decisions system leaders and college presidents have made during the pandemic, such as requiring faculty get approval from their supervisor if they wanted to teach remotely to avoid being exposed to someone with COVID-19. The union also raised concerns last year that non-supervisory workers would bear the brunt of any job cuts.
The system had nearly 48,000 employees last fall, a decline of more than 1,560 workers from the prior fall, according to annual reports on its website. The biggest declines were among service/maintenance workers, secretarial/clerical staff and para-professionals.
More staff reductions occurred at some of the system’s largest schools, such as UGA and Georgia State, with more 500 fewer full- and part-time employees each, according to the union’s report. UGA, though, did not experience any layoffs solely related to the pandemic, system officials said.
For those who lost their jobs, the decisions still hurt.
At Kennesaw State University, which had an increase of 33 employees during the time period reviewed, some former workers believe they weren’t treated fairly.
Melissa Monsibais, who worked at Kennesaw State for about three years as a catering sous chef, was told in October her job was being eliminated. Monsibais, 53, did not understand the rationale. The catering department, she said, was making a profit. An executive chef in another department asked if she could work for him. That wasn’t an option, she said an administrator told her.
Kennesaw State officials referred the AJC to the University System for response.
Monsibais, who is Latina, said she began talking to union leaders and discovered similarities in employees who were let go. Most were 50 or older, women and minority.
“I checked all the boxes,” she said.
