CHE is profiling various people who lost their jobs due to pandemic-related cutbacks, including a member of the housekeeping staff at a hotel owed by Northwestern University:
Espinosa, 48, left Colombia 20 years ago, fleeing violence in her home country and seeking opportunity in a new one. Here she married an American, became a citizen, gave birth to a daughter, and eventually got divorced. She worked for a few years at manufacturing plants, then landed a job at the hotel in the early aughts through a cousin who already worked there. At the time, Aramark ran housekeeping in the hotel, and Espinosa was paid about $9 an hour, with 10-cent-an-hour raises every year. Her health insurance cost $500 a month.
Espinosa was active in organizing the union, in 2013, a cause supported by students and faculty members at Northwestern.
“The union came, everything was different,” she says. Before she was laid off, she was paid $14.75 an hour by the Compass Group, which took over Northwestern’s services contracts in 2018, and her benefits fees went down to $85 a month.
As a union steward in the local Unite Here chapter, Espinosa helped co-workers who looked to her for answers when they lost their jobs: Could they get unemployment? How would that affect their health care? The stress was at times overwhelming, she says.
“The company, they don’t offer anything for us. Northwestern neither,” she says. “Thank God we had the union, and thank God we had the students, because they would support us, collect money for us.”
Students held rallies to press the university and its contractor to offer back pay and health benefits to the workers. “We need to have a voice, so the students were behind us to tell the university we need help,” she says.
That back pay was never granted. Nor were laid-off employees offered help in finding unemployment services or health care, or transitioning to some other job. “The workers were laid off and left to sort of figure things out on their own,” says Elliott Mallen, a researcher with the union.
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