Hannah Lord, feeling frustrated, defeated and left with no choice, sent an email to her seven student employees to find out which of them would struggle most financially without their job.
Lord, administrative assistant and supervisor of the Language Learning Center, said she did all she could to convince the university to retain her student employees, who she argued were needed during the transition to online classes due to COVID-19.
The work of the center’s student employees includes acting as IT for the MLLL department of about 120 faculty and instructors, Lord said. After the move to online-only classes, she said she felt her student employees were still critical to the department and advocated for them to keep their jobs.
However, she had to lay off five of those students. When it came time to choose what students she would keep on, Lord said she had to figure out who would be the most vulnerable without a job.
“I didn't want to put them in the position of deciding who was more worthy of a job, that’s not fair or appropriate,” Lord said. “But ... they're a team, they've known each other for a long time, and I knew that they would be honest.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic brings increasing worry and an inevitable economic recession, more than 200,000 Oklahomans have filed for unemployment in the past month.
Many OU student workers are being affected by the challenging economic situation, too. Of the university’s 5,729 student employees, 21 percent are in positions “for which there is no work” during the coronavirus pandemic, according to an OU spokesperson.
The majority of these positions are in food service, and all who lost their positions received a two-week transition pay that started after spring break, the spokesperson said.
Randall Sweet, who now works less than 3 hours a week at $10 per hour to tutor athletes, said paying bills is going to be a lot harder.
Sweet, a public relations sophomore, has been a tutor for the athletic department since August 2019 and said he worked about 18 hours a week last semester and 10 this semester before the coronavirus outbreak.
All but three of his 45-minutes-per-week sessions were canceled when the university moved to online classes, and the few remaining will be conducted over Zoom, he said.
“(I don’t know) how I’m supposed to go about tutoring ... through a camera,” Sweet said. “Especially when you're handling concepts like geology or something like that — it can be hard if it's not visual.”
Though he is thankful he still has a few hours of work, he said he knows it won’t be enough.
“I rely on (my job) a lot,” Sweet said. “It pays most of the rent monthly for my apartment. I do have money saved, a good chunk, so I’m not completely dependent on it, but it does keep me from going through (my savings).”
Students like Liz Romero, interior design junior, lost their jobs altogether when this crisis hit.
Romero has been a student intern for OU's engineering and design services department since April 2018, working about 20 hours a week at $10 per hour, assisting architects on campus renovation projects. She learned at the end of spring break that she wouldn’t be able to continue working, and her weekend job at The Children’s Place fell through as well due to the pandemic.
Expecting to be able to return to her campus job after spring break, Romero said it was frustrating when she was informed she wouldn’t be able to work until at least the fall semester.
“I wasn't upset with OU at all because I understand that they're trying to keep us safe, but I was very stressed once I got that email,” Romero said. “I was just like, ‘I don't know what to do now. Every place is closed. I guess I'll start applying for other jobs.’”
For the people like Lord behind those emails bearing bad news, there is a whole new set of stressors.
With only herself and two student employees able to work 10 hours per week, she said it’s not enough to accomplish all the needs and tasks of the center.
“The students will prioritize responding to whatever we get as far as needs for help,” Lord said. “And then the other tasks that we normally do will probably fall on the back burner.”
While both Sweet and Romero said they have people to turn to for financial help if it comes to that, the months ahead are going to be tough.
“I don’t want to say it’s disappointing because it's not necessarily anyone's fault, and I kind of saw it coming,” Sweet said. “But it is disappointing because we all have bills to pay. And without as many hours ... it's going to take another job or figuring something else out to pay rent or whatever else I need to.”
Romero said she is trying not to focus on the difficulty of the situation, but it’s easier said than done.
“I'm just telling myself, ‘There's a reason why this is happening, and it's for (the best),’” Romero said. “I just try not to think about it much because I know it's only going to stress me out — it's not going to do anything for me.”
This story was updated at 2:14 p.m. April 20 to expand the description of administrators Lord spoke with when advocating for the retention of her student employees.
