The University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, has announced that it will be ceasing in person classes and finals in an effort to protect students, staff, and faculty from the growing Covid-19 outbreak, and will be finishing out the academic quarter online. While this is a necessary move in order to protect the UW community, it also creates a perilous position for student workers at the university. If the campus shut down extends to other facilities on campus, a large number of hourly student workers who depend completely on their work at the college to survive will be temporarily out of work. In a university community where 1/3 of the student body faced food insecurity in 2019, and where housing prices are affordable, both on and off campus, even a few days disruption of pay could be devastating.

For this reason, the University must guarantee that regardless of shutdown, it will continue to pay student workers for the hours they are scheduled to work, at the pay they rate they would normally receive. The university is taking important steps to protect the health of our community, but they must also take important step of protecting the health of student workers by ensuring that in protecting the health of the community, they make the choice to protect student workers from food and housing uncertainty.

Guarantee Student worker pay for the duration of the campus shutdown.