Philipsburg-Osceola food service workers push back on idea to outsource positions

With less than a month before the current contract expires, Philipsburg-Osceola Area School District and its food service workers are at an impasse over talks about bringing in subcontractors to fill district positions.

Nearly 40 members of the Pennsylvania State Education Association Educational Support Professionals union attended a Philipsburg-Osceola board meeting Wednesday night to ask the board to reconsider an option in the collective bargaining agreement that would allow the district to hire a subcontractor to fill food service positions. Several members spoke during public comment before the group walked out of the meeting to take photos and discuss the meeting in the parking lot.

District solicitor Carl Beard said the district hasn’t been in specific talks with subcontractors and could not say if the move would have any financial impact on the district’s budget. The district already uses a subcontractor for food service supply and management, Beard said.

“The district has not explored bringing in any one particular contractor,” Beard said. “They haven’t gotten proposals or anything like that. That hasn’t been explored. It was just the conversation of through the bargaining process, getting the ability to explore that option.”

However, union members said that hiring a subcontractor to fill open food service positions is a slippery slope. Staff representative Doug Rosenberry said filling positions with a subcontractor could open the door for the district to start subcontracting out other support staff like secretaries or paraprofessionals.

“Subcontracting is not a road that we want to go down, not only for our food service workers,” Rosenberry said. “I really feel like it’s going to start to have a snowball effect and it will just continue with with other classifications that they’ll try to outsource. And in all that what we’re going to do is diminish the number of good, stable jobs.”

Beard argued that using a subcontractor would not endanger any current jobs within the district. Instead, when a food service employee leaves or retires, the open position — if not filled internally — would be filled by the subcontractor.

But ESP president Dawn Miller said hiring through subcontractors would also mean a revolving door of staff rather than directly hiring food service works who may stay with the district for years. Miller said that food service workers form close bonds with the students, especially those in special education.

“They know us, and we know them and they look forward to coming in,” Miller said. “And that might be a little bit of a highlight of their day. We just love the kiddos. I mean, we come here every day, and we support them and it’s a great relationship that we have with our students.”

Outside of the issue of subcontracting, union members are asking the district to raise wages to keep up with the cost of living.

Union members and district representatives have two meetings scheduled before the current contract expires at the end of June, but both Beard and members of the ESP expressed hope that a new agreement could be reached soon.

“These are the issues that are most important to our members,” Rosenberry said. “And so these are the issues that we feel so strongly about that we’re willing to take as long as it takes to come to an agreement.”