After a Temple librarian died, coworkers mentioned the sick-leave coverage ‘ran her into the bottom’

The month before her death, Latanya Jenkins was one step closer to her career – the librarian’s version for a position at Temple University.

It was an important moment last March for Jenkins to receive the first round of approval for what is known as the “regular appointment”. Jenkins had a different name for it: Persistence. She applied permanently.

Success would come with a raise in salary and job security, but just as important would be recognition of Jenkins’ services to the institution. It was the kind of recognition she didn’t expect there.

At 45, she had spent more than a decade in college. She taught students how to conduct research and helped professors access government documents while also speaking and writing book chapters at conferences around the world. It’s not just a job, her friends said, it’s a calling. “It was what she was supposed to do,” said her childhood best friend, Maraizu Onyenaka.

Even so, during many of her years at Temple, as her breast cancer worsened, Jenkins was forced to choose between her health and her job, said more than a dozen friends, colleagues, and family members. “They drove her into the ground,” said her mentee Fobazi Ettarh. Temple did so, colleagues said, with a sick leave regime that begins disciplining workers as soon as they have six sick days a year – even though they get 10 paid sick days a year.

Those days are rolling by. So an employee could save himself dozen of sick days, but that wouldn’t matter: the sixth day triggers a series of disciplinary actions that can escalate to a three-day unpaid suspension and eventual dismissal. Temple’s employee handbook warns workers not to “use sick days sparingly”.

Neither the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, nor Pennsylvania State University have similar disciplinary policies.

It is a tool that Temple said is needed to manage “excessive time investment” and to ensure that the institution has enough staff to operate.

“We have 6,500 employees,” said Sharon Boyle, vice president of human resources at Temple. “We don’t have a lot of fat at Temple, we’re government funded, we’re trying to keep our costs down because we care about access.”

Library staff say the policy has left them going to work sick or in pain, burdening parents of young children, and creating a system where staff are at the mercy of their superiors who can choose to enforce the policy or look the other way .

As union members, librarians are not covered by the Philadelphia Paid Sick Leave Act, which makes it illegal to punish employees for sick days earned. But Temple’s sick leave policy is more of an issue for librarians than professors who are in the same collective bargaining unit because they work 9 to 5 hours.

“Everyone thinks it’s ridiculous,” said Leanne Finnigan, vice president of the Temple Association of University Professionals, which represents 2,500 faculty and staff, including about 50 who work from 9 to 5, said librarian Leanne Finnigan. “It treats us like children.” The union tried to strike the directive in its most recent contract negotiation in 2019 but was unsuccessful.

Boyle said Temple refused to strike the policy because “very few, if any” workers were disciplined for violating it. She added that library supervisors “do not make decisions in isolation” and that “the majority of our supervisors are on the forbearance side wrong”.

Temple declined to comment on the details of Jenkins’ case, but said in a statement that the Inquirer’s coverage was “based on rumors and guesswork, not facts.” “Situations like this are never easy, but we support how Latanya’s supervisors and Temple University library administrators responded and worked with her during her illness,” the statement said.

On the other hand, Jenkins friends and co-workers are wondering: what if she had been given the time to heal?

“Nobody can know what could have happened if she had worked for a more caring organization,” said Ettarh.

When Jenkins was hired as the Government Information Reference Librarian and Temple’s Department of Africanology and African American Studies in 2012, it was a return for her.

She had held stints at two historically black universities in Maryland and at Purdue University, where she was recruited for the library’s first diversity scholarship. But the Philadelphia area was home. She had grown up across the river in Pennsauken, where her mother, a Trinidadian immigrant who worked in a nursing home, lived, and she had worked as a library assistant in Temple after college. There she decided to do her Masters in Library Science at Drexel.

Professors and library staff describe her as a tireless, dedicated employee. She encouraged professors to apply for scholarships that she thought were a good fit, spent her free time organizing diversity symposiums, and mentored younger black librarians in a mostly white section. But after Jenkins was diagnosed with breast cancer, they ran into trouble with the sick leave regime.

Four colleagues said she went to work after chemotherapy, even if she was sick or tired, because she had already had too many sick days and was worried about stricter disciplinary measures. She couldn’t afford to lose her job – which gave her health insurance – and she didn’t want to. This was the career she had worked so hard for.

She felt sorry for Ettarh, who also felt powerless in the face of politics. Ettarh, who was a librarian’s residence in Temple from 2015 to 2017, has sickle cell anemia, a chronic disease that causes episodes of pain that would take her to the hospital for days at a time. These episodes are made worse by factors such as stress and weather, which means that the harder she tried to go to work, the sicker Ettarh got when she was in pain, leading to more hospitalizations and more policy violations.

The two encouraged each other to just try to go in for a few hours, even if they felt so sick they could barely work, said Ettarh, who is now 31. They knew if they would make it for a little over half the day it took the violations longer to set in.

In the last few years of Jenkins’ life, sick leave policy has become less of a burden.

Part of that was because she had gotten sicker. After a brief remission, she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer – an incurable disease whose treatment never ends. The cancer that had spread to her spine made it difficult for her to walk, and for a while she used a walking stick. “I just want to run without extreme pain,” she wrote to a friend in autumn 2017 via SMS. She moved back in with her mother in Pennsauken so that her mother could take care of her.

She was eventually approved for temporary leave under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which meant she would not be punished for her absences. And in 2020, Temple paused enforcement of the sick leave rule because of the pandemic.

However, three friends and colleagues said when Jenkins was hospitalized earlier this year, her supervisor asked her to call every morning to confirm she was still in the hospital. Your manager declined to comment.

Even though Jenkins knew she was dying, she was determined to keep her regular appointment request permanent. Even if she needed a two-week extension because she had contracted COVID and her mother – her carer – was in the hospital. Even if she was afraid that her illness would prevent her from going on. She had looked around for other jobs just in case, because failure to get a regular appointment resulted in firing.

“All this energy that she could have spent fighting for her life,” said Onyenaka, “she has spent fighting for her career.”

In April, Jenkins received the second round of regular appointments from the dean of libraries. None of her friends or colleagues who had spoken to The Inquirer knew if she had heard of this next step. She died a week later.

For Ettarh, Jenkins death symbolizes a larger problem with the library system, with any kind of work that expects workers to “live and breathe their work” so fully that everything else, even Your health, comes second.

“It’s just not fair,” she said, “the way we are expected to put our whole being into these institutions, and they keep showing that we are all expendable.”