Editor’s note: The Emerald interviewed eight current or former UO dining student employees for this story, and five current employees wished to remain anonymous. In cases where employment or housing could be impacted by someone telling their story, the Emerald allows the use of anonymous sources to avoid retaliation.
University of Oregon dining services faces a staffing shortage and has amped up efforts to attract student workers. However, students working in the dining halls said the lack of staffing combined with lower-than-average pay has created stressful work conditions.
“UO dining has been operating with fewer employees this fall amid a staffing shortage that has been noted locally and nationwide,” UO Director of Dining Services Tom Driscoll said.
About 750 students were employed by dining services prior to the pandemic, Driscoll said. At the start of fall term, dining services had about 100 student employees. That number increased to 550 over the course of fall term.
During the staffing shortage, student dining service workers said the dining halls have been high-stress environments. They said UO needs to increase its pay to attract more student workers.
A strenuous workload
Many student employees said that Unthank Hall, which has nine dining venues, especially struggles with the staffing shortage.
A student employee working in Unthank Hall said her job was more stressful fall term than during remote learning last year.
“A lot of people quit before starting, which they probably expected,” she said. “But, within the first month, people were dropping like flies.”
Another student employee who works in food preparation at Unthank Hall said she feels like she is doing multiple people’s jobs due to the staffing shortage.
“The reason I stayed in the dining halls for so long is because of the friends and the connections I made,” she said. “Because Unthank is just so big, and we are poorly run and just disjointed, I’m kind of separated from my friends who really made this job a lot more fun.”
UO junior Harrison Wood worked in Hamilton’s dining hall for two years before he became a student shift lead at Unthank Hall during fall term. He left to pursue another job after working three shifts. But those shifts involved extremely long work hours in a stressful environment due to the staffing shortage and student excitement over a new dining hall, he said.
“Everybody wants to eat there, and we don’t have enough people to serve them,” Wood said. “Venues would just close once they ran out of food for hours until more food was cooked, and then they would reopen again, run out of food and close again.”
Wood said staff had difficulty fitting in breaks because of the staffing shortage. Student workers would often have to stay past their shift to wait for another worker to come in, he said.
A student employee working in Unthank’s dish room said keeping up with dishes is one of the main problems to arise from the hall’s staffing shortage. In the weeks before fall term began, he routinely worked 40 hour weeks, he said.
He said things are smoother now. “Previously, there would be mountains of dishes that were left for the next day or things would not be able to get cleaned that should be cleaned,” he said. “People would leave at 2 a.m. because they had no way of getting all the work done.”
Driscoll said three venues in Unthank Hall’s new PNW Public Market have not yet been opened due to the staffing shortage.
The student employee in Unthank Hall who works in food preparation said Unthank has more new hires than workers with previous experience in the dining halls.
She said the new hires cannot always cook on the line or produce food quickly, which slows operations down.
“You can hire all the people you want,” she said, “but if you don’t hire the people that I actually need, then that doesn’t help me.”
Driscoll said hiring efforts have been centralized so dedicated staff can work full-time hiring students.
The student employee in Unthank’s dish room said not allowing individual dining halls to hire students leaves certain areas in more need of staffing than others.
“One of the problems that we faced in the middle of the term was we had a lot of new hires, which we desperately needed, but they were all being sent to places where it made no sense for them to be,” he said. “They would just stand around and do nothing because there was no work to do. They would send them to the venues that weren’t visited frequently.”
He said the dish room is essentially the backbone of Unthank, but it was left understaffed with about three workers on a good day. “There’s a complete disconnect in how things would flow and move from one place to the other,” he said.
Leaving for higher pay
UO increased the minimum starting wage for student employees from $12.75 an hour to $13.25 an hour to retain and attract additional staff, Driscoll said.
The university also offered various incentives to increase staff numbers, including a $200 student staff retention incentive for students who joined on or before Nov. 1, 2021 and worked through Dec. 4, 2021, up to three $50 payments for referring friends to University Dining and a $50 bonus after joining if students meet certain employment requirements.
Driscoll said the hiring, referral and retention bonuses offered to student employees will continue in winter term.
UO dining will also hold a student job fair Jan. 7 from 3 to 6 p.m. in the EMU Crater Lake room, and all new hires will receive a $100 signing bonus.
Michael LaQuay, a student employee at Unthank’s dining hall, said the perks UO offers have helped improve the staffing shortage and will continue to help as time goes on.
Driscoll said dining hall positions offer reduced price meals for student employees on every day they have a shift, as well as significant flexibility to accommodate their class schedules.
Many University Dining student employees said they want their wages to be increased to attract more workers and to be compensated for the amount of work the staffing shortage puts on them.
Multiple student employees said their co-workers have left for places like Target and McDonald’s because they can receive higher wages.
“I think pay and just simply not wanting to put yourself through an unnecessarily high-stress environment are probably the two main reasons why I would say a lot of people are leaving and trying to find work elsewhere,” a student employee working at Fresh Marketcafé said.
She said she tries to work as many hours as she can to compensate for what she could be making elsewhere.
Eliza Reyes said she quit working in Hamilton’s dining hall last year, and pay played a large factor in her decision to leave. “I wouldn’t have been able to afford food and groceries this year if I was still working at the dining halls, so I left,” she said.
The student employee in Unthank’s dish room said, despite the wage increase, his co-workers have been attracted to jobs offering $15 an hour so they can make rent and pay for food.
“No one showed up, and everyone was surprised. They thought, ‘We’re only paying $13.25, and then you have to do double the work that you would expect to do and take up everyone else’s work.’ To me, it didn’t really make sense why they’d be surprised,” he said.
Students employees in the dining hall work alongside classified employees — full time, unionized employees.
The Oregon union SEIU Local 503’s higher education bargaining team, which negotiates contracts between unionized higher education employees and some public universities including UO, reached a tentative agreement with the universities on Dec. 3, 2021.
The tentative agreement includes a selective salary increase of one salary grade for classified food service workers and a $15 an hour minimum wage for all classified staff. Members of SEIU 503 are in the middle of voting whether or not to ratify the new contract, which will go into effect the first day of the month after ratification. The contact wouldn’t directly affect student workers, who aren’t unionized.
A level two classified food service worker currently has a salary that ranges from $13.73 to $16.49 an hour, while student employees’ wages range from $13.25 to $15 an hour.
“They essentially do the exact same work,” the student employee in Unthank’s dish room said, “although our compensation is quite different.”
Wood said he does not think the classified workers’ wage increases will lead to wage increases for student employees in the dining halls because students are not equipped to organize like a union to demand more pay. “They might be afraid of losing a job or whatever because they might need it to survive,” he said. “It might be difficult to try and demand something like that.”