Joey Roberts (he/him)
Junior
Q: How many hours were you getting previously, and how many hours are you getting now with the hour cuts?
“[Previously] during the school year 12 hours is the approximate, then at the very start, the first week, I was getting three hours a week, but I’ve gone up hopefully now to six hours a week.
Q: How are the hour cuts impacting your income?
“ I’ve noticed that I’ve significantly reduced the amount of hours I have and I’m trying to feed myself off of this. I’m not saying I can’t feed myself off [six hours a week], it can, but it doesn’t give much wiggle room for clothes and other basic necessities that really aren’t cheap.”
Q:What impact are these cuts having on you? How is that impacting the work environment?
“There’s even fewer opportunities for incoming students to find jobs on campus, and that’s really sad since for me personally, an on-campus job is an extremely valuable learning opportunity. It’s frustrating that I’ve learned a lot of those jobs and developed those [valuable] skills and all of the sudden I’m given six hours a week.”
“Like all of the studden [the CSD] basically isn’t a student work position anymore. A vast majority of the time it’s staffed by salaried employees, not to mention the fact that those salaried employees already had a previous job working in the library, now they’re basically working two jobs. The library staff now basically working two times the job is affecting the efficiency of that position. There’s hundreds of tickets that have been made by people with problems that [library staff] aren’t able to get back to because they’re not enough people working the desk. The people who are working the desk have other jobs they need to do. Not only are you overworking people, but less work is being done.”
Q: Do you think Hamline could have approached this in a different way?
“I feel like there are other avenues the university can explore to cut down on costs [but] instead they decided to slash student worker budgets. The students are the ones paying for the University’s existence, so why is the university doing things that directly hurt students and directly impact students’ abilities to stay at Hamline?”
Elena Laskowski (she/her)
Junior
Q: How many hours were you getting previously, and how many hours are you getting now with the hour cuts?
“This summer I was working between 20 to 25 hours, then July 1st happened and suddenly it went down to half that. An average day on a shift prior to July would be four to six hours and then suddenly it was an hour to two hours a day.”
Q: How are the hour cuts impacting your income?
“It’s frustrating because the only job I have is my student worker job, so this is how I get my income. It’s frustrating because I’m trying to save up and pay back those loans. I’m very fortunate to live at home right now, so I don’t have a ton of extra expenses. I’m mostly worried about the people I know who also only have their student worker jobs to pay their rent, pay their bills, to pay for their groceries, and all their living expenses.”
Q:What impact are these cuts having on you? How is that impacting the work environment?
“[Full Time staff] have to do more of this [kind of work] because they rely on the student workers to help them out so that they can, you know, do the work that they’re supposed to do.”
“My direct supervisor was like we can’t do that, we are the mailroom, and we have to stay open to receive mail. At least the mailroom hours haven’t been cut, but the work hours have. People aren’t at the window as much, so it’s just my director supervisor who has to be at the window. Again, that’s the same as the library, like he has other stuff he needs to do. He needs to help receive packages on the back end. He’s not supposed to have to be at the front window to help students all the time. It just feels like an uneven balance now whereas before it was well distributed.”
“If you need to be hiring freshmen who were awarded work study, when you’re working on these limited number of hours that you’re struggling to even distribute among your existing workers. How are you going to give them to incoming freshmen?”
Q: What would you like your fellow students to know?
“I want to emphasize that the direct supervisors and the staff in the library [are not in charge of the hours allocated and] this is not their fault in any way and they are just as upset about this on our behalf as we are. Because, you know, it’s making things harder for them and they also do care about us. They don’t think it’s fair either.”
“I want incoming students to know that they deserve more hours than they have right now. That is not normal like that. It wasn’t always like this, There were more hours to go around last year.”
Q: How were these budget cuts shared with you? Do you think Hamline could have approached this change in a better way?
“So [Piper Xpress Student Workers] knew something was going to happen and we knew that they were re-budgeting and re-planning. We knew hours were going to be cut, but I didn’t know that it was going to be that bad. I do not expect that. I think that other people were blindsided because they maybe didn’t have a supervisor who warned them about it.”
“I do sort of wish that there had been an email send before July 1st from the Provost Office or somebody to student workers just being transparent about the fact that this new financial budget for the year was going to result in severe hour cuts, because there was no blanket statement like that and I only knew because my direct supervisor warned me because he knew their was.”
