Hiring woes and work study cuts

This past Sunday, I went to Marty’s around nine p.m. looking to grab dinner and was turned away, to the horror of my grumbling stomach.

“Kitchen’s closed,” I was gruffly informed.

As I slumped out, grumbling at my denial of chicken strips, I noticed a sign hanging on the door: “Due to an extreme shortage of workers, Marty’s kitchen will close at 8:30 on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.”

Let’s be real: nobody wants to work on the weekend. I certainly don’t. But Marty’s has somehow always managed to stay staffed – until now.

When thinking about last year’s work study cuts however, the cause of this understaffing becomes more clear.

Administrators limited the hours many students are allowed to work a week from ten to six in an effort to create more job openings for students. While this has had the direct effect of denying many of these students a fair amount of the money they were promised upon their enrollment at Luther, another unexpected consequence has arisen.

The Luther job-market has been flooded with open positions, as is evident by Marty’s staffing woes.

I asked Dining Services Operations Manager Diane Narum, who handles much of the hiring for Marty’s, what the issue is. Through no fault of her own, apparently staffing Marty’s has become a chore.

“We have no student help,” Narum said. “They will not work. I don’t have one single [student] worker working Friday, Saturday or Sunday night shifts.”

Students that have been limited in their hours are now able to hit their allotment during the week, and don’t need the weekends to fill their quota. They can’t work beyond their allotment, even if they wanted to pick up an extra shift on the weekends, and no one will work only these undesirable spots.

“If we offer someone a job at this point, and that’s what we have open ... they just don’t want it,” Narum said.

Narum is surprised at this, and is working hard to fill these openings, even considering hiring high schoolers, although there has been little response so far.

So that’s the irony: in an effort to create more jobs for students on campus, the administration has unintentionally forced staffers to hire from the outside to cover basic student services. Nice one.