Today I’m sitting down with Mark, a recent graduate of UCLA who is working as a journalist in the Los Angeles area. He worked at both Royce Hall and Powell Library in his time at school, and he had a range of experiences and co-workers that I personally never experienced. Mark is a smart guy and a great writer, and you should make sure to follow him @McgrealMark on Twitter.
One of the topics that he and I spoke about that was the most challenging was the obligations of the University to its student employees. Specifically, we were discussing instances of over-hiring and how that negatively impacts employees who are fighting one another for shifts. So what is the solution? Do you fire a certain amount of students to provide more hours for everyone? That doesn’t really solve the problem in this instance, because it leaves students without work who might really need to pay bills. It takes time to apply to jobs and to actually get one, and two weeks without work can be existentially threatening to students who need this income.
Still, this ultimately ignores financial realities. If you don’t limit access to those shifts, you’re ultimately spreading the harm between more students within that department. If the university doesn’t have a need for more work in a certain department, then it is essentially spending money it doesn’t need to spend. After charging students anywhere from 15 to 60 thousand dollars a year to attend school, it seems difficult to ask them to shell out more money to finance some student workers just because the University feels an obligation to maintain their employment.
We talked about the idea of a middle ground, finding other work or projects to move students onto. For example, in another interview I have coming down the pipeline, I spoke with one student whose work was rather seasonal and infrequent. As a result of COVID, she ended up getting a job with another department which she greatly enjoyed. I proposed the idea that she could have probably had both jobs at the same time, because they had such low time demands.
If we were to expand on this idea, we could look for jobs that have infrequent or sporadic hours to try to find students who might need more work. If you’re not getting enough job as an usher, ta-da! here you go, we just found an opening at the learning centers by the dorms. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s an idea. At the end of the idea, that’s all I really want to offer in this project: ideas. I don’t have answers because I haven’t done high-level research into labor relations and conditions at UCLA or across the University of California. All I have is a little technical know-how and an inclination to ask questions from time to time.
Anyway, enough out of me. Make sure to check out this episode of the podcast, and I hope you enjoy it!
Isaac Edejer 