Editorial: UCLA Dining must reevaluate student workers’ jobs, wage disparity

When workers accept employment, they agree to a wage and set of responsibilities. At UCLA Dining Services, it’s become clear that this agreement needs renegotiation.

Dana Carrera, a student worker at Bruin Cafe and rising third-year sociology student, recently began advocating for equal pay between UCLA students and full-time workers, starting a petition and meeting with UCLA Dining Services directors.

Peter Angelis, the assistant vice chancellor of UCLA Housing and Hospitality Services, told The Bruin that student workers’ lower wages are justified by responsibilities simpler than career staff’s, such as serving food and cleaning their work stations.

However, Carrera and other student workers told The Bruin that many students do the same work as full-time employees, even though tasks such as handling specialized equipment and working alone are outside their job descriptions.

It’s evident that the current divide between policy and practice isn’t due to poor management, but practicality. Its existence, however, is unfair and facilitated by the absence of communication between employer and employee.

There are two possible ways to reconcile this dissonance between administrators and workers: better enforce the difference between student and career workers or reconsider how big the difference should be, both in responsibility and wages.

UCLA Dining Services needs to acknowledge that the petition, regardless of the number of signatures or students’ ability to organize, represents a serious oversight on its part. It must understand the students it employs, rather than assume that students’ responsibilities on the clock conform to their current job description.

This means finding out which responsibilities are necessary to share between students and full-time employees from a practical viewpoint, updating student workers’ job descriptions with an accurate picture of their duties and raising their pay accordingly.

In dining halls and residential restaurants, students and career workers operate side by side. They cover each other’s breaks and sick days, train new hires at various tasks and lead food stations. The functional difference between the two is much narrower than the rules – and the almost-six-dollar pay difference – suggest.

The university not only needs to reconsider student workers’ responsibilities but also understand the environment they work in by consulting them and getting feedback on how the line between student and employee can be drawn better.

That means that students shouldn’t necessarily have to shoulder the burden of full-time employees. The university has every right to limit some responsibilities to career staff in order to avoid greater liability or make hiring students more efficient and cost-effective.

After all, there are other differences between students and full-time employees that might justify a slighter, but still existent, wage gap. Angelis said student workers have higher turnover rates and need more flexible hours, which require extra resources from the university to accommodate.

However, the current rules limiting students’ workload and responsibility are impractical and poorly enforced. The university has failed to accurately classify student workers in Dining Services, instead putting them in situations that require them to perform many of the same duties as career workers do, while paying them less.

Students shouldn’t have to rally for their job description to match their actual responsibilities. It’s UCLA Dining Services’ responsibility, however, to ensure they’re paid a fair wage for their work.