UWM Asks Faculty to Serve More Than Just Knowledge

The dining halls at UW-Milwaukee are usually staffed relatively well with student employees, however, leading up to the fall 2022 semester the dining halls were experiencing massive shortages. 

Normally, 80% of the dining hall staff would be composed of returning staff from previous years, but COVID changed all that. 

Through efforts in the spring and summer, they had built up about 40% of the student employees they needed to run the dining halls, but there was still that 60% unhired when the semester began, said Nolan Davis, executive director for Student Life and Services.

“We’re really building back a department from having nobody, or zero student employees,” Davis said.

Also this semester, UWM introduced its first new dining model in over 25 years, the Anytime Dining Plan. This plan, an effort to address food insecurity, the university says, allows residential students to eat any time that the residence dining halls are open, come as many times as they would like and eat as much as they care to eat.

In an effort to combat this staffing shortage, the university asked staff to volunteer in the dining halls, a request that some staff—and their union—found incredulous. 

“I’ve got a better option. Why don’t you pay us?” said Eric Lohman, UWM instructor and president of the labor union that represents academic staff at UWM.

In the past, volunteering has happened in some capacity in other departments, but other instances were not as formally organized as this one, according to Davis.

“The department was experiencing a lot of changes because of COVID and the new Anytime Dining Plan, and other departments offered to help,” Davis said. “In the past, volunteering was very informal and complicated to work out. We wanted to make it more organized this year because we were actually asking for volunteers.”

The volunteer request was sent out via email to any and all university employees on campus, so this could be anyone from a custodian in Sandburg to a Linguistics teacher in Merrill Hall. 

“…My position on this is that we are workers on this campus. We earn a wage for our labor, and we should be compensated fairly for the work that we do,” Lohman said. “We shouldn’t be taking on work for no money, especially when the university could afford to pay us better and could advocate for increased pay and increased benefits on this campus.” 

If an employee expressed interest in volunteering, they would follow a link in the email to a Signupgenius page with all of the shifts available at that time. 

In order to reduce the amount of time spent on training, the volunteers were given one or two jobs that they would do for the entirety of their shift. The volunteers were only required to do tasks that required very low amounts of skill including bussing, cleaning and sanitizing, basic prep work, and service stations. 

While they were referred to as volunteers, that volunteer time was not necessarily unpaid. 

“If you are able to take time during your regular work day, it is important that you clear this with your supervisor, preferably in writing (email works). If you are able to donate time outside of your regular work schedule, this time would be unpaid and cannot contribute to any time-worked or overtime calculations,” the request sent to staff says 

If an hourly employee wanted to volunteer, they would speak with their supervisor to allocate a certain amount of time to be spent in the dining hall. Simply put, that hourly employee would still be receiving the same amount of money, just for doing a different job. If that same hourly employee were to volunteer in the dining hall after their shift, whatever time spent there would go unpaid and could not count towards any overtime calculations. 

Similarly for academic staff who are paid a salary; if a teacher were to volunteer, they would receive no additional income for this time. 

Human Resources and Risk Management were also brought in to determine what would be covered by the university in the event of an accident. All employees are entitled to coverage in the event of an injury, however, volunteers are not entitled to that same coverage. 

With hourly workers, the university has a legal obligation to cover their injuries, but with volunteers, they don’t have that same legal obligation. 

Therefore, if an hourly employee was injured in the dining hall, they would be partially covered by the university. However, if an hourly employee volunteered outside of their shift, or if an academic employee decided to volunteer, there’s no guarantee that they would be covered for their injuries. This is not to say that the university wouldn’t cover it, but there’s no legal obligation requiring them to do so.

Lohman, a teacher in the Journalism, Advertising and Media Studies department, is the president of the American Federation of Teachers Wisconsin which represents faculty, grad students, and academic staff at UWM and UW-Parkside. Lohman’s role in the labor union is to be the voice for the workers on campus by advocating for better working conditions and better compensation. 

He came across the request in his email as an academic faculty member at UWM, and he put out a response as quickly as he could to officially oppose the request. 

Lohman’s initial reaction was anger and incredulity at the laziness and greed of this request. Having been involved in organizations in and around this campus for a number of years, he said he’s seen many staff members go underpaid, including himself. 

“I’m stunned and surprised sometimes with the callousness of employees when they make these kinds of requests,” Lohman said.

There are full-time academic staff members at UWM who are paid between $30,000 and $40,000 a year. People who have doctoral degrees, families, and bills are being paid starvation wages, Lohman said. 

On top of that, they are being asked to work overtime for no additional pay. 

Being an academic staff member does give them more freedom in that they get to choose how to spread out their work, but that freedom is also ripe for exploitation when they end up working 60 hours a week and are only being paid for 40, according to Lohman. 

There is a problematic assumption that it’s normal for academics to take their work home with them, Lohman said, and none of that time spent outside of the classroom can count towards overtime calculations. 

This volunteer request is a rude misuse of the university’s power when more funding could be allocated to the dining halls, Lohman added. 

“The university’s blindness and ignorance is what caused the situation to get so critical, and they issued a quick fix in response,” Lohman said.

The other main reason that the union was offended was the fact that the university used food insecurity as a justification for this request. 

“Food Insecurity is a big problem for grad students, students, faculty, and especially underpaid academic staff. But we don’t solve that problem by pitting one of us against the other,” Lohman said. “If they had said that overtime opportunities are available in the dining hall to help students who are experiencing food insecurity, the union would have absolutely encouraged its members to volunteer.”

Lohman offered several alternative solutions including advertising solid wages and good hours, discounts on room and board, discounts on books and dining credits to eat at restaurants outside the campus. All of these options would better entice students to become employees and receive these benefits, and the percentage of people that would receive these benefits would be relatively small when compared to the entire student body, he said. Instead of relying on existing employees to pick up extra shifts, they should have made the positions more enticing to incoming students.

This volunteer program is no longer in effect, as the dining hall is relatively well-staffed, and the university doesn’t see a need for it this spring semester, according to Davis.