In the past few years, Stanford Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE) has expanded to include four additional residences and the Arrillaga Family Dining Commons while cutting the number of workers and the hours of the workers who remain. Adding insult to injury, R&DE managers also disrespect, threaten, and intimidate workers while manipulating their hours, breaks, and days off, committing multiple violations of federal and state labor law and the workers’ collective bargaining agreement.

In addition to these speed-ups, R&DE has reduced many workers to part-time, 75% status, even though they still assign many of these workers a 40-hour weekly workload. Being at 75% status means these workers’ benefits, including health care, vacation pay, and accrued time towards retirement, are significantly reduced. R&DE has also fired permanent workers only to rehire them as temporary workers, reducing their pay and benefits and eliminating their ability to join a labor union.

Managers also insult and demean their employees’ work as valueless. Managers have called their employees’ work “children’s work” and have yelled at them to work faster. Some R&DE managers have prohibited workers from talking to students and, when they do, threatened to move them to work at Arrillaga Dining, which already has a notorious reputation among the workers as one of the worst working environments.

While workers have faced many of these problems for years, Stanford administration continues to justify greater cuts and worsening conditions – both in Dining and on the Row – with the economic crisis. Stanford offers this reasoning despite consistently increasing tuition, board, and housing bills and having one of the largest endowments in the world, which increased by 22% last fiscal year. Stanford administration clearly does not need to cut workers’ compensation but nevertheless uses the dismal job market to frighten workers into accepting cuts and worsening conditions. Stanford shouldn’t follow this shameful trend of making cuts on the backs of hard-working people but rather should set an example by providing good, secure jobs in Dining, Row houses, and all parts of campus.

In light of the above facts we demand that Stanford University:

• return all workers to permanent, full-time status with full-time benefits as defined in the workers’ collective bargaining agreement
• ban temporary hiring until all part-time workers are employed as full-time workers as required by the collective bargaining agreement
• increase the number of full-time, permanent employees by an amount proportionate to the recent expansion in students served and meals provided by R&DE
• end intimidation against talking to students
• ensure supervisors respect workers and value their work as required by Stanford policy and R&DE Core Values
• standardize work schedules so that workers know their break days at least 30 calendar days in advance as required by the collective bargaining agreement
• give workers proper meal and rest breaks, spaced throughout their shifts as required by state and federal law
• ensure that if workers show up to work, they work at least half of their regular shift as required by state and federal law
• provide opportunities, including training if needed, for workers at part-time status to supplement their labor with alternate work in order to reach full-time status
• prevent food waste by ending the practice of forcing workers to throw out leftover food, for example by allowing students to take to-go boxes and coordinating with appropriate student groups
• ensure ingredients arrive on time for workers to properly prepare them
• pay overtime when it is earned as required by state and federal law
• for workers who work above their classification, pay them wages due for the classification they worked (this should not be construed to pay workers below their classification) as required by the collective bargaining agreement
• when supervisors need to fill work, they should give workers priority based on seniority, then classification.

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