Student workers in Commons given wrong, limited break policy as some decry conditions

Heciel Nieves Bonilla, Assistant News Editor

Food service workers at the University Student Commons were confused in October when a notice for a new break policy was posted on an office door, contradicting the terms of their contracts.

The notice, attributed to the “Management Team,” detailed a new policy with three facets — workers doing shifts under six hours do not get breaks, those working longer than six hours get a 30-minute unpaid break, and workers are not allowed any 15-minute breaks, as seen in a post on Reddit. 

The notice also stated student workers were no longer allowed overtime.

“If this is my third year working here, why have they only now implemented this policy?” the author of the Reddit post stated. 

The Commons are notoriously busy and full of long lines, especially at Chick-fil-A. VCU Dine’s new in-app ordering feature through Grubhub has allowed students to quickly fill up virtual lines. Both methods of ordering can take up to an hour to move through.

VCU has continuously accepted larger freshman classes with each passing year. The class of 2029 has been estimated to be over 4,500 students, according to a previous report by The CT.

Dining workers previously received half-hour unpaid breaks when working five hours or more, and those on seven and a half, eight or 12 hour shifts would receive one, two and three fully-paid half-hour breaks respectively. 

The terms of those breaks were negotiated between the VCU branch of the UNITE HERE union and the management outsourcing company Aramark, according to Aramark’s local district manager Bryan Kelly.

Virginia does not require employers to provide breaks or meal periods at all unless the employee is under 16 years-old.

Kelly confirmed the existence of the notice and said it was taken down within days of the post on VCU’s Reddit community.

“There’s nothing that applies to student workers [alone], everything applies to our employees. Students are our employees,” Kelly said. “They get the same amount of wage — everything. And they work under the same union.”

Kelly said he should be considered ultimately responsible for the discrepancy with the break policy posting, and that it was a mistake by a lower-level manager.

Kelly acknowledged instances of inconsistency between levels of management at Aramark, and said there is an effort to “re-educate and inform” lower-level managers in those instances followed by “progressive disciplinary actions” if policy-breaking behavior continues. 

The CT spoke to multiple students who work in dining at the Commons, who preferred to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation by their employer. 

One anonymous student worker confirmed the accuracy of the posting and believed it was still up as of Friday, Nov. 7. He confirmed he had been operating under the rules Kelly said were a mistake.

An anonymous UNITE HERE member and Aramark employee at a food service location elsewhere on campus said Aramark generally enforces the negotiated break policy and operates the same policies with part-time, student workers. They were not aware of the notice or the social media post. 

They also said Aramark management at their location can be inconsistent, and VCU Human Resources is ‘completely useless,’ especially regarding workplace incidents that would require their intervention. 

The employee said there was an instance in which a store manager told a student worker she could sit and rest while working with a migraine, and was then yelled at for doing so by a higher-up manager. They also claimed another student was harassed by multiple other staff members and forced to leave her job because of HR’s inaction. 

It is difficult to incorporate student workers into the union because of a requirement that members work full time, the member said. Instead, students rely on consistency between their contracts and the contracts of UNITE HERE members to ensure their rights as workers.

The posting in the Commons conflicted with a contract the union signed with Aramark in July that improved working conditions for food service workers on campus, and included “big raises, cheaper health insurance, more sick days, holidays and an improved attendance policy,” according to a post on their Facebook.  

However, the student worker who authored the Reddit post described other issues with their work conditions in the Commons, including chronic short-staffing and policy denying overtime pay. For them, remaining at their workplace is no longer worth it.

“Because this is my primary income, I cannot just quit like that,” they wrote. “But I will start searching for jobs nearby that allows me to work early morning shift again.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The CT made the decision to grant student worker interviewees their anonymity to protect them from possible retaliation by their employers.