Be Nice to Pub Workers: They’re Struggling Too

In the past few weeks, I have seen many disheartening YikYaks attacking the pub workers for not being fast enough or not completing an order correctly. While it is fair to have concerns about the amount of time that you wait for your food or your order not being made how you specified, it is not entirely the pub workers’ fault.  

The labor shortage that is being seen nationwide is not only causing us to have the minor inconvenience of having to wait a few extra minutes for our lunch or not getting our side-order of fries at dinner. The pub workers are also being affected in ways that many of us students aren’t seeing.  

According to a group of anonymous pub workers, “no one is working here today [Tuesday]” this was clarified by them saying that there were three full-time workers that didn’t show up to work on Tuesday, as well as one more worker having to leave early due to personal reasons. The Pub workers also commented that they don’t have much help from the student workers at the beginning of the week and only really have them on Thursdays and Fridays. This is understandable, since Fridays  tend to be lighter days for students’ workloads. However, they don’t have the regular staff to make up for this due to the staffing issues.  

I don’t know about any other pre-pandemic Laurentians, but seeing students being blatantly rude to the staff members at the pub is not a characteristic of the SLU that I fell in love with. Albeit that was a different time, but it is still not acceptable to be disrespectful to the people that keep us fed and have gone out of their way to even learn some of our names.  

I understand that mealtimes are very stressful, with the GET mobile app personally attacking us at least once a day while we try to fit a mealtime in between classes or before club meetings or sports practices. I’ll admit that I sometimes catch myself staring down the people working in the deli selection when my sandwich is late. However, this isn’t a “students vs Pub workers” situation, and not to quote High School Musical, but “we’re all in this together.”  

The GET app issues also have an effect on workers, which can lead to the wait times for food being longer than anticipated. The anonymous pub workers added, “the GET app has a limit for 15 orders for every 15 minutes, which gets overridden by the kiosks,” this limit was put in place because that is the number of orders that can feasibly be made in that amount of time, but now that the kiosks are added to the equation, the workers are getting swamped with orders that they can’t keep up with. The workers also said, “the GET app closes out about 5 minutes before closing to give us [the workers] time to catch up on orders before they are supposed to close at 10:30, but the kiosks are allowing people to order right up until closing, which makes us stay late.’ 

All in all, we need to stop acting like “mini Karens” and accept that there isn’t much to be done to immediately solve the issue, and it sure isn’t an issue that the pub workers can solve themselves. It is up to Dining Services and the administration to remedy the situation.