Brown University Dining Services imposed a temporary hiring freeze for student workers last week, placing 18 students on a waitlist to allow current workers to pick up more shifts. The freeze on filling shifts with new workers ended Monday, said Melanie Masarin, general manager of BuDS.
When signing up for shifts this semester, some workers "didn't get their eight-hour minimum," she said, which is one of the few requirements of working for BuDS. In response, BuDS stopped hiring to allow current workers to pick up more shifts and fulfill this minimum requirement before they started allowing new employees to pick up shifts that the current workers may have wanted.
During this brief hiring suspension, 18 students came in looking for jobs, Masarin wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. Those students were put on a waitlist and were told that they would be e-mailed "as soon as they would be hiring new workers again." Masarin said the students received e-mails Monday. Many of the students who were initially put on the waitlist did come back for a job, said Ann Hoffman, director of administration for dining services.
But Masarin added that some students who initially came to BuDS for a job may have found work elsewhere by the time they received the e-mails informing them that BuDS jobs were available again.
It's "not unusual to keep a waitlist for a short amount of time," Masarin said, adding that it "happens almost every semester." The Herald reported in April 2010 that there was a similar waitlist in fall 2009.
Though Hoffman said the number of BuDS workers "fluctuates every single day," Masarin said BuDs has "probably around 340 workers."
There are 794 shifts per week for student workers, Masarin wrote.
