By Bahi’chi Castañeda
A majority of the students and professional staff members that I spoke with, even those that no longer work for RAD, requested to remain anonymous for fear of further retaliation, so I’ve made the decision to keep everyone anonymous. With the exception of the Assistant Director, I’ll only be identifying folks by the department they work(ed) in.
During one of the first meetings for the newly hired 2018-2019 Residential Life Student Staff, Sharon Goodman tells us that we are Residential and Dining Services (RAD) and that when “they” talk about RAD, “they” are talking about all of us. We exchange nervous looks, but Goodman doesn’t elaborate on who they are, only that their negativity about RAD is negativity about us. So, what exactly does it mean to be RAD? I spoke with several current and former resident assistants (RAs), facilities workers, and residential directors (RD), as well as the Assistant Director to try and find out.
RAs live where they work, and they’re expected to be available to address resident concerns at any time, day or night. They are often responsible for specific students, like those in a particular apartment building or floor of a residence hall. Major parts of the RA role include conflict resolution, untangling the messy interpersonal relationships that arise amongst residents when sharing a living space with others, navigating the College as an institution and connecting residents to campus and local community resources, and being on duty. When an RA is on duty, they are required to stay on campus in RAD gear, and answer the duty phone if it rings — again, at any time, day or night. When I was an RA, duty shifts were from 4:45pm on Friday until 8:00am on Monday. (This has since been changed to 4:30pm to 8:30am shifts on weekdays and 4:30pm to 4:30pm shifts on weekends a few times a month).
Until the 2020-2021 academic year, RAs were paid a stipend of up to about ~$200 at the highest end of the scale for an estimated 20 hours of work per week, had their on-campus housing covered by RAD (as they are required to live on campus), and were provided a meal plan to use at the Greenery. RAs were not allowed to work another job, on- or off-campus, or participate in extracurriculars without permission from their supervisor per their contract. Working 20 hours a week at minimum wage ($13.50) would put their paychecks at $270, more than they were making from the stipend. Not only that, but many RAs were working much more than 20 hours per week. As one RD I spoke to points out, “Because housing is not included in your income and food isn’t included in your income, even though they’re really significant parts of the compensation, you’re not setting yourself up for success financially […]. If a big part of your compensation isn’t salary, it’s not necessarily ideal for savings and long-term stuff.”
Early last fall, the 2019-2020 Residential Life Student Staff team presented their supervising RDs, Assistant Director Dani Clark, and Director Sharon Goodman with a list of unmet needs in three major areas that they needed addressed in order to survive and thrive in their role as RAs. The three major areas that needed improvement included transparency and clear communication, food security, and more adequate compensation. Their five-page Needs Document begins:
“We, the RAs, are struggling to survive and thrive […] We are coming to you with three major areas that we need to see improvement in, in order to adequately perform our jobs and exist fruitfully as students and human beings. […] We ask that you listen with an open mind, and recognize that we are taking this time to advocate for our own wellbeing in the ways that you have taught us to.”
Another key piece of the Needs Document was a request to remove a part of the RA contract that vaguely states that RAs were responsible for “other duties as assigned and needed.” This was used to enlist the help of the RAs who were on campus during the snowstorm and subsequent campus-wide power outage/shut down in February 2019, and part of the reason that RAs wanted it removed. Scared of losing their job (and consequently, their housing and access to food), RAs showed up at 8am after receiving an email that threatened job action if they didn’t, were handed shovels without warning, and told to start clearing snow. Some RAs shoveled for several hours at a time. As compensation, we received a Costco sheet cake that we were told was given to us by George Bridges himself. None of us were paid extra for the countless hours spent helping out that weekend.
When I interviewed Dani Clark, Assistant Director of RAD, they were unable to give me a clear answer on whether or not pro-staff and upper management saw the Needs Document as a list of demands, despite RAs spending countless hours writing and rewriting the document to sound as non-threatening as possible. They did share that the response the RAs received, one that Dani and the RDs had spent hours writing together, came with multiple significant edits. At the time, multiple RDs confided to some RAs that the response they received was not at all the one Dani and the RDs were written, but it was the only response they were allowed to send. When I asked if any of the unmet needs had been addressed, Dani said that only some of them had. In response to concerns surrounding food security and more adequate pay, Dani noted, “We asked RAs [the year before] if they wanted a bigger meal plan or if they wanted more dollars, and they said more dollars in a paycheck.” For the RAs I spoke to, that “more dollars in a paycheck” was only $2 which for the original 16 RAs twice a month comes to $64/month for the whole staff, or approximately $576 for the 2019-2020 academic year. Dani expressed that they saw these issues as individual issues, rather than issues symptomatic of a deeper institutional problem. For Dani, it was more of a question of “What do YOU need? How can we help YOU?” with regards to each RA. They claimed that had the RAs come to their RDs individually and expressed that they were experiencing food insecurity, felt that they were working too much, or felt that they weren’t being paid enough, that it would’ve been addressed on an individual, case-by-case basis. Allegedly, because the RAs organized and approached them as a unified group, it was largely out of Dani’s hands.
Since last year, significant changes have been made to the RA role. Dani told me that RAs hours were reduced from 20 per week to 12 per week, and that “[they] took the money that was paying for the stipend to pay for more meal plans so that [we] could have more RAs, so [the RAs] had fewer residents. The plan before the pandemic was that there would be an RA for every single floor in every residence hall, as well as every single apartment. We were going to almost double the staff so people wouldn’t have to work as many hours, they could focus on school or get another job that paid them a paycheck.” The RA role also “made the shift from […] being a programming, event focused role to being relationships focused only. Having conversations with your residents, having community meetings, etc.” Most interestingly to me, the RA role has “switched […] to a leadership position so that ANY student at Evergreen is eligible for the RA position because there are students who cannot work because they’re not legally allowed in the State of Washington or in the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Certain kinds of VISAs dont allow for work, as well as undocumented students. You don’t need proof of eligibility to work to be an RA now.” When I asked who signed off on that particular decision, Dani confidently told me that they made the decision by themselves and Sharon Goodman signed off on it. Dani claimed that it was motivated by the question of, “How do we use the budget we have to better serve our students AND make the job more manageable?”
Issues of lack of transparency and communication, food security, and adequate compensation are not exclusive to RAs. Many of the student workers I spoke to in facilities, which includes the grounds, custodial, and maintenance crews, said the same thing: there is a significant lack of understanding and respect from RAD upper management. One facilities worker wrote, “[RAD] constantly held our jobs over our heads, saying that a professional custodial crew would be cheaper and that if WE didn’t get our ‘act together’ we would all be fired.” Even more concerning, “there would be whole meetings where [they] would drone on and on about how [Washington] is a “at will” state and [how] we [were] disposable to [them].” Last academic year, there was a letter written by a then-facilities lead that “ask[ed] for more cooperation from upper management to create a fair work environment.” Unfortunately, I don’t have access to this letter. For facilities workers, there was no response or acknowledgement at all and the facilities lead who presented it had their position eliminated and was ultimately demoted.
Intriguingly (and disappointingly), this issue of adequate compensation isn’t exclusive even to student workers. Retention of professional staff (RDs) at RAD has been an on-going issue. For almost five years (2015 to Summer 2019), with only one exception, RDs were not retained beyond one academic year. One RD told me that “a large factor that contributed to that was pay that didn’t necessarily benchmark competitively with peer institutions.” That is, until somewhere around 2018, RDs were only compensated around ~$2,600 per month (plus housing and meal plan). They’re now compensated somewhere around ~$4,000 per month (plus housing and meal plan), but retention issues still persist.
Although Dani Clark framed the decision to shift the RA position from paid to volunteer-based as unrelated to the struggle by RAs for transparency and clear communication, food security, and more adequate compensation and spun it as a largely positive thing, I can’t help but suspect that it is simply retaliation against student workers by RAD in what appears to be a consistent (intentional or not) pattern of retaliation. Being an RA appeals to vulnerable and marginalized students, because RAD pays for your (overpriced) housing on-campus (where you’re required to live in order to qualify for the job) and provides you an (insufficient) meal plan. When RAs were paid, they weren’t paid enough to build any sort of savings. Many stayed as RAs for multiple years because they had no other choice. It seems to me that this shift only makes it easier to exploit student labor, particularly that of undocumented students, even without the “other duties as assigned and needed” clause in their contract. Especially when you consider that there are significantly less student jobs on campus this year as a result of the pandemic, and a majority of the jobs that are available off-campus are public facing and thus dangerous in the face of the virus, it seems like a misguided decision at best (and likely ill-intentioned).
RAs (and other RAD student workers) should strike. The best time to strike was yesterday (or last year), and the second best time is right now. It will require solidarity and support from students, staff, and faculty — particularly residential students, who RAD places the most value upon because without you, they make no money. Without students living on-campus, there is no one to charge for housing, for meal plans, for miscellaneous fees. It will also require solidarity and organization among student workers, which there are significantly less of this year — but there are more of you than there are pro-staff members and upper management. What does it mean to “be RAD”? It means not being understood, it means not being respected. RAD doesn’t seem to comprehend that without you, they would cease to function. If you stopped doing your job, all of housing would come to a grinding halt. It’s about time you showed them exactly what that looks and feels like.
