By: Karen Aylot, Vice President, Care, Compassion, and More Care
Dear SFU community,
As you know, we care a lot about our wonderful employees — like, a lot. In fact, we care so much that it scares us, and we’re afraid that if we cared anymore, we might actually care too much. That is why we continue to employ cleaning and dining staff indirectly through third-party companies, even though employees may wish otherwise.
Don’t worry, though. Whether our employees are contracted in or out of house, we make sure they’re treated fairly. Just don’t ask them. Not because they would tell you otherwise, but because, well, like we said, we just care so much that we want to save them the hassle of having to explain how fairly we treat them. Yeah, we care that much.
You may or may not have seen a report from a few years back analyzing what it would mean for us to contract in vs. out of house. And yes, the report did conclude that switching to direct, in-house contracts for cleaning and dining staff may “improve service quality, progress mission to educate, and enable career pathways,” and “promote SFU’s equity and diversity.” But the report also said that transitioning to in-house contracts might result in more absences, because staff would receive paid time off. We’d hate to see all this caring go to waste for something trivial like a doctor’s appointment or root canal.
And that’s the thing — there is one thing that the analysis failed to take into account. Can you guess what it is? Exactly — just how much we truly care. Some things you just can’t measure — care, love, pay . . . you just can’t put a number on that stuff. But if you really did have to, we can assure you that our out of house staff make an exceptional satisfactory liveable wage. Trust us. You don’t need to look at the living wage for Metro Vancouver and then check out our hourly wage chart. We already checked to save you the trouble, because we care about you too.
