By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 14, 2012
As part of the effort to cut costs at AfterMath, employees have begun discussing the possibility of giving up their paycheques for the remainder of the month.
However, this is not as simple a process as it seems.
There are several issues with this idea; first of all, all parties have to careful to stay within BC labour laws.
According to these provincial guidelines, workers cannot simply waive their wages. They also cannot purely work for tips.
The two options currently on the table, according to interim SUS president Shane Potter, would be for staff to still receive paycheques and donate them back to AfterMath after the fact, or for servers to quit and work as volunteers for the rest of semester.
It’s currently unclear what stage this proposal is in. AfterMath manager Brad Ross commented on record last week that it has already been implemented.
“Staff has forfeited their hourly salary and they’re going to work for tips which is going to save us a ton of money,” he said. Brad Ross later retracted this statement, saying that he expected the changes to take place by the time his comments would be published and this was not, in fact, the case.
“I think that it’s a very selfless and valiant effort to offset the cost of AfterMath at this time,” Potter says. “We just, as a society, have to look at the legal ramifications of this.”
The second issue in play is the importance of it being a unanimous move on the part of the servers, which is currently untrue.
Dakota Ross, one of the current servers at AfterMath and son of manager Brad Ross, was the first to bring up the idea of giving wages back to the pub.
“I brought that up, and the staff seemed to be somewhat on board about it, for the most part,” he says. “I’d say at least eighty per cent of them were for it.”
While saving the server wages ould help cut down on AfterMath’s losses for this month (Potter estimates no more $6000 in saved wages would be saved out of a $10,000 budget for the month), it is by no means a permanent solution.
“It’s a question of, okay, I love this place, I really love the people I work with, I respect my boss – but can I afford to work for nothing?” Ally Schuurman says. She worked at the pub both this year and last, although she is currently on leave for unrelated reasons.
“It’s only meant to be a short-term solution,” Dakota Ross admits. “It’s not meant to solve the problem. It was only really meant to try to give a couple more weeks for SUS to figure stuff out for the next year.”
These options are still on the table and being discussed, but the clock is ticking. Potter notes that it’s fairly late in the month to still be discussing these options – AfterMath is slated to close on November 30, no matter what happens at the SUS EGM on the 21.
These changes would not apply to kitchen staff or Brad Ross’ salary.
