During the pandemic, we discovered the mental health importance of our workplace routines. For students, staff, and faculty at the University of New Brunswick, slipping out to get a coffee or cookie at one of the cafés keeps us going. Picking up something for a colleague is a small act of support. Going together allows a moment’s conversation about a problem. We return to our work fortified, ready to finish a paper, read one more article, prepare for an exam.
Coffee out of a thermos, tea made alone, a cookie dug from the bottom of a backpack are not adequate substitutes. Why? Because the quick break almost always involves a personal exchange with café staff, with people who know and care about us.
They notice when we’re down. They congratulate us on completing a task. We exchange news about children and grandchildren. They observe the small details of our life: a new jacket, a haircut, a visitor. They affirm our presence, give meaning to our lives, offer a spot of human kindness.
On a widely read and shared Facebook post, Doreen Crilley, who runs the Tilley Café at UNB, observed that “Every day I have at the very least one great laugh and the best conversations. I am blessed that faculty, staff, and students have always made me feel appreciated and very much part of the UNB community.” We are blessed in return.
During the pandemic, we also learned how critical Crilley and the dozens of other staff are to our core wellbeing, to our mental equilibrium, to our ability to do our jobs with steady regularity.
The food service staff on UNB’s Fredericton campus received termination notices on February 20, 2023, from Sodexo telling them their last day of work would be May 31, 2023.
For everyone, the mental shock was significant. No anatomical metaphor can capture impact. It was all at once a gut-punch, knee to the groin, knife in the back, whack upside the head, and slap in the face, and again in succession. It has not let up.
The Sodexo employees have no idea whether they will have a job come June, whether they will be able to pay their bills, especially in the time between May 31 and the activation of employment insurance.
People have been speaking out about the callous treatment of these dedicated colleagues. On March 6, Matthew Sears, a professor in the department of Classics and Ancient History, sent a letter signed by over 130 faculty and staff to the top administration at UNB expressing concern over the treatment of these food service workers. In late March, the Canadian Union of Public Employees organized a petition campaign. Faculty have raised the matter repeatedly in UNBF’s Faculty Senate. Nothing moves the administration.
Crilley has been at UNB for 48 years and, along with running the coffee shop, has served thousands of people at presidential parties and receptions. For her, the knowledge that senior administrators, who she attended to with humanity and goodwill for decades, would betray her and her coworkers in this way is demoralizing.
“The stress is unbelievable! Did I ever for one minute think that I worked for UNB? Not once! But did I think they would protect our backs? Most definitely,” Doreen noted in her post.
The anxiety and anger of those 75 members of the UNB community cannot be tamped down. Their affection for and trust of UNB is badly eroded, for some it vaporized. It is an open question how they will move forward, how they will recover.
Their requests for information from the administration so they can plan for post-May 31 are being ignored, all in the name of questionable economic efficiencies and the needs of the university. What is anticipated is that they will almost certainly take a marked cut in pay should food service work at UNB Fredericton be available to them after the termination date.
UNB prides itself on being one of the best employers in Canada. That claim is now farcical.
When faculty and students inquire about the decision not to protect food service staff in the new contract with Chartwells, we are told in saccharine tones that there was nothing UNB could do, that the university simply had to make a new contract with no conditions, as though the university had no bargaining power. We are treated as though we are children rather than well-informed professionals who know better.
These same senior administrators ponder with gravitas the severe mental health problems among students that are over-taxing student services, the high absentee rates in classes, and the rising attrition rates. At the same time, they send support staff and decanal level administrators to expensive workshops, paid for with university resources (i.e., from the funds to educate students), to help them be happy in the workplace.
The handling of the food service contract exposes the dangerous hypocrisy of the UNB administration, one day touting UNB as the best employer in NB, and then treating long-standing members of the UNB community as expendable, people from whom they can squeeze a few dollars. The administration’s ruthless economizing and its sanctimonious dismissiveness about the wellbeing of long-standing members of the UNB community is exacting a high toll on the health of the UNB in every way.
It is hard to understand how damaging and insulting 75 of our lower-waged colleagues makes UNB more economically efficient, unless the task is to inure us to this cruelty, to train us to look away. Is it any wonder that there is a student mental health crisis, a rising attrition rate, and poor classroom attendance? The dissonance on this issue alone is enough to keep people away from campus.
The cost of this decision to UNB has already been extremely high. In the end, they will far outweigh any savings.
Tertulias Fredericton will be hosting an event about this situation on April 11 at 7:30pm. For more information check out the NB Media Co-op’s community calendar or the Facebook event.
Elizabeth Mancke is the Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at the University of New Brunswick and a regular at Crilley’s Tilley Café on UNB Fredericton’s Campus.
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