By Ella White ‘22
News Editor
Mount Holyoke College is facing the same staffing shortages that have been affecting the rest of the country since the start of the pandemic. Employment in the United States is down nearly 3 million jobs from March 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, with about half of those jobs coming from the food industry. The 1.5 million workers who have not yet returned make up about 12 percent of the food industry’s workforce.
Mount Holyoke’s campus is no exception. Dining Services is still understaffed. Chisato Kimura ’22, a student dining manager who oversees student employees working in the Dining Commons, estimates the school is still looking to fill roughly 10 full-time positions.
“A lot of [the work] has kind of come on[to] the students,” Kimura said. “We’ve had a lot of great student cashiers who have really stepped up, because we don’t have as many cashiers as we used to, and all the students are doing great in stations — but definitely a lot of shortages.”
Kimura noted that the number of student workers in dining reaches nearly 400, and the open positions give more people opportunities to work, especially as the College has capped each student’s employment at 15 hours per week.
Still, according to Kimura, student workers cannot run stations themselves. “It’s pretty obvious that if we had enough people, the Perk would be open, the Pub would be open,” Kimura added. “I think it’s pretty clear that we’re not operating at full capacity right now.”
A lack of employees is not only affecting the nation’s food industry, however. Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker is using the state’s National Guard to compensate for school bus driver shortages across the state.
James Hartley, chair of the Mount Holyoke economics department, says incentives not to work can be narrowed down to three factors: unemployment benefits, the eviction moratorium and fear of COVID-19.
“The general phenomenon, we can say, is you think about why people want to go to work in the first place,” Hartley explained. You go to work because you want the income from the work.”
“If you were making $40,000 if you were going to work and $38,000 if you stayed home — do you want to work for 40 or stay home for 38?” Hartley said. “Everybody will have a number at which they’ll say, ‘I want to go to work.’”
Employers, he continued, have a choice: they can offer higher wages now and attempt to win back workers, or they can wait for workers to lose their incentives to stay home and return at the same pre-pandemic wages.
In a survey conducted by One Fair Wage, as published in Time, 76 percent of food service employees said low wages was one of their top five reasons for leaving, and 55 percent cited concerns about COVID-19 as one of their top five reasons.
“The awful truth is that hundreds of thousands of people have died, and a lot of those people were service industry workers, so it’s unfortunately not super surprising to me that there’s a worker shortage,” Kimura said.
For Kimura, workers have every reason not to return.
“This is an institution-wide problem. It’s not just dining,” Kimura said. “Mount Holyoke doesn’t pay enough, for its student workers, for its full-time staff,” Kimura added. “It’s also an American problem. They don’t pay enough, so obviously people aren’t going to work.”