Just over a week ago, all students and staff received an email from Capital Communications regarding the reduced hours of One Main Café.
The email read, “Labor shortages are impacting organizations across the country, and they are now impacting Capital.”
Because of this labor shortage, Capital had no choice but to reduce their hours at One Main on Labor Day weekend.
Daniel Parton, District Manager for campus dining, seconded this by discussing how the change in hours were due to the nationwide shortage of staff and the pandemic. Despite these hours going back to normal, things are not exactly ordinary for dining staff.
With normal hours returning, staffing is still not where it should be.
“The shortage of full time and part time employees mixed with quarantining of current staff due to possible exposure to COVID in their daily lives, left us without enough coverage to provide quality service and quality product,” Parton said.
Parton as well as Liz Hernandez, who is also a part of the dining services team, are working on ways to make this better for everyone involved.
They currently have 57 employees as a part of their staffing services. Included in that number are many temporary staff members used to fill in the gaps they are missing. Normally, they would like to have 80-90 employees.
In order to try to fix this issue, Parton and Hernandez have been running ads on Indeed, Facebook, and other job posting outlets. They also have put out signs on campus in an attempt to hire students.
“For students, we are very flexible and able to work around almost any schedule. Currently we are not seeing a lot of applications coming in, but we are following up on every lead we receive,” Parton said.
Their biggest need for employment is in the evenings for One Main Café. The issue with this is many workers rely on the COTA bus line, which does not run late into the evenings. However, for those who work at MDR this is not an issue since MDR closes at 8 p.m. and they are still able to catch the bus.
Regardless, staffing is stretched thin across dining services and any help is appreciated. If anyone is interested, they can contact Liz Hernandez at liz.hernandez@aladdinfood.com.
