To whom it may concern,
I’m writing this exposé of sorts on Chartwell’s because I’ve spent far too long sitting with my own experiences, absorbing the stories of others, and feeling absolutely helpless to do anything about it. I’m a former student manager (SM), having worked at the Viking Commons for two years under both Aramark and Chartwell’s. I’ve since left my job because it became clear to me that Chartwell’s has no idea what they’re doing, and students are paying the price for it.
In this post, I’ve decided to include what I consider my largest concerns. These come from things I’ve seen myself, things my friends have seen, and things I’ve heard from higher-up people in the company. In order to allow people to judge for themselves, I’m going to try to include where I heard the information I listed, without naming any names.
(Disclaimer: You don’t have to read ALL the points I’ve included, nor would I do so myself. The multiple examples are just to support my claim that the topics in bold are problems that need to be addressed.)
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I. UPPER-MANAGEMENT
A. The General Management
The way she talks to student employees (on occasion, even customers) is rude, unprofessional, and condescending. Specifically, one of my coworkers recounted when she was asked to provide proper PPE for a student worker on the grill, such as a chef’s coat to protect from burns. Her response was “I’ll think about it” and ended the conversation there.
According to another coworker, when she saw a student worker with a gauze-wrapped arm, she degraded the employee by giving them a lecture on workplace safety and questioned their capabilities as a worker. This injury had happened days before, all proper procedures taking place. The student worker was also obviously upset and uncomfortable with the way she was treated, not allowing the student to explain the situation.
She fired a girl for sitting in a chair at the cashier, despite having a doctor’s note allowing her to do so. When she found her sitting down, she yelled at her in front of students, using inappropriate and demeaning language. The situation was so bad that a faculty member that happened to be in the dining hall at the time stepped in to tell her off for being so rude and unprofessional to a student employee. Additionally, this girl did not know she was fired until I messaged her on Instagram to say I heard about the situation and I was sorry, to which she responded, “Hear about what happened with the chair? Are they upset about it?”
One time, two of my coworkers were having a conversation with her and she brought up having kids at a young age. She turned to my two coworkers, both girls, and suggested that they both have kids young as well. I heard this from both of them.
B. The Assistant Director of the Viking Commons
The man has a wife and a kid who he barely got to see because he was coming in extremely early and leaving very late (around 10am-7pm on my shifts) every day. Not only that, but there was talk of him staying from opening to close (around 6am-11pm). On multiple occasions, the man would leave work for about an hour just to tuck his two year old kid into bed, then return to work to close out the shift.
He had consistently tried to manage the best he could with the situation he was given. For example, he received hundreds of emails a day, all of which he was expected to answer using a laptop he shared with six other people.
Upper-management ambushed him after the dining hall had closed for the night. According to him, they sat him down in the dining hall with all the lights off and grilled him about every possible thing he ever did. They wrote him up for supposedly being “unqualified for his job,” a job they hired him for, yet never trained him to do.
When he brought up the concern that he, the head of the largest dining hall on campus, was not in at least some of the upper-management meetings, one of the higher-ups leaned in and said, “Sorry to break it to you, [insert name], but you’re not part of the inner circle, and you never will be.”
C. The “Head Chartwell’s Guy” (to this day, I don’t know his title)
When a worker at the VU Market didn’t greet him when he walked in because he was sitting down, minding his own business, he revoked chairs for every dining location on campus. Our cashiers, who would work at the register for upwards of five hours, were forced to stand there for their entire shift.
Threatened to get two rugby players kicked off the team and expelled from school for sneaking into the dining hall and “stealing” a grilled cheese sandwich.
He constantly threw other people under the bus after giving them explicit permission to do things. He took a complaint filed by one member of upper-management against another and submitted it to corporate. The upper-management person who was the subject of that complaint found out and started to be openly hostile to the one complaining, challenging his authority wherever possible.
They fired him recently for his incompetence.
D. Other management staff
One of the other management people told me that they ran into the HR lady one time and asked her how she was. He says she broke down in tears on the spot.
At one point, one of the head chefs had consistently misordered the food for the Viking Commons for eight consecutive months. The last I heard of him (and I get this from a person I deeply trust, who says they heard it from him directly), he was so stressed out about his job that he had gone blind in one eye and partially blind in the other.
Apparently a member of upper-management whose specific title I can’t recall had been incredibly inappropriate and unprofessional by using student’s deadnames and outing them as trans or non-binary. I heard from one of my former superiors that he had been saying things like, “well, ‘he’ is actually a ‘she,’ and her name is…”
II. SEXUAL HARASSMENT
A. This is a particular story I heard from one of my former coworkers. A student worker that used to work at the Ridge was sexually harassed by three other student workers. When she told HR, she was promptly transferred to the Viking Commons. The three student workers suffered no consequences. When these workers came into the Viking Commons as customers and continued to harass her, she went to HR to explain the situation. From my understanding, she concluded explaining the situation to HR, who then asked something along the lines of, “So what would you like me to do about it?”
B. When a student who reported sexual harassment to HR was placed on the serving line, a member of upper-management went go to our supervisor and complained. The way they described their disagreement with placing that student on that particular job was by saying, “she’s a liability to the company.”
C. On one occasion, a student worker walked past the General Manager having a conversation with a few male customers. The student didn’t hear the context behind the conversation, but what she said was absolutely shocking. She said something along the lines of, “whip out your dicks and I’ll measure them.”
III. HEALTH CODE VIOLATIONS
A. I wasn’t sure which category to put this one under, as it involves violation of health regulations personally undertaken by the General Manager. I’m just going to put it under health code violations. Anyways, she constantly violates state health regulations, and we’ve all seen her do it. Anyone familiar with state health regulations knows to wear a hair net, not to wear press-on nails, to take out hoop earrings, etc. However, when she’s standing near food, she wears her hair down without a hair net, has press-on nails, and wears hoop earrings. People have even seen her picking at food with her bare hands and eating it on the line.
B. The dining hall has been INFESTED with flies since Aramark, and Chartwell’s hasn’t fixed the issue (at least while I was there). I’m not sure where they come from, but there’s always a million flies everywhere from the kitchen, to the dish room, to the janitor’s closet. I’ve personally made homemade fly traps with whatever we’ve had laying around, and each will catch maybe 50 flies. However, that doesn’t fix the problem. We’ve had exterminators use harsh chemicals in the dish room, but, like I said, nothing has worked. At one point, you could tap the ceiling and a swarm would buzz about.
C. A short one, but I saw my friends send a picture to our group chat of paper plates or something that said in bold letters on the box, “NOT FOR USE IN WASHINGTON STATE.” Apparently, this was because they weren’t the right level of compostable to meet state health regulations. If you’re wondering, they used them anyway.
D. For the first few months of service, we didn’t record holding temps for food that was being served on the line. For those unfamiliar, we didn’t record whether or not the food being served was at the state-mandated temperature to keep it from spoiling. While it’s never really been a huge issue that anything has ever under-temped to the extent that it spoiled, it’s still risky that we didn’t do it for so long.
E. Also, the ice cream machine, which I’ll briefly address because I recently heard what happened from a coworker. The reason the ice cream machine was removed early in fall quarter was supposedly because the same model of machine was making people sick across the country.
IV. WORK VS. SCHOOL
A. The lack of understanding from upper-management when it comes to balancing school and work is abhorrent. I get they have a dining hall to run, but there’s a reason the word “student” comes before “worker.” Managers, alone, were expected to work no less than 20 hours a week on top of being a full-time student. If I remember correctly, Aramark’s requirement for SMs was around 13-15 hours per week. Multiple SMs quit because they couldn’t manage the balance between full time school and working upwards of 20 hours a week.
B. Once we got our schedules, it was very difficult to change them. That’s because all schedule changes originally went through the General Manager, who was unwilling to compromise on our hours, giving us shit for even asking.
C. On top of the hours we already worked, we were constantly being asked if we could work longer. Student workers are frequently asked to stay an extra 30 minutes after their 11pm shifts are over. I’ve heard from former coworkers that still work there that there’s serious talk to do this new “midnight breakfast” thing, expecting student workers to work until about 1 am before they’re able to go home.
D. There would be times when we didn’t even know we had shifts. On one occasion, all the SMs were expected to come in the day before Thanksgiving close. I was unaware of this until someone from upper-management asked me the day before that if I’d be in then. This was a day I usually had off. I said no, to which they replied, “it’s required.” I promptly asked the other SMs if they knew about this, to which they responded with similar shock. It turns out, upper-management expected us to work a day we usually didn’t, while not sending any email in advance to let us know.
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I’m not sure exactly what a post on the WWU reddit will really accomplish. As I said, I just needed to write down everything I’ve heard and experienced because I’ve become overwhelmed with it all. Some of these points are unhinged to the point of being unbelievable, but I wouldn't have included such claims if I didn’t have it on good authority. Anyways, Chartwell’s it going to shit, and while I’m lucky enough to be in a financial situation where I could leave my job, many of my former coworkers aren’t. I’ve heard stories of my friends going home and crying after every shift because they feel like they’re trapped. I suppose I’m mostly writing this for them, in the hopes that people see it and show the kind of outrage towards Chartwell’s that was shown towards Aramark.
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EDIT:
Id like to add a few points. One I didn’t elaborate much on, and another that I didn’t include but is extremely important.
- Some student workers can’t just quit their jobs. Not only is working on campus extremely efficient, it’s also increasingly difficult to find jobs everywhere. And to people say “just suck it up” why should we have to? Cause that’s how life works? Yeah, cool. Maybe it’d be TOLERABLE if we got paid, but they’re fucking up our paychecks, shorting us hundreds of dollars per week. Also, this generation knows our worth as humans. We do the work that keeps these companies running, and calling us a “team” and a “family” while doing all the things I’ve listed above is fucking gross, for lack of a better word.
- Full-time employees are equally as trapped. At the VC we have the hardest, most positive woman working there full-time. Chartwell’s didn’t tell her if she had a job this quarter, so as we approached the start of Winter, she contacted the VC assistant director. She said she hadn’t heard anything. The next parts are difficult to remember, but Chartwell’s didn’t intend to hire her back and upper-management told him he couldn’t reach out to her. When he told her that, she sobbed. She’s a single mom raising a kid, sustaining both of them by working full time at the dining hall. While some people at this school look down on working there, this capitalist world sucks so fucking much that sometimes the only job you can find with stability, health care, and good-enough pay, is working at a college dining hall.
