Most students in paid MSU positions have volunteered for the MSU in the past
C/O Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash
Every year around February and March, the McMaster Students Union begins hiring for paid student positions. Whether it’s being a part-time director for an MSU service, a research assistant for MSU Advocacy or working for the Silhouette, there are many ways to get involved and actually be paid for your work.
In addition, the MSU highlights that prior employment or volunteer experience within the MSU is not required to apply for these positions. While that may be true, the odds of actually landing a position in the MSU without prior volunteer experience are very unlikely.
But if they’re saying you can apply without prior experience in the MSU, why would they not also hire students who don’t have prior experience? I’m not saying it’s impossible to be hired for a paid role, I’m just saying it’s not likely you will be hired for a paid role.
Why is that? Because in the four years I’ve been at McMaster University, most people I know who have been hired for paid roles had previous volunteer experience within the MSU.
Because in the four years I’ve been at McMaster University, most people I know who have been hired for paid roles had previous volunteer experience within the MSU.
Let’s highlight the part-time director positions first, shall we? Director positions are student positions that manage an MSU service. For example, services such as the Women and Gender Equity Network, Spark, the Student Health Education Centre, Diversity Services and Maccess all have a director.
Currently, all of these directors used to be volunteer executives for their respective services. Volunteer executives have to commit a large amount of time to the service — around 5-10 hours a week — typically for a whole year. If we open it up even further, most part-time directors have at least been a general volunteer for their service or the MSU as a whole.
Evidently, most directors have volunteered for the MSU in the past. This can make sense in many ways, as they are managing a whole service and obviously need to be qualified to do this — so volunteering is an asset, right? But what about paid positions that don’t involve directing a whole service?
Even for non-managerial roles, students who are hired for paid roles often have volunteer experience beforehand. I can speak on behalf of the Sil — as the Opinions Editor for the past two years, I volunteered for the Sil the year before I got hired.
At the Sil, previous experience is considered an asset. You don’t need to have previous experience to be hired, of course, but you’re much more likely to have a step-up in being hired if you can say you’ve written an article or two for the Sil in the past.
I can’t speak on behalf of the other paid roles in the MSU, but I can tell you that almost all my friends that have been hired for a paid role in the MSU have volunteered for the MSU at some point in their undergraduate career.
So what’s the problem? The problem is: what about the people who can’t afford to volunteer? Students may find themselves in a financially unstable situation where the only option they have is to find a job — volunteering simply doesn’t make sense because it won’t help them pay for their groceries or rent.
As a result, because they are not volunteering for the MSU, they are less likely to land a paid role in the MSU. This makes a lot of paid roles in the MSU financially inaccessible for students if they are unable to volunteer. They may be spectacular at the role they’re applying for, but they may not be hired because they don’t have previous experience with the MSU.
So what’s the problem? The problem is: what about the people who can’t afford to volunteer?
The fact that “you can apply regardless of MSU experience” is misleading — you can apply, but if you do have volunteer experience, you are more likely to be hired. It’s okay if volunteering helps you get a step up in being hired, but the MSU should start making that more clear.
The McMaster Students Union employs dozens of students through part-time positions in various services with flexible hours. These often attract the best and the brightest within the student union. But working for the student union is not without its own hiccups, and students are speaking up.
Following the end of her term as part-time manager for the Peer Support Line, Zeinab Khawaja, a fourth-year Health Sciences student, presented a statement to the Student Representative Assembly. She expressed concerns about the expectations the MSU holds for their workers.
In her statement, Khawaja argued that part-time managers have not received adequate training before their roles began and subsequently did not receive adequate support from their higher-ups. She took particular issue with the expectation many held for part-time managers that they would willingly work over their hours without compensation.
“My job description contains the line ‘Time demands may exceed stated hours of work’ and there is an expectation that I will not be paid for this. This is unhealthy, unfair and quite probably in violation of labour laws,” she said at the SRA meeting on April 9.
Services, part-time managers and you
Whether you were aware or not, you have probably used an MSU service at some point during your undergraduate career.
The MSU offers over 30 services for all members. These range from leadership-oriented services such as the MSU Maroons and the Creating Leadership Among Youth conference to advocacy-driven services such as Diversity Services and Maccess, which aim to promote equity for marginalized groups on campus. MSU services are largely run by fellow students, many of whom work as part-time managers for the each service.
Broadly speaking, part-time managers are in charge of hiring executives, managing finances and coordinating events for their service. Every service has specific needs and different services require different jobs from their respective part-time manager.
For example, part-time managers for advocacy-related services such as the Women and Gender Equity Network and Diversity Services are often expected to work with other equity-related groups on campus such as the Ontario Public Research Group and the Presidents’ Advisory Council on Building an Inclusive Community.
The majority of part-time managers are expected to work for roughly 10 to 14 hours per week depending on the service with the majority of their terms beginning May 1 and ending April 30. Some exceptions exist.
Some part-time managers are paid for more hours such as the Emergency First Response Team director, or different, shorter terms for seasonal part-time managers such as the Shinerama Campaign coordinator whose job is finished after Welcome Week is over.
"This is unhealthy, unfair and quite probably in violation of labour laws."
Zeinab Khawaja
Fourth-year Health Sciences
One manager's experience
Peer Support Line is an anonymous and confidential support line where any McMaster student may receive emotional support from trained volunteers. PSL saw a marked increase in usage this year, and Khawaja ran into new, unprecedented problems with her own safety being compromised at times due to her association with the service.
“Our usage more than doubled from last year, meaning we were much busier than we have been in the past. I was repeatedly talking to security services/police because of certain unprecedented situations, and I often had to drop academics or other commitments to do so due to the urgency of the situation,” she said.
To ensure the service ran smoothly and that her volunteers were also being supported, Khawaja had to work over her paid hours repeatedly. Because of this, she asked for retroactive pay from the Executive Board, the MSU committee responsible for the day-to-day operations of the student union. Khawaja asked for three extra hours per week from Sept. 1 to March 26, and was denied this request. This denial sparked her desire to speak up about her working conditions.
In Khawaja’s last Executive Board report for PSL, she expressed her lack of compensation for the work she and her executive team had put in throughout the year, but received little support from the board.
“When I shared the things we were struggling with, I got no support. I explicitly said that I needed help with a few things, but there was no feedback, follow-up or guidance provided. In fact, none of the concerns I brought up at EB throughout the year were ever mentioned again unless I actively brought it up multiple times,” said Khawaja.
“It feels like our dedication to our services is used against us, because it is known that we will continue to do the work and put in the hours even though we are not being compensated fairly for it. … Yet going above and beyond in our roles — something implicitly expected of a “good” part-time manager — is not rewarded, and instead deemed a ‘personal choice’ of the part-time manager that was never explicitly asked of us.”
Khawaja also expressed concern about part-time manager training, since they were not explicitly trained to do the day-to-day activities expected from them such as filling out a purchase order, working with the MSU Underground for promotional material and booking spaces on campus. Many other part-time managers came to Khawaja to learn how to do these tasks.
“These are basic tasks that all part-time managers have to be able to do. This not only indicates that the training provided to us did not prepare us for our jobs, but also that there wasn’t a supportive environment where part-time managers felt they could ask for help without fear of being judged,” she said.
While Khawaja was the only part-time manager to speak at the SRA meeting, she states she has the support of other part-time managers who were not comfortable speaking up.
“I didn’t ask anyone be included because I know it’s difficult and no one seemed very excited to be included. Some people explicitly said they didn’t want to be named. ... I’m someone who’s comfortable and it was really important to me to bring this to attention so that it would hopefully change, and I know that how other people feel,” she said.
While Khawaja was the only part-time manager to speak at the SRA meeting, she states she has the support of other part-time managers who were not comfortable speaking up.
What is being done
Preethi Anbalagan, the current vice president (Administration), cannot comment on Khawaja’s statement since she is not at liberty to comment on closed meetings or disclose similar information. She does, however, plan to support part-time managers through various other means and pointed out that there are steps in place within the union to support part-time managers.
All part-time managers are expected to report to the Executive Board, a committee consisting of the board of directors, some SRA members and some of the full-time MSU staff. Part-time managers are expected to meet with EB regularly and submit EB reports. These EB reports are typically two to four pages in length and discuss updates, service usage, budgeting, volunteer retention, successes and challenges and similar topics.
“You do have that nine person panel, where you are supposed to talk about some of the challenges you face on a day-to-day basis or put them in the EB report so that nine people around that table are able to look at those challenges and provide some recommendations and how part-time managers can navigate the challenges they’re facing,” Anbalagan said.
Anbalagan also plans to implement an anonymous feedback form where employees may comment on how she can improve in her role as their support. This will exist in tandem to the traditional one-on-ones vice presidents (Administration) have held in order to support their workers. At this time, however, it is unclear whether issues concerning compensation and unpaid hours will be addressed by the upper management of the MSU.
Part-time managers continue to work diligently to ensure their services run smoothly and grow. With Khawaja’s statement ringing in the ears of the higher-ups, there is hope more safeguards will be put in place to maintain a more equitable work environment for all MSU employees.
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