$10 an hour to do your homework

I'm not going to lie, I've had a job like this. During my two years in Forbes College, I worked a weekly shift at the Forbes Cafe, a great place for Forbesians to get some coffee between the hours of 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. From a student's standpoint, it was awesome. For a cumulative time of about one hour, I actually "made" coffee from an automated Flavia machine and socialized with friends and frequent customers, and for the other three hours I finished problem sets and essays for an hourly wage of $9.70. Essentially, I made about $40-$50 every Tuesday night to do my homework.

But after reading Friday's article about how overworked the Rocky-Mathey Dining Services staff was after the dining hall renovations, it made me really curious about how much the Dining Services staff make for their work. I also felt bad for getting paid well for my not-so-serious job. I reached the conclusion that Princeton spoils its academic community of students and faculty and sometimes misses out on its worker staff.

It's pretty shocking for a staff worker under the pseudonym of "Robert" to state that Rocky-Mathey kitchen has turned into a "slave camp," and especially shocking when blacks are a significant demographic of the Dining Services staff. With many of these staff workers working overtime three to four nights a week, it's safe to say that the intensity and the amount of work they do is significantly greater than, say, what I did at the Forbes Cafe. The most intensive thing I ever did in the cafe was a problem set.

And how about the janitors who work the graveyard shift at Frist Campus Center? According to one facilities worker last year, there were only four janitors from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. to clean every floor of Frist — all 185,000 sq. ft. of it — before it opened again each day. I hope they get paid well. If a staff worker isn't earning significantly more than I make doing homework at the Forbes Cafe, then it's a great injustice to them.

The University certainly makes every effort to give the best of the best to its students and make our college lives amazing: from top-caliber professors and excellent dining facilities to generous financial aid and funding for study abroad and research, all the way down to free laundry and free unlimited printing. We are an important part of this University community, and we pay almost $170,000 one way or another to be a part of it. But for some of us, a small portion of that $170,000 is earned through the federal work-study program that lands us a job doing homework.

There are a number of student jobs at Princeton that pay anywhere from $7 to $15 an hour, and the majority of time on the job can be spent on the internet and doing homework. It just doesn't make sense to pay a student working at the front desk of a library doing his homework the same rate as a student working nonstop for a residential college dining hall. If we were in the shoes of these staff workers and knew that students made that much money at these certain jobs doing less intensive and possibly less specialized work, we might feel pretty disgruntled. I mean, I don't know the pay rates, but if it happens that any of the workers at Princeton make less money than I did in the Forbes Cafe and had to work harder at it, then I guess you could say that either Princeton students value coffee more than they should or something just isn't fair on campus.

Couldn't the University just offer us our slice of paradise and avoid running into problems with its staff? Perhaps our focus on the academic community of the University unintentionally clouds our ability to see how our operations affect the workers. For example, according to Robert, he thinks that "Dining Services has concentrated on aesthetic change — possibly to impress students, parents and potential donors — while neglecting workers' situations." I wouldn't be too quick to accuse the University of actively dismissing the problems the workers face, but there certainly is evidence that the University is not paying enough attention to them. Students certainly get treated well at this University; let's hope that everyone else does too. Ben Chen is a Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering major from Los Altos, Calif. He may be reached at bc@princeton.edu.