Work, salary issues raised as Green Bean expands

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Author: Elwyn Pratt

Human Resources recently informed the student managers at the Green Bean that they are required to reduce their work hours, despite an agreement earlier this school year allowing them to work 15 to 20 hours per week at a wage of $12 per hour.

According to Assistant Director for Student Life Justin Gerboc, the Green Bean managers had an earnings cap of $5,000 for the year.

With their pay rate and the number of hours they’re working, they’re bumping up against that cap,” Gerboc said. “However, we’re trying to figure out is if that cap was a reasonable expectation.

According to Gerboc, wage limits were informally agreed upon during the student-run coffee shop’s formative years. The $5,000 cap was the first formalized limitation imposed on the Green Bean management staff.

“We’re realizing that either the hours need to be scaled back so that it’s no longer a 15 to 20 hours [per] week job, or the cap needs to be extended to accomodate their needs,” Gerboc said.

Since the Green Bean’s founding in 2009, the business
has maintained a cooperative relationship with the Office of Student Life, Financial Aid, Associated Students of Occidental College and other organizations. The student managers are currently meeting with administrators to work out an agreement.

“They’re aware of our concerns and we’re aware of theirs,” Green Bean sales analysis manager Tyler Radler (junior) said.

Cutting management hours, according to Radler, has implications for the whole business.

“We’re trying to do everything more efficiently,” Radler said. “The conflict we’re facing is whether cutting more hours will allow things to run more efficiently, or if it will diminish the amount of quality we can provide.”

Green Bean manager Hana Kaneshige (junior) had similar concerns about work hour limitations.

“We’re not being able to fulfill our job to meet all the requirements that the Green Bean demands of us,” Kaneshige said. “We spend a lot of time and energy trying to make sure that the Green Bean functions as well as it can. In the past, because the Green Bean was just starting, a lot of managers were able to put in the hours that they needed, but financial aid and [Human Resources] have recently been keeping more track of work hours.”

According to Radler, students should not expect a Green Bean strike of any nature, but the work hour limitations may lead to other consequences in the next few weeks.

“If it seems like we’re running out of things more than we usually do, a likely reason is that we haven’t been able to spend time on tasks that we used to,” Radler said.

The Green Bean is a relatively new establishment in the larger scheme of Occidental’s history. However, the coffee lounge now firmly claims a unique niche on campus, serving hundreds of members of the Occidental community everyday. The last generation of students to remember a time without the Green Bean will graduate in May. The rapid expansion of the establishment may be the cause of its current problems.


“The Green Bean’s success is such an interesting experience for the college that it is causing growing pains in different ways,” Gerboc said, “and no matter how passionate or upset the Green Bean managers may be in a moment, their amount of professionalism in interacting with members of administration, in my experience, is what has allowed them to be successful.”

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