In their final meeting of the semester, the Student Services Finance Committee passed two resolutions aimed at reforming student wage oversight.
One of the resolutions passed seeks to reduce wage theft on the part of students working for a registered student organization who are paid out of the General Student Services Fund.
The committee moved to require student employees paid through the GSSF to “record their hours worked in a wage accountability form demarking the date, time in and time out, location, and work accomplished,” according to the resolution.
“I do think there needs to be some level of accountability,” SSFC Chair Jeremy Swanson said. “We currently have allocated for [fiscal year 2020] $726,000 in salaries and there is no requirement for groups to tell us how that money is being spent. This is a simple solution that solves part of the problem that at least requires groups to tell us what they're doing with their time and what they're accomplishing.”
One line in the resolution became a point of contention: “no student employee may be paid for time spent over the summer outside of the UW-Madison campus, excluding authorized signers.”
This piece was amended to include the greater Madison area, but not without member discern.
SSFC Vice Chair Zaakir Abdul-wahid spoke about his concerns regarding language in both the original resolution and the amendment.
“Overall, I definitely agree with the sentiment. Unfortunately I feel like this resolution fails to really capture the nature of [the issue] in a concise way,” Abdul-wahid said. “I will be voting against this mainly because of the restrictions on the Madison area and its reliance on the chair's discretion.”
The committee discussed the trial-and-error nature of the new resolution they expect to occur over the summer and into the upcoming fall semester. One way the committee hopes to reduce confusion is to allow RSO’s to petition SSFC if they feel their circumstances do not fit into the language adopted in the resolution.
For example, the RSO Adventure Learning Programs does much of their work off-campus. Under the original resolution, the group would most likely have to petition the committee as their activity would not be payable. The amendment seeks to fix this type of issue, but the committee sees more problems remaining surrounding the policy as new SSFC members are welcomed in next semester.
