Sixty-five percent of Miami of Ohio dining shifts are vacant

OXFORD, Ohio — A report by Dining and Culinary Services revealed student employment for fall 2014 is short 3,500 hours in comparison to last year.

In preparing for the fall semester, Culinary Services did not expect the drastic drop in the number of student employees.

Every spring, staff development specialist Jennifer Baker Williams evaluates the number of student employees at each dining hall location through statistics.

“Our customer count has gone up, which we expected, but the people willing to work is going down,” Baker Williams said.

According to Nancy Heidtman, Senior Director of Dining and Culinary Services, the lack of student staffing has resulted in the long lines students complain about at the Armstrong Student Center.

With full-scale operations in all of the dining halls, the Vacancy Report, released earlier this semester, showed that only 25 to 35 percent of student shifts are currently filled, This means nearly 65 percent of work shifts in dining halls are vacant.