BY ALEXANDER ROLLE

In print | Published April 23, 2009

With the growing possibility of major budget cuts, some members of the staff and student body have identified potential changes to staff health benefits as an issue of serious concern. On Sunday, April 19, a group of worried students met in Kohlberg Coffee Bar to discuss employee compensation, along with ways in which they could influence the administration’s decisions in the area.

The idea for the meeting originally came from Dermot Delude-Dix ’09. “After talking to a staff member who was concerned I decided to e-mail a huge list of students that I thought would be concerned,” Delude-Dix said. Among those present at the meeting was Kae Kalwaic, administrative assistant for the Department of Educational Studies, who spoke about the current system for compensating employees of the college and detailed some concerns that staff members had about the possibility of cuts.

Among the topics discussed was the Swarthmore benefit bank, a college fund that pays $153 a month to members of staff with no dependents, as well as a reduced amount to staff members with one dependent. Vice President for Human Resources Melanie Young spoke about the benefit bank at Tuesday night’s Kohlberg fireside chat on the budget, responding to student questions about employee compensation. “The benefit bank is a benefit we have that is much more generous than other employers offer,” Young said in an e-mail. “It is natural that this benefit would come up for discussion at a time when everything is being evaluated.”

According to Suzanne Welsh, Vice President for Finance and Treasurer, the college does consider its competitiveness as an employer when making choices about compensation. “Actions taken by other institutions will be a relevant input [for compensation policy],” she said in an e-mail.

In the last week, members of the administration, including Welsh and Young, spoke at meetings with staff about proposed changes to the budget, including the possibility that staff compensation could be reduced in the following year’s budget. An e-mail from Young informed the staff that “there will be time in the meeting to ask questions and share your perspective [about proposed cuts].” In addition, members of the administration left the meeting “so staff could raise questions with each other at the end,” according to Kalwaic. “However, they didn’t provide the mechanism for organizing that, and the meeting just broke up,” she added.

At Tuesday’s fireside chat, Student Council President Yongjun Heo ’09 mentioned that one of the possible options for the use of the council’s rollover money could be employee health care. A referendum is to be held to determine how the student body wants the money to be spent, and while the options for the referendum are still being decided on by the Council, Heo said that he had received a number of e-mails about employee benefits, and using the money to help the school avoid cuts in that area could be one of the referendum options.

The issue of Student Council’s rollover money was discussed at length at Sunday night’s student meeting, as well as a follow-up meeting that took place on Monday. Some students thought that designating the money for employee health benefits would show the administration the student’s commitment to workers’ rights. While Delude-Dix applauded the sentiment behind the idea, he said that he does not support using the rollover money to help the college pay for employee benefits. “I think it would legitimize the notion that the school isn’t able to pay for benefits,” he said, adding that he thinks that “the college can afford to pay for the benefits that they’ve [paid for until now].”

At Tuesday night’s fireside chat, several students questioned the transparency of potential cuts. Bringing up the budget, the details of which aren’t published by the administration, and important financial planning meetings, which aren’t open to non-committee members, students argued that more information about the college’s financial position would make them better able to suggest potential cuts.

This point was also raised at the meeting for students concerned about employee health benefits. Some complained that they weren’t able to find constructive solutions or alternatives for budget cut issues because they don’t know where money is spent at Swarthmore. Delude-Dix echoed their tone, saying that the college’s lack of transparency makes students unable to effectively propose changes.

“There’s a lot of wiggle room in the budget,” Delude-Dix said. “It’s a lot more fluid than they’d like us to think. It difficult to hold the school accountable because the administration refuses to make the budget transparent to students faculty and staff. These decisions affect the whole Swarthmore community and its only fair that when it comes to cutting something like employee compensation that the administration make the reasons for these cuts transparent.”

According to Delude-Dix, the students concerned about employee benefits are setting up meetings with administrators to become as informed as possible about the issues involved. While he said that the students would probably begin a petition, he described the group as “still in the information gathering stage.”

As far as actual decision go, there is still a lot of planning and consideration before any final cuts are made.“The budget gap is large enough that we will very likely need to create a solution that pieces together reduced costs from all areas of the College,” Young said. “The ad hoc financial planning committee that is charged with creating recommendations to address our financial shortfall is in the process of educating itself on how the College budget is allocated and won’t have any potential solutions to offer for consideration until the late fall.”

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