Dining Services fails to shine among University's excellence

At a nationally recognized, highly selective university such as Duke, one expects everything to be held to as high a standard of quality as the students. Usually, this holds true; our medical center is one of the best in the world, our basketball team is a perennial power, and our faculty is superb. An anomaly amidst all this excellence is Dining Services, which for years has provided consistently mediocre food options and sub-par service.

As a student at the University, I feel that I should be treated as a paying customer each and every time I walk into a campus eatery. Anyone who has been to the Rat lately can attest that this often is not the case. Customers are greeted not with a "Hello, how may I help you?," or even a smile, but rather a look that makes them feel that they are imposing on the employee. Some employees seem determined to make the dining experience as difficult as possible. I actually went to confession last week, so guilty was I made to feel when I ordered pasta at the grill line-and I'm not even Catholic. Rather than just pass your order along to the grill worker stationed no more than three feet away, the employee told me to go to the back of the other line. Needless to say, the pace of service consistently resembles that of molasses rolling down a hill in January.

This is not to say that every worker, or even every eatery, exhibits these symptoms. The new trend of privatizing Dining Services by bringing in locally and nationally recognized vendors has been an unmitigated success. Han's Chinese is the best example of how service should be at every Duke operation: The employees always have a smile on their faces, and the rice guy actually seems to relish asking the question "steamed or fried" 1,000 times a day.

When presented with examples of quality service at an eatery such as Han's, it becomes apparent that privatizing operations further, and thus reducing the power of the Local 77 Union, the organization that represents many University employees, is the way to give the students the service they demand. Unfortunately, the demands of union labor have become entrenched at this University and represent something of a sacred cow.

Union workers make as much as $20 an hour, including benefits, for doing jobs that rate minimum wage on the competitive labor market. Even more startling is the fact that employees with enough seniority are given approximately 40 fully paid sick and vacation days a year. Employing people at rates so far above market levels leads to a whole host of problems whose net result is to deliver an inferior product.

Students often wonder why they can't order from merchants on points before 7 p.m. The answer is that those orders would take business away from campus eateries. And though any other business operation would simply cut back on employees or tweak the schedule, Dining Services refuses to, insisting on paying $20 an hour for workers to stand around. At the Rat, employees working the early shift arrive at 7:00 a.m., even though the first customer usually walks in the door at about 11:00 a.m. This kind of waste flies in the face of common business sense, and is especially aggravating at a University where students pay $30,000 a year.

As a student, I'd have no problem with the University paying an above-market rate to their employees, especially to those who have spent most of their lives serving Duke, if what I got was really, really exceptional service. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Instead, many workers adopt an attitude of entitlement that makes good-natured interaction next to impossible.

According to Engineering Sophomore Rich Vandermass, the food service operation at Duke is simply unacceptable. "When I came to Duke last year, I was shocked and disgusted by the power that the union exerted here. And the attitude I see from many of these workers is basically one of 'What do you want?'"