While we applaud the group “Students for Staff” for considering the needs of the entire Wesleyan community during last week’s power outage, several elements of the group’s petition have raised concerns for us.

Before we outline our concerns, we want to acknowledge the generosity of the students in offering support to staff members who remained without power throughout last week, such as the distribution of flashlights and non-perishable food items, and the childcare program that was organized on Thursday and Friday. The amount of effort that went into providing such resources, even as many of the student organizers remained without power themselves, was impressive—in times of emergency, such concern for the needs of the University community is crucial.

The petition that the group has presented to the administration, however, is problematic in several ways.

It appears to us that the document was written without adequate staff input. The first meeting of the group was convened based on concerns raised by one staff person from an undisclosed department. While these concerns should certainly not be ignored, we caution against assuming that they represent the majority views of staff without significant further research. However, the “demands working group” began drafting a statement to the administration, and a “media outreach” group began to lay out a plan for publicizing the issue a full 24 hours before a group devoted to communicating with staff was formed.

Although more staff members were consulted after the group submitted its initial demands to the administration, it does not appear as if the students were able to meet with a broad range of staff from different departments or that a consensus was reached among staff members who spoke up. Without the inclusion of specific statements from staff, we are hesitant to support such a petition. It leads us to wonder whether staff agree with all of the points the petition raises, or if the petition is more representative of the views of aggravated students.

We are also concerned that the “Call to Action” is too broad in its target group. At Wesleyan, the term “staff” includes everyone from Public Safety Officers to Bon Appétit chefs, to administrative assistants, to custodians who are contracted through ABM.  We believe that the document fails  to represent differences in opinion among staff, the role of unions, or the specific situation of employees who are contracted through Bon Appétit and ABM.

There are some circumstances in which it is appropriate for students to speak on behalf of staff. For an example, we point to the students who publicly read statements last fall that were written by members of the Secretarial/Clerical union about the impact of the rising cost of health insurance. In this case, the student voices played an important role because the unionized employee’s contract stipulates that they may not hold a public demonstration, and because the concerns voiced by students were based directly in statements from staff.

However, this power outage case is quite different because students wrote a document calling for increased rights for staff without actively involving the staff in the writing process. The limited discussions with staff that figured into the creation of the petition are not conclusive enough to blame the administration for marginalizing all staff members in this emergency. Such a petition is so sweeping and accusatory that it overshadows the valuable input that has been provided by staff on the situation. There are members on Students for Staff who have expressed that greater staff input is indeed important and we hope that this view is put into practice.

We propose that, rather than issuing such charged demands with limited staff input, the students frame their concerns to the administration as suggestions. The purpose of the statement should be to point out the specific issues that staff members have brought to their attention, rather than deciding what is appropriate for all staff. We encourage members of the Wesleyan community to weigh in about whether they felt their needs were met during the blackout, both in the comments section of this editorial on our website or by submitting a Wespeak.