Content Warning: Mentions of suicide, sexual assault, and racial discrimination.
On Feb. 15, McGill’s Student Housing and Hospitality Services (SHHS) informed their 65 Floor Fellows via Zoom that their positions would be eliminated, effective this fall. SHHS announced the meeting only two hours in advance and the call lasted a mere eight minutes, ending before the Floor Fellows––unionized members of the Association of McGill University Support Employees (AMUSE) Unit B––had the opportunity to ask any questions. Floor Fellows are essential members of the residence life community at McGill, and this decision risks the physical and mental safety of incoming first-years living in residence. Furthermore, SHHS’s actions expose the university’s dangerous disregard for unionized workers on campus.
Though the Floor Fellow position provides financially vulnerable students with rent-free housing and an annual meal plan, their job also comes with the invisible cost of exploitation and 24/7 emotional labour. Floor Fellows have long protested the difficult conditions and high demands that residential services place on them. During the Winter 2022 semester, AMUSE Unit B reached an agreement after a two-week strike for a 14.8 per cent wage increase, the first meal plan increase in five years, and other gains on union priorities—a much-needed adjustment to their contracts and a testament to the union’s organization. But in March 2023, the university announced that Floor Fellows would be moving to smaller rooms in residences and, in some cases, forced to share communal washrooms with residents.
Addressing McGill’s residence issues by removing Floor Fellows without clear justification is unconscionable and irresponsible. Most students in residence are minors or young adults living on their own for the first time. Floor Fellows support students learning to navigate adult life and the university workload in Montreal. First-year students look to these older peers for help understanding the often-opaque bureaucracy of McGill services, like the Student Wellness Hub (SWH) or the Quebec healthcare system. Most importantly, as both peers and authority figures, Floor Fellows are often the first people that residents will go to for help when they suffer from incidences including racial discrimination, harassment, and sexual assault, which run rampant in residences. They are the first to respond to emergency instances of alcohol poisoning and overdose—the difference between life and death.
SHHS intends to hire more Residence Life Facilitators (RLFs) to compensate for the loss of Floor Fellows. However, the main roles of RLFs are event planning and advising residence councils, not crisis prevention and intervention. This is not an adequate replacement for Floor Fellows.
SHHS argues that Floor Fellows’ training sessions do not adequately qualify them to address the needs of students who disclose sexual assault, express suicidality, indicate signs of self-harm, or struggle with mental health in numerous other ways. They also argue that Floor Fellows are primarily tasked with directing struggling students to the proper resources. This denies the on-the-job experience that Floor Fellows gain from regularly dealing with urgent student concerns and also distracts from the university’s failure to provide appropriate resources for students. The SWH is unequipped to handle urgent mental health crises and forces students to turn to the province’s failing healthcare system, which is struggling with widespread practitioner shortages. McGill’s limited support for the Office for Sexual Violence Response, Support and Education (OSVRSE) creates unnecessary obstacles for survivors of sexual assault to receive the help that they need and deserve. Floor Fellows step up for first-year students when McGill fails to provide the resources to survive university life.
McGill cannot boast its status as a “top employer” when its actions depict its employees as disposable. The abrupt nature of the announcement to terminate the Floor Fellow position disturbs organizing among a campus union. This restriction of support aligns with a dangerous trend among Canadian universities to develop student housing as an entrepreneurial endeavour rather than a service for students. McGill benefits from its status as an elite research institution while mistreating the people who contribute most to the university. Viewing future generations of students as potential profit will strip the university of its prestigious reputation. Floor Fellows are necessary for the safety and well-being of students in residence, and McGill must reverse its decision and commit to uplifting these essential members of the university community.
